The Ghosts of Christmas Past
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“Tidings of discomfort, in a white coat supremacy Christmas.” (12/11/25)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/11/the-ghosts-of-christmas-past/
Category: Opinion
Why a ceasefire is not enough: A call to block the bombs
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
by LInda Holtzman
“This Hanukkah, while Jews around the world prepare to light the menorah and bring light into the darkest days of winter, our celebration of hope and resilience remains in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And, nearly two months into a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, I am still protesting. Hanukkah, which in Hebrew means dedication, tells the story of Jewish peoples’ resistance to an oppressive empire, and of a miracle that kept candles aflame for eight days and eight nights when there was only enough oil for one. It is a story that resonates to this day, and it is in the spirit of hope, light, and miracles that I find myself rededicating to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” (12/11/25)
The Attack on Somalis is Hate Politics
Source: Unpopular Front
by John Ganz
“Ask yourself: If someone were actively trying to incite a pogrom against Minnesota’s Somali community, what would they do differently than Trump and his allies are doing now? And, if the government were controlled by David Duke, would it behave any differently? Don’t lie to yourself that this is just about the fraud investigation. That’s cover: A way to help the normies sleep at night. Trump is bashing the entire ethnic community, calling them ‘garbage,’ and menacing them as a group. It’s now combined with state repression: ICE agents have descended on Minneapolis. A U.S. citizen was ‘wrongfully’ detained by ICE agents for looking Somali. … Again, don’t lie to yourself: this wasn’t an accident. ‘Mistakes’ like this one do the dirty work. The point is to terrorize this community. To make them feel unwelcome. To say to them, ‘You’re not Americans, and you’ll never be.'” (12/11/25)
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-attack-on-somalis-is-hate-politics
Flashback to 2009: Obamacare Creates a Mess for Others to Clean Up
Source: Town Hall
by Larry Elder
“The Affordable Care Act was passed upon a mountain of lies about ‘bending the cost curve’ and phony cost estimates. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for it. The subsidies Obamacare shoveled to insurance companies — that enriched them greatly — are set to expire exactly as the Democrat designers planned. This will cause premiums to skyrocket. Right on cue, Democrats label the failed Obamacare promises a ‘Republican health care crisis’. In 2019, right before President Barack Obama signed the bill, I wrote the following column in which I predicted he would be long out of office when the true bill came due, leaving others to clean up the mess. Here are excerpts: Americans overwhelmingly like their health care and their health insurance. While Americans reject Obamacare, the president and Congress insist on driving it through. Most Americans, up to 85 percent, already have health insurance and are satisfied with it.” (12/11/25)
The Trump Administration’s Policies Are Disrupting the Balkans
Source: The American Conservative
by Giorgio Cafiero
“Siniša Karan’s victory in the November 23 snap presidential election for Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constituent polities, reinforces the enduring grip of the former President Milorad Dodik. Declaring that his opponents had merely ‘got two Dodiks’ this time, Dodik made clear that his influence remains undiminished. Dodik stepped down, following a court decision that required Dodik to pay a fine that spared him a prison sentence for actions undermining Bosnia and Herzegovina’s delicate order; yet the former president of Republika Srpska continues to loom large over the Bosnian-Serb entity’s political landscape despite being officially out of office. Karan’s win came less than a month after U.S. President Donald J. Trump suddenly and surprisingly lifted U.S. sanctions on Dodik, which had been in place since early 2017.” [editor’s note: Why should the US regime be sanctioning politicians in other countries in the first place? – TLK] (12/11/25)
The Specter of Al Capone is Haunting Poland
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Andrzej Strojny
“To American observers, Poland can appear to be an example of successful political transformation. A country that threw off the yoke of communism in 1989, shifted towards a market system, and this year ranked 20th among the world’s largest economies. However, more than 30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the demons of state tyranny are reawakening on the Vistula River. This time, the threat to freedom does not come from Moscow, but from local town halls. In selected cities, bans on the sale of alcohol by shops at night are being introduced. Under the guise of health concerns, regulations are being introduced that, in fact, restrict consumer freedom and harm small businesses.” (12/11/25)
https://fee.org/articles/the-specter-of-al-capone-is-haunting-poland/
Signs of the regulatory apocalypse
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jackie Calmes
“The confluence of two seemingly unrelated news events in recent days — the first one roiling Hollywood and media from coast to coast, the other playing out before the Supreme Court — was nothing short of uncanny. And disturbing. The first news was the one-two punch of Friday’s bombshell that Netflix planned to swallow up Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business to create an entertainment industry behemoth, and then Monday’s competing hostile bid from jilted suitor Paramount Skydance for all of Warner. And in between, on Sunday, President Trump — tuxedoed and speaking on a red carpet, appropriately enough — proclaimed matter-of-factly ‘I’ll be involved’ in deciding the winner.” (12/11/25)
Trump’s Oil Piracy Shows Why the Push for Renewable Energy Is the Push for Peace
Source: The Crucial Years
by Bill Mckibben
“I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them—just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: Pirates are ‘enemies to mankind’.) But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight.” (12/11/25)
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/pirates-of-the-anthropocene
The Knowledge Socialists (Still) Can’t Calculate
Source: The Daily Economy
by Art Carden
“The ‘calculation problem’ is not a computational problem. It’s an epistemic problem. It isn’t that it was too hard to gather the necessary data and do the required calculations in 1920 (when Ludwig von Mises published ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’) or 1945 (when F.A. Hayek wrote ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’) or 1985 (when Don Lavoie published Rivalry and Central Planning: The socialist calculation debate reconsidered). … The problem is that the data don’t exist unless the means of production are bought and sold in free markets – which means that modern technosocialists enamored with generative AI as the technology that will finally solve the calculation problem are missing the point.” (12/11/25)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-knowledge-socialists-still-cant-calculate/
Think tanker altered Ukraine war map before big Polymarket payout
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout
“On November 15, as Russian forces were advancing on the outskirts of the town of Myrnohrad in eastern Ukraine, retail investors placed risky bets in real time on the battle using Polymarket …. If Russia took the city by nightfall — an event that seemed exceedingly unlikely to most observers — a handful of retail investors stood to earn a profit of as much as 33,000% on the battle from the comfort of their homes. When nightfall came, these longshot gamblers miraculously won big, though not because Russia took the town (as of writing, Ukraine is still fighting for Myrnohrad). Instead, it was because of an apparent intervention by a staffer at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a D.C.-based think tank that produces daily interactive maps of the conflict in Ukraine that Polymarket often relies on to determine the outcome of bets placed on the war.” (12/11/25)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/isw-polymarket-ukraine-war-map/