US: Still Religious and Prosperous

Many posts have discussed international views of religion.

Ryan Burge on the World Values Survey: 

The most recent version of the survey is Wave 7, and it was fielded between 2017 and 2022. It contains 64 total countries, but some don’t have responses to religion questions, so we are left with 54 countries. Which is still a lot.

...

One final scatterplot before I close up today. This one is just a simple replication that is widespread in my corner of the world: specifically, the secularization hypothesis. This is the idea that as a country becomes educationally advanced and economically prosperous, it will be less religious. I created a composite index of religiosity based on a number of questions about religious belief, belonging, and behavior. Then I grabbed a measure of GDP per capita to assess economic prosperity.

What about outliers above the line? One big surprise is Puerto Rico. Its GDP is $40K but their religiosity index is .83. The combination of a strong Catholic Church and the rise of Pentecostalism probably explains a lot of that. Then you’ve got a bunch of Eastern Orthodox countries who are more religious than they should be based on their GDP: Cyprus, Greece, and Romania all fit this pattern.

Where does the United States fit? Well, it’s still an outlier. The religiosity index is .62, and GDP is nearly $70K. In order to fit the trend line in this scatterplot, GDP would need to drop to just $28,000 or religiosity would need to dip to .47. 

The Reflecting Pool: Bureoning Algae and Peeling Paint

Previous posts have discussed federal monuments.

Sahil Kapur and Sophie Ziedalski  at NBC:

President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan.

First, the project overshot Trump’s initial cost estimate of under $2 million — and has already topped $14.6 million, according to a federal spending database.

Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.

In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.

You know who's obsessed with the Reflecting Pool? Donald J. Trump. pic.twitter.com/vqZZEC4WEa

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 20, 2026

The $1.7 million no-bid contract to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool went to a company ultimately owned by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, who previously pleaded guilty in separate federal cases involving bribery and campaign finance violations. The company's name?… pic.twitter.com/TXBU7c7jIr

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 19, 2026

American Dream 2026

Many posts have discussed American perceptions of the future. 

Stephen Raynes at Gallup:

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary amid growing partisan divisions and widespread concerns about the country's direction, less than half (46%) of Americans believe everyone in the country has the opportunity to achieve the American Dream. While confidence in the state of the Dream has softened on most measures since 2024, belief that it is important to strive for (78%) has remained resilient. Despite this general decline since 2024, most U.S. adults still believe they will personally achieve the Dream (69%) and agree that the Dream is unfinished (58%).

These findings come from the second wave of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream (MCAAD)-Gallup American Dream Study, a nationally representative web and mail survey of more than 6,300 U.S. adults, conducted Jan. 7-March 4, 2026. The survey is part of an ongoing collaboration between Gallup and MCAAD to study how Americans connect to the concept of the American Dream. The research is featured in the center's long-term exhibition, the American Dream Experience, in Washington, D.C.

Financial Cost of the Iran War

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.  The Iran War has been a disaster.

Edward Wong and Aruni Soni at NYT:

For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.

A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing about a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.

The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. She added that the replacement costs of the enormous number of munitions that the U.S. military has expended will be much higher than the original purchasing costs.

Iran also severely damaged other U.S. assets in the region, including a valuable military radar jet on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh.

Surrender

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military

"There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!... IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).'” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/H2HKkBVkww

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

Despite the brilliant performance of the US military in the war against Iran, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding that amounts to a surrender ... by the United States.

Mike Nelson at The Dispatch:

Finally, and shamefully, the agreement puts a final nail in the coffin of the Iranian people’s hopes that the United States would support their cries for freedom. “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” A conflict that started with the hopeful protests of a people pushing back against almost five decades of oppression ends with the country meant to be the beacon of freedom agreeing to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of 30,000 Iranians, or the inevitable continued crackdowns, executions, and repression. No matter how he wishes to run from it now, we should never forget the president’s undeniably clear messages to the Iranian people when he thought this would be easy—“help is on the way,” “the hour of your liberation is at hand.” Vance, already having shown his callous disregard for the deaths of Ukrainians, adds the Iranian people to the mix in his attempt to carry his boss’s water, “if the Iranian people want to rise up, great. That's their business. That's between them and their government.”

The conflict ends with a seeming disregard for the disposition of uranium we said we were fighting to secure, for the arsenal of missiles we said we were seeking to destroy, and for the oppressed Iranians we promised we were going to help. The war ends with nothing of value to show for it. We will have killed thousands of Iranians, destroyed hundreds of missile launchers and air defense systems, but to what end? For the privilege of achieving nothing quantifiable, we have provided Iran with proof of a strategic deterrent it can exercise at any time, provided the regime with access to a massive cash influx, rebuilt its relationship with proxies that was damaged after October 7, damaged our alliances and relationships, spent billions of dollars, expended a large percentage of our critically short precision munitions, and lost 13 American lives, to say nothing of the hundreds of wounded. As with so many of his missteps or failures, President Trump will likely try to categorize this as a win, shift the way it is remembered with the passage of time, blame someone else, or just hope it fades from memory as he moves on to what he deems truly important business, like ballrooms and reflecting pools. But this will likely be the largest and costliest error of his presidency, and one for which he deserves permanent shame.

