“Venezuela obviously poses no threat to the U.S. on its own. That is why interventionists have been going out of their way to hype the connections with great power rivals. The trouble for the fearmongers is that the connections are much more tenuous and much less significant than they have claimed. There has been increased military cooperation between some of these authoritarian states, but except for Russia and North Korea none of it comes close to a formal treaty alliance. Hawks want the public to believe that there is a grand anti-American coalition forming around the world to menace the U.S. to sell the same braindead aggressive policies they have always favored. Whenever the U.S. threatens or attacks one of these states, we see that there is no coalition.” (12/05/25)
“President Trump will not be on the ballot to help Republicans in the midterm elections, but his administration’s promises for his final two years should be. For a critical election, Newt Gingrich rallied Republican candidates to come together with a Contract with America that helped win the day. The contrast between the Republican and Democratic parties has never been greater. Most Americans are tired of the personal political attacks, but they may again be ready to listen to what these warring parties will actually do if voters deliver them a midterm victory. Let’s be honest, Donald Trump is a can-do President. He took four years to prepare the campaign promises his administration would start delivering on day one. His team works every day to do just that, and the results are amazing.” (12/06/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“No single academic knows enough to base his conclusion solely on his own work and expertise. Each of them is relying on information produced by many others. … What happens if each of those experts feels entitled, even obligated, to lie just a little, to shade his conclusions to strengthen the support they provide for what he believes is the right conclusion? Each of them then interprets the work of all the others as providing more support for that conclusion than it really does. The result might be that they end up biasing their results in support of the wrong conclusion, which each of them believes is right on the basis of the lies of all the others.” (12/05/25)
“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)
“While President Donald Trump and many of America’s top corporate CEOs were bowing down in Washington to Saudi absolute monarch Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Trump administration was busy escalating (unauthorized and illegal) military actions against Venezuela with the apparent goal of regime change. Last summer, it bombed Iran, killing over 1,000 civilians, in a failed attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons potential. The US insists Venezuela and Iran are enemies in part because of authoritarian governments and human rights violations. But Saudi Arabia is one of the most authoritarian states in the world, marked by an absolute monarchy, tight control over political expression, and severe penalties for dissent.” (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)
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)
“I have had enough. I can no longer sit still while the Deep State does its very best to smear Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and have him removed from his post via lies, rumors, propaganda, and innuendo. It feels exactly like version 2.0 of the ‘Trump/Russia Collusion’ disinformation campaign, and it needs to be called out for what it is. Enough. I am here to defend the best Secretary of War/Defense since Caspar Weinberger. What we have seen in the last few weeks is clearly an orchestrated, carefully constructed character assassination campaign against Hegseth. The campaign began in the early days of November when the leaders of the Sedition 6 introduced legislation known as the ‘No Troops in Our Streets Act,’ legislation clearly designed to undermine the roles of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth in the military chain of command.” [editor’s note: I learned some Latin today — “Publius,” in English, obviously means “idiot” – TLK] (12/05/25)
