“Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) secured the 218 signatures needed to force another House showdown over the Jeffrey Epstein files Wednesday, just one day after fellow Republicans blocked his attempt to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Congress overwhelmingly voted last year to force the release of the Epstein files, but survivors and lawmakers say the Trump administration has still withheld records. The new bill would give them the power to sue the DOJ and help state prosecutors pursue investigations. Massie announced Wednesday afternoon that his discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act II had reached the required 218 signatures. … Massie’s petition is expected to become eligible for a floor vote by early December, with more than enough legislative days remaining under the House’s current schedule.” (11/11/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“In the 1950s, President Eisenhower officially changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day. That was done ostensibly, and somewhat understandably, to include veterans of WWII and Korea in the ceremonies. But with that shift, the holiday’s center of gravity moved from celebrating the end of a particular war to honoring veterans of all wars. And over time, after each major war, the holiday’s meaning widened from the initial grateful recognition that a war was over to something of a spotlight for politicians to stress that military service is itself glorious, which has made each next war easier to sell. And make no mistake, that is precisely what the hawkish politicians and establishment voices we hear today are doing.” (11/11/26)
“Matt Taibbi discusses how political bias has undermined journalism, Trump’s failure to defend free speech, and the dangers of government-backed censorship.” (11/11/26)
“Trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi between Russia, Ukraine and the US aimed at ending the war in Ukraine have concluded after a second day. Although the American side said they saw ‘some openings’, there was no hint of any breakthroughs to end the nearly five year-long war sparked by Russia’s invasion. … Both Moscow and Kyiv confirmed that a large-scale prisoner of war exchange was in the works and could be carried out soon. After the talks it was announced that on Thursday US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – President Donald Trump’s son-in-law – would travel to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then to Dublin to speak to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. This latest round of talks had been framed as centred around the ‘security architecture’ of Europe.” (11/11/26)
“Kristie Higgs lost her school job in January 2019 over Facebook posts expressing her Christian beliefs about sex and education. In February 2025, the Court of Appeal held her dismissal unlawful. It therefore took more than six years to establish that she should not have been sacked. Before congratulating ourselves on the strength of British free-speech protections, we might consider how many people could afford to wait that long. Britain possesses a remarkable variety of mechanisms by which it can ruin you for speaking your mind. Criminal prosecution is the most conspicuous. For someone with a professional qualification, a complaint to the profession’s regulator may be quite sufficient. For an employee, the threat of dismissal does the work.” (11/11/26)
“Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, conceded to Scott Colom, a Democrat, in a video posted to social media on Wednesday evening. … Colom’s win means Democrats will hold at least 55 Senate seats at the start of the next Congress. The contest in Alaska, in which the Democrat Mary Peltola has a narrow lead, is the last remaining Senate race in which a winner has not been declared.
Ms. Hyde-Smith, the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress, was first appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy in April 2018.” (11/11/26)
“Strangers connecting through Tor could bypass spam and privacy protections on thousands of bitcoin nodes because the software treated them as trusted computers. Bitcoin Core published a formal security advisory on Tuesday, about 13 months after releasing a fix. The code change had been public on GitHub since September 2025, under a title explicitly saying whitelist permissions should not apply to incoming Tor connections. The flaw was one of three developers disclosed Tuesday, all patched in releases issued last October. Another could leave a mining node unable to build blocks until its operator restarted it.” (11/12/26)
“Politics and government have long been muddied by a chicken-or-egg issue. Which came first, people with good morals or the just institutions that nurture good people? Economist and social theorist Deirdre N. McCloskey surprised me, just a bit, by coming down hard on one side of the question last week. ‘It is ethics, good or bad, that guides pretty much all human relationships, from a marriage or a small circle of friends to a sports team, a business, or a nation-state,’ she wrote, adding that ‘well-designed laws, courts, catechisms, extrinsic motives, social approval, and even a few good and decent people are of no avail if too many people do not behave like self-respecting and other-respecting adults.’ While this sure seems true, I note that her fellow economists have been preaching the preeminence of proper incentives and disincentives to channel good outcomes. For a long, long time.” (11/11/26)
“Iran has claimed a strike on Didamar, a small rocky island belonging to Oman at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, according to reports on Tuesday. Iran’s military said that personnel on the island were ‘helping the flow of oil smuggling by the enemy’. An unnamed official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy told Iranian state media that navigational aid systems in the south of the Strait of Hormuz were destroyed. The official added that no vessels that Iran considers unauthorised passed through the route overnight. Oman confirmed that a loud explosion was detected at the base on the island.” (11/11/26)
