“There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one. The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues. Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.” (12/05/25)
“The death toll from a drone strike on civilian facilities in the Kalogi locality of Sudan’s South Kordofan state has risen to 79, including 43 children, a local official said on Friday. Issam al-Din al-Sayed Angalo, Executive Director of Kalogi, blamed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the attack, which he described as one of the deadliest in the region since the conflict began. A drone fired three missiles at the town in the eastern part of the state on Thursday. The first missile struck a kindergarten, causing initial casualties, Angalo said. A second missile was fired as residents gathered to rescue the wounded. A third strike hit the rural hospital where victims were being transported, killing and wounding more people and destroying large sections of the facility.” (12/05/25)
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
“Although much has already been said, I can’t not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust. What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime’s mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are. So what’s the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish.” (12/05/25)
“The Supreme Court will decide if President Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship can stand, the court announced on Friday. If the justices agree with the president, the court could overrule a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and upheld by SCOTUS over a century ago. … The president’s executive order leaned into a once-fringe belief that children born to undocumented immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship as a way to deliver on his promises to cut down on illegal [sic] immigration. However, the 14th Amendment automatically offers citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents.” (12/05/25)
“Some of the damage done by ‘campaign finance reforms’ has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself. This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.” (12/05/25)
“The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, [murdering] four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions [sic] mount over the legality of the [illegal] attacks. Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, ‘Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization.’ … It is the 22nd strike the US military has carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the [murder count] of the campaign to at least 87 people since September when the strikes began.” (12/04/25)
“Americans, the Associated Press reports, spent a record $11.8 billion online on ‘Black Friday’ (the day after Thanksgiving) this year … and another record, $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving itself. Physical in-store traffic for Black Friday also ticked up versus the previous week, although shopping for deals has strongly moved online in recent years. What caught my eye about the story, though, was the headline, which suggests the record sales occurred ‘despite wider economic uncertainty.’ ‘Despite?’ More likely, in my opinion, ‘because.’ With inflation still running at about 3% annually, prices subject to Donald Trump’s seemingly random tariff policies, the job situation looking more uncertain and unpredictable than it has since the COVID-19 panic, etc., what have American consumers been up to? I can tell you what they’ve been up to, because I’ve been up to it myself. What we’ve all been up to is ‘waiting for the best deal if the purchase isn’t an emergency.'” (12/04/25)
