“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under increasing fire for a double-tap strike, first reported by The Intercept in early September, in which the U.S. military killed two survivors of the Trump administration’s initial boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order ‘to kill everybody.’ Multiple military legal experts, lawmakers, and now confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.” (12/02/25)
“Haiti’s transitional presidential council has backed an electoral law in the latest step toward holding a general election for the first time in nearly a decade. The approval late Monday means that the government can finally publish an official and long-awaited electoral calendar, after fears that the council would try to push back the tentative dates to stay in power longer. … The adoption of the electoral law came as some council members have pushed for the ouster of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, including Fritz Alphonse Jean, who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. government. Some believe that U.S. visa restrictions, like the one imposed on Jean, are being used as a threat to try and influence Haiti’s politics. Three of seven council members with voting powers weren’t present for Monday’s meeting, where the electoral law was approved, including Jean, according to Le Nouvelliste newspaper.” (12/02/25)
“The most common cancer in America is also one of the most preventable — if people simply had access to effective sunscreen. We spend $9 billion a year treating the cancerous effects of sun damage, not to mention the billions we spend to soothe the sun’s more minor effects. So many people get skin cancer that the statistics aren’t even reportable to cancer registries. But nearly all skin cancer is the result of sunlight and UV exposure, which means it is preventable. But that’s the (often greasy) rub: in the United States, sunscreen is locked inside a bureaucratic vault built in 1938, guarded by the Food and Drug Administration as if it were an experimental medical treatment.” (12/02/25)
“One danger of nationalism, Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, was the ‘bridge’ it provides ‘from conservatism to collectivism.’ ‘To think in terms of ‘our’ industry or resource,’ he wrote, ‘is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest.’ That’s a short step that President Donald Trump has eagerly taken. In the first nine months of his second term in office, the president has overseen a giant government leap into the boardrooms of strategically important businesses. … Trump would not be the first leader to believe that greater state control of key industries and economic sectors would translate into better growth and stronger security. But from Soviet Russia to modern China, the best parallels come from authoritarian regimes rather than American presidencies.” (for publication 01/26)
“At its base, economic fascism is a form of capitalism, not socialism. It has always been this way, though many leading promoters of free markets today wish it wasn’t. But fascism has native-born citizenship in capitalism, in private property, and not in state property socialism. Fascism’s private property DNA can’t be denied. There are many words to describe statism generally, as well as words to describe our capitalist system that has been corrupted by parasitic billionaires. These include cronyism, fascism, corporatism, plutocracy, and kleptocracy (this latter one, admittedly, can apply to socialism or capitalism). We don’t have to shoe-horn socialism into the role.” (12/02/25)
“Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said after meeting with President Trump on Monday that she’s recommending a travel ban on multiple countries in connection with criminal activity in the U.S. Trump widened his administration’s hardline immigration crackdown after officials said the suspect in last Wednesday’s ambush-style shooting in D.C. that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another was an Afghan national [that Trump’s administration approved for asylum]. ‘I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,’ Noem said on X, without specifying which countries she was referring to.” (12/01/25)
“The economics of housing affordability is very straightforward. If prices have gone up, either demand has shifted right, supply has shifted left, or some combination of the two. While supply constraints are the major culprit in the affordability problem, we want to acknowledge that buyers are partly responsible for the market shifts that we’ve seen — it takes two to tango. Housing is a normal good with a long-run income elasticity of demand close to one, meaning housing demand rises in tandem with household income growth. To bring prices down, we need builders to shift the housing supply curve ‘out and right’ by a larger factor than buyers are shifting the demand curve.” (12/02/25)
