“No president ever pardoned a soldier for war crimes before Donald Trump. Yes, there were broad Confederate amnesties that effectively forgave Civil War atrocities, but no pardons. Even Nixon merely lessened and commuted the sentence of the My Lai commander found guilty of civilian mass murder. But in his first term, Trump pardoned three men very credibly accused by their own troops of wantonly killing unarmed civilians — and one convicted of posing with a man he’d just murdered. Their chief lobbyist? [Pete] Hegseth. … Yes, murdering a few bad guys on a boat in cold blood may sound like a trivial thing. But the principles it violates are about as profound as you can get. This kind of murder is not a defense of the West. It’s an attack on it.” (12/05/25)
“A federal judge has expanded on the remedies decided for the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, ruling in favor of putting a one-year limit on the contracts that make Google’s search and AI services the default on devices, Bloomberg reports. Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling on Friday means Google will have to renegotiate these contacts every year, which would create a fairer playing field for its competitors. The new details come after Mehta ruled in September that Google would not have to sell off Chrome, as the DOJ proposed at the end of 2024.” (12/06/25)
“The U.S. must rapidly expand its high-voltage transmission system to keep electricity affordable and reliable over the coming decade. After years of nearly stagnant development, any interest in transmission buildout among grid operators is encouraging. Yet, even amid this renewed momentum, utilities nationwide continue to embrace alternating current transmission, a 19th century innovation, instead of embracing modern and commercially viable high-voltage direct current (HVDC) technology.” [editor’s note: “Grids” themselves are yesterday’s technology. Tomorrow’s technology is decentralized local generation, not “improved” long-distance transmission – TLK] (12/05/25)
“Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to George Santayana warned that history repeats itself because we fail to heed its lessons. So it is with the Trump administration and its plan for regime change in Venezuela. Even if it succeeds in ousting Nicolás Maduro, the result will almost certainly mirror the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush and Biden administrations.” (12/05/25)
“Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday at an annual summit and agreed to diversify mutual economic ties, as the United States presses India to revise its decades-old partnership with Russia. The 23rd Russia-India Summit comes at a pivotal moment as the U.S. pushes for a Ukraine peace deal while seeking global cooperation. It will test New Delhi’s efforts to balance relations with Moscow and Washington as the nearly four-year war in Ukraine grinds on.” (12/05/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Mihai Macovei
“Europe became prosperous through a burst of innovation and capital accumulation during the eighteenth-century industrial revolution that allowed individual freedom to replace feudalistic rents and privileges. A new industrial revolution based on digitalization, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is in the making, but the reputed analyst Wolfgang Münchau claims that Europe is about to miss it. In his view, Europe has forgotten how to innovate, because it may still have the aptitude, but it has lost the right attitude to foster creative destruction. Münchau and other analysts put down this failure on European government’s inability to pick winners like China or capitalize on military investment like the US, in order to promote cutting-edge technologies and research. In our view this is wrong – Europe does not need more and better targeted government intervention, but considerably less.” (12/05/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“If there is a threat to democracy in Spain, it’s not from the ‘far right,’ that mysterious force to which Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez wants to attribute all the country’s problems. Recent developments have highlighted two issues that are causing much more damage to public trust in democratic institutions—namely, the politicization of the judiciary, or ‘lawfare,’ and financial corruption. Lawfare is alleged to be the reason for an unprecedented ruling against Spain’s former attorney general; while a massive fraud case centered on 95-year-old Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, has tarnished the reputation of a once-revered politician.” (12/05/25)
