“Immigration policy has become a critical tool for labor and economic strategy. But as governments around the world compete for valuable workplace talent, the United States has gone in the opposite direction by adding new restrictions on legal immigration for high-skilled workers, explicitly targeting the H-1B visa program through a $100,000 fee. … The administration has said the amount will encourage companies to hire American workers instead of relying on foreign talent. However, in practice, the policy has created confusion among employers regarding the extent of its implementation.” (11/18/25)
Source: Drop Site
by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain
“With an avalanche of new documents released by the House Oversight Committee, and looming legislation mandating further disclosures, the press has renewed its relentless coverage of the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, with some notable exceptions, a major part of his life’s work has remained outside the media’s gaze, his relationship with the state of Israel and his prominent role in helping advance the Israeli cyberweapons industry.” (11/18/25)
“The UK scrapped war-time identity cards in 1952. It remains one of the few countries that eschews a ‘papers, please’ relationship with the state. In the 2000s, the 9/11 terror attacks gave Tony Blair’s government a justification to re-introduce state-issued identity cards …. Introduced via legislation in 2004, ID cards became one of New Labour’s most contentious policies, dogging the final years of the government. They were scrapped in 2010 by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. By then, they had already cost an estimated £5 billion, officially, or between £10 billion and £20 billion, unofficially. Surely no one would want to do that all over again? Almost nobody did, until this year.” (11/18/25)
“Roughly two weeks before the New York City mayoral election, more than 1,000 rabbis signed onto an open letter against anti-Zionism in politics, and thus, against Zohran Mamdani, under the misnomer ‘The Jewish Majority.’ They wrote the letter ‘to declare that we cannot remain silent in the face of rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.’ In doing so, they discredited themselves and expanded Jewish leftists’ opportunity to redefine the political — and spiritual – parameters of Jewish identity. Anti-Zionism has existed since the beginning of Zionism itself, and has, indeed, grown as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank remains deeply unpopular across the United States and around the world. Democrats’ refusal to contend with this fact – to actually represent their base – has become a symbol of the party’s overall inability to listen to, and fight for, its members.” (11/19/25)
“There was a way the 2025 shutdown could have been avoided. Congress could pass a temporary spending bill to fund government operations while continuing to hammer out regular spending bills. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives drafted a straightforward Continuing Resolution to do just that, sending the bill to the Senate, well before the government would shut down. That’s when things went wrong.” (11/18/25)
Source: Orange County Register
by the editorial board
“Justin Raimondo tried to warn us. The co-founder of Antiwar.com devoted his life to warning Americans and particularly the American right against the relentless pull of the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan-established warfare-welfare state. Raimondo would’ve turned 74 today. He passed away on June 27, 2019 in Sebastopol, California at the age of 67 after battling lung cancer. But his legacy lives on and his message is as necessary as ever.” (11/18/25)
“For the government to send out more than it’s raking in AND ‘begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT’ is mathematically impossible. … But more than the fiscal infeasibility of the proposal, I’m interested in Trump’s claim that those checks would constitute a ‘dividend.’ A dividend on what, precisely? Dividends are payments to shareholders in a business enterprise, distributed as a share of profits. As a ‘business enterprise,’ the last time the US government turned a “profit” by spending less than it received in tax payments was 2001. More importantly, none of us are shareholders in the US government.” (11/18/25)
“In recent decades, and especially since the release of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence use has rapidly spread into almost every industry. And as AI proliferates, so do fears that a wave of mass unemployment will follow. Concerns are widespread that AI will be deployed to accomplish an ever-greater share of the labor needed throughout the economy, leaving fewer and fewer jobs available for human workers. This fear led Dario Amodei, one of the world’s leading AI technologists, to sound the alarm earlier this year about an impending ‘white-collar bloodbath.’ The Anthropic CEO told Axios that one very possible scenario within the next one to five years is that, ‘Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs.'” (11/18/25)
“In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ordered members of the military and the National Guard onto the streets of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The purported reasons for these decisions have been to protect federal agents and federal property, but the threat of using the troops for general domestic law enforcement looms large, with President Trump repeatedly threatening to do just that. … Under American law, when members of the military violate citizens’ rights in law enforcement, it is much harder, if not impossible, for those victims to receive monetary compensation for the harms they suffer than it is when they suffer wrongs by state or local police — though it’s already hard enough in those cases. Indeed, using the military in domestic law is entirely incompatible with our nation’s current remedial legal architecture.” (11/18/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Diyar Kasymov
“Is building more homes not enough? Recently, there have been more and more Gen-Z memes about boomers selling their overvalued houses to Blackrock instead of to young couples, and then the corporation rents the house to the couple for 2x the price. The housing crisis is not a false alarm. The median rent price went up 25 percent in just 6 years. This is a serious economic problem for America. Many young people are already being radicalized by this, as they are willing to elect socialist Zohran Mamdani — who called for abolition of private property once — as the mayor of New York City. But what can we do? Are rent controls now relevant, as globalization and financialization changed the rules of the game? Can European-style social-democrats like Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC control the markets elegantly enough to maximize supply?” (11/18/25)
