“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)
“For nearly five years, pandemic-era waivers allowed patients to receive telehealth visits from home under Medicare and most commercial plans. That flexibility ended on September 30, 2025 when Congress failed to renew permanent parity. Beginning October 1, a patient’s home no longer counted as an eligible originating site for most non behavioral medical visits, with only a narrow set of mental health exceptions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not ban telemedicine — it simply stopped paying for it. In modern health care, that is the same result. Regional insurance plans followed, affecting more than thirty million Medicare beneficiaries who used telehealth last year. They all risk losing access again in a matter of weeks.” (11/20/25)
Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
by Ricardo Vaz
“Since August, the US has been amassing military assets in the Caribbean. Warships, bombers, and thousands of troops have been joined by the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in the largest regional deployment in decades. Extrajudicial strikes against small vessels, which United Nations experts have decried as violations of international law, have killed at least 80 civilians (CNN, 11/14/25). Many foreign policy analysts believe that regime change in Venezuela is the ultimate goal (Al Jazeera, 10/24/25; Left Chapter, 10/21/25), but the Trump administration instead claims it is fighting ‘narcoterrorism’, accusing Caracas of flooding the US with drugs via the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua, both designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Over the years, Western media have endorsed Washington’s Venezuela regime-change efforts at every turn, from cheerleading coup attempts to whitewashing deadly sanctions.” (11/20/25)
“[T]he negative impacts of Trump’s global tariffs are already being felt by American businesses and consumers. The Budget Lab at Yale University projects the net impact will be a slowing of the U.S. GDP for years to come and net losses to the average household of about $1,300. In just the first few months of the Trump presidency, Californians coughed up over $11 billion in tariff payments as a result of Trump’s decrees. That’s real money taken out of the hands of California businesses and consumers. So it struck me as odd, the other day, when I saw GOP Rep. Young Kim post on X, ‘California’s gotten too expensive for small businesses to take off. I fought to make President Trump’s pro-growth tax cuts permanent — so local job creators can keep more of what they earn.'” (11/20/25)
