“American industry has been getting a lot of hands-on direction from Democrats and Republicans for quite some time now. Every few years, someone looks at the underwhelming results of this economic maneuvering and insists that real ‘industrial policy’ has never been tried. The truth is that the left’s call for a ‘mission-oriented’ state and the right’s yearning for a nationalist industrial revival may sound different, but they share the same conceit: that their own intentions can finally succeed where decades of intervention have failed.” (11/20/25)
Source: Semafor
by Burgess Everett & Eleanor Mueller
“The rifts between Trump and the rest of the GOP are piling up. Indiana Republicans are declining to rewrite their congressional maps at the behest of the president, sparking a wave of redistricting regret on Capitol Hill. Trump’s pitch to eliminate Affordable Care Act subsidies is also drawing skepticism within the party, as is his bid to jam a moratorium on state AI regulations into a must-pass defense bill. Republicans spurned Trump’s plans to import Argentine beef and shunned suggestions like a 50-year mortgage. Then there’s the nearly unanimous bicameral vote to compel the Trump administration to release Jeffrey Epstein files and the Senate’s rejection of Trump’s personal appeal to gut the filibuster. … the fresh GOP resistance marks a new phase for a party that muscled through much of Trump’s agenda this summer with zero Democratic votes and quickly confirmed his Cabinet.” (11/20/25)
“Ecuador, once one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, is now one of its most dangerous. The murder rate in 2020 was 7.7 homicides per 100,000 people. That was roughly comparable to the United States where it was 6.4 that year. In nearby Brazil, on the other hand, it was 22.3. By 2023, Ecuador’s homicide rate had leapfrogged over its neighbors to an astounding 46 per 100,000. In a mere three years, the number of murders had increased six-fold. The reason: narco-traffickers. Ecuador had become a convenient transshipment hub, and various gangs were warring over territory, particularly in coastal cities. In 2023, in a presidential election that featured the assassination of one of the candidates, Ecuadorians voted in Daniel Noboa, an undistinguished but telegenic conservative politician who promised an iron-fist approach to fighting drug kingpins. His tactics boiled down to unleashing the military to attack specific gangs.” (11/20/25)
“After years of deliberation, a bipartisan consensus is coalescing on the need for Congress to help states protect their Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs against improper payments and outright fraud, which cost the federal government, states, and taxpayers an estimated $135 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic alone. … An effective reform package would focus on fixing how UI administration is funded and establish new program guardrails. Congress can ensure that state UI agencies make use of more federal revenue raised specifically for program administration while offsetting past administrative funding lost to inflation.” (11/20/25)
“Sensible people already know that medicalizing children in the name of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ is not only experimental, it’s barbaric. Now, a peer-reviewed study, commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, reports that the evidence used to back such practices as hormone therapy for kids is flimsy at best. There just isn’t enough known to justify such drastic medical interventions for young people. Back in January, President Trump slammed the brakes on the medicalization of minors with his Executive Order 14187, restricting ‘the maiming and sterilization’ of patients under 19, and ordered a study to look at the standards of care. First released in May, the report has been affirmed by 10 researchers and groups who found no fault with the findings — and advised that doctors treating minors with gender dysphoria should focus on psychotherapy until more is known about medical interventions.” (11/19/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“The idea of eugenics originated with Galton, who proposed positive eugenics, policies to encourage the reproduction of the able. The idea of negative eugenics, preventing the reproduction of the unfit, was taken up by the British left, with supporters including Shaw, Wells, Keynes, Laski and the Webbs, and spread across the political spectrum; Winston Churchill was one of many enthusiastic supporters. The result was an attempt, in 1912, to enact compulsory eugenics into law. It was successfully opposed by Josiah Wedgewood, whom Ridley describes as a radical libertarian. His central argument was not that it was bad science but that it was a striking violation of individual liberty.” (11/20/25)
“Recently, I’ve been hearing of a new phenomenon: teams reportedly using agentic AI tools to ‘enter takeoff’ – achieving astounding feats of productivity that escalate each week, with no limit in sight. … The classic scenario for AI ascending to superintelligence involves ‘recursive self-improvement,’ where an AI builds a smarter AI, which builds an even smarter AI, and so on. These stories of teams entering takeoff are not quite that, because there is still a human in the loop, but they have a similar flavor. If the singularity ever arrives, the early stages might look just like this.” (11/20/25)
“Before heading for a special London summit earlier this year, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk noted ‘a paradox’ involving the continent’s security relationship with America: ‘500 million Europeans [are asking] 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians.’ His numbers were slightly off — it’s more like 600 million Europeans and 340 million Americans — but his conclusion, that Europe ‘must take greater responsibility for the continent’s security,’ was sound. The time is well past for burden-sharing, however. It is time for burden-shifting. NATO was created 76 years ago. Yet the Europeans remain seemingly haplessly and helplessly dependent on the US for their defense.” (11/20/25)