Fake TR and Plutarch Quotations

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others. 

Add Theodore Roosevelt and Plutarch to the list.

 Sammy Westfall at WP:

A giant banner bearing the face of Theodore Roosevelt decorates the facade of the Office of Personnel Management in downtown Washington and carries an inspirational quote it attributes to the late leader. There’s one problem: Historians say the 26th president never uttered the phrase.

“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength,” says the quote, which is overlaid in serif font under Roosevelt’s portrait and attributed to him.

But scholars of the quotable Roosevelt say there’s no evidence he ever said those words, even though references linking him to it appear online.

“What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt,” Michael Patrick Cullinane, co-director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, said about the federal government’s poster on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses OPM.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center, housed at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University, keeps a list of quotes by the president — about valor, patriotism, leadership, fear, action — maintained and updated for years by historians and researchers along with original documents of origin. Searching the word “courage” pulls up three pages — but no quotes matching the one on the poster. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Phrases misattributed to Roosevelt are common enough that the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s website keeps a running list of them.

This is not sustainable.

Plutarch warned us 2,000 years ago that the imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

We have got to democratize our economy so that it works for all. https://t.co/6APdjhw4NU

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) June 12, 2026

From Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture:

Apparently it’s a thing to quote Plutarch as having said “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” This phrasing does not appear anywhere in the Project Gutenberg edition of the canonical Clough version of Lives.

It is possible that “oldest and most fatal” is just an unusual translation from the original Greek and so doesn’t turn up in a ctrl-F search, but I am extremely skeptical. As somebody who has actually read Plutarch (and who quotes him accurately in my own syllabus), it doesn’t pass the smell test. Plutarch has a distinctly aristocratic perspective and is more likely to complain about demagogues pandering to the mob than to complain about the dispossession of the poor. For instance, in his lives of the Gracchi he describes the underlying grievances of the depopulation of small farms and the rise of the latifundia, but he also criticizes the Senate for going squishy by offering conciliatory redistributive measures (specifically, a grain dole and colonial land) to the mob, “by gratifying and obliging them with such unreasonable things as otherwise they would have felt it honorable for them to incur the greatest unpopularity in resisting.” Mind you, I think it is entirely fair to read Plutarch and come away with the opinion that the facts he describes provide evidence that inequality is indeed the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics, I just don’t think that’s Plutarch’s own opinion, let alone his language.

AI in Political Ads

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

AI deepfakes are increasingly showing up in attack ads. Andrew Solender at Axios:

Driving the news: The latest spot to push the envelope is an attack ad against Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico from a President Trump-aligned group called Citizens for Sanity.The ad depicts Talarico in a dress singing an abridged version of "Favorite Things" about transgender children.

Talarico has been a frequent target of this practice: The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) used AI in March to depict Talarico reciting past social media posts. The posts were real. Talarico reading them was not.

Zoom out: While the Texas Senate race has been a hotbed of AI use — Republicans John Cornyn and Ken Paxton and Democrat Jasmine Crockett all utilized it to some extent in the primaries — it is far from the only one.The GOP primary in Kentucky's 4th district saw widespread AI use by both sides.

That included a "throuple" ad, which contained deepfakes of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) dining, checking into a hotel and holding hands with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Pro-Massie spots used AI to depict an elephant with Trump-like hair and a MAGA cap, and Ed Gallrein, Massie's challenger, abandoning Trump in a foxhole.

In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger used AI in multiple ads to depict his GOP primary opponents wildly shooting guns in the air and fighting each other with pugil sticks.

A new ad from another Georgia gubernatorial candidate, Burt Jones, is entirely AI-generated and features depictions of his GOP primary runoff opponent Rick Jackson shoveling money into a furnace and inflating a hot air balloon with his breath.

It's not just Republicans making use of AI:

In Texas, Crockett made use of AI to inflate the crowd size in one of her ads and posted an AI video to social media of herself, Trump and others as babies.

In New York City, Democrat-turned-independent Andrew Cuomo used AI in the mayoral election in an ad that portrayed him performing various jobs, including subway conductor, stockbroker, stagehand and window washer.

In Maryland, a new ad from Democrat Harry Dunn in the 5th congressional district includes a brief shot of AI-generated men in suits reading "Crypto" and "AIPAC" tossing golden basketballs into a carnival free-throw game.