“Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world. In response, digital and human rights organization Fight for the Future is hosting a week of events—across Reddit, LinkedIn, and various livestreams—to raise awareness on how it believes these bills are setting a dangerous precedent by making the internet more exploitative rather than safer. Many of the proposed bills include a clause for ID or age verification, which forces people to upload an ID, allow a face scan, or otherwise authenticate that they are not a minor before viewing adult content. Fight for the Future says the policies will lead to increased censorship and surveillance.” (12/03/25)
“The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will discuss hepatitis B vaccines at their meeting on December 4 and 5. In this article I will lay out the case for removing hepatitis B vaccines from the CDC childhood schedule altogether. As the Informed Consent Action Network has demonstrated, the hepatitis B vaccines Recombivax and Engerix — injected into the vast majority of American children at birth, one month, and six months of age — never should have been licensed by the FDA in the first place.” (12/03/25)
“Do you have a silver card? I do. I live in New London, Connecticut, and while I don’t get EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfers) anymore, I still carry the card as a talisman. It’s nestled in my wallet right behind my driver’s license. It reminds me that there was a time when I needed help and was able to get it. It’s the kind of reminder we all need — and one that’s in ever shorter supply these days. When I was poorer, that card filled every month with money I could spend on food — fruits and vegetables, oil, spices, and cheese at the grocery store. I marshalled my resources carefully then, never taking them for granted. When Congress and the Trump White House shut the government down recently, they hit 42 million Americans right in their wallets. They took that stability away.” (12/04/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Gerard Lyons
“One word describes this Budget: bad, but it can be used three times, bad, bad, bad. Bad in terms of its fiscal consequences, economic impact and the incentives it embeds. Because so much of the Budget was trailed in advance, the initial impact of it may be seen as neutral. It’s not. The Red Book confirmed that Britain is a high public spending, high tax and high borrowing economy—and with no appetite ever to reform. The Budget provided a decisive shift away from a focus on economic growth to redistribution as a driver of fiscal policy. Tax hikes, not trimming public spending. Hitting work, not incentivising it. And saddling businesses with higher costs. The unintended consequences of the Chancellor’s 88 fiscal measures will be hard to quantify, but is unlikely to be economically beneficial.” (12/03/25)
“Across the country, entire neighborhoods are losing their grocery stores — and not just big chains, but independents as well as family-owned shops and markets. It’s part of a broader pattern of food access disappearing where it’s needed most, often in poorer neighborhoods, larger Black or Latino communities and areas with a history of disinvestment. Some companies, like Walmart and Kroger, promote themselves as ‘a community partner’ only to turn around and cite the very same conditions as reasons to leave. In the South and West Sides of Chicago and parts of Detroit or Kansas City, Mo., grocery stores have left, citing low profits, crime or aging infrastructure. Other times, stores simply consolidate or move to wealthier suburbs. Have city-run stores been tried? Yep! But mostly in rural areas. Baldwin, Fla. (a town of about 1,300) opened its own grocery store, in 2019, after the last independently owned one closed.” (12/03/25)
“…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one. I explained the debate more here, but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But molecular studies – that is, attempts to find the precise genes responsible – usually only found enough genes for the traits to be ~10-20% genetic. The remaining 35% was dubbed ‘missing heritability.’ Nurturists argued that the twin studies must be wrong; hereditarians argued that missing effect must be in hard-to-find genes.” (12/03/25)
“The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are justifiably provoking outrage. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, ‘We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.’ Donald Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama. … Many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 expected a seachange in Washington. However, from his first weeks in office, Obama authorized widespread secret attacks against foreign suspects, some of which spurred headlines when drones slaughtered wedding parties or other innocents. On February 3, 2010, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stunned Washington by announcing that the administration was also targeting Americans for killing.” (12/03/25)
“Legitimacy doesn’t come from official recognition. Government attention is poison to innovation. Look at Bitcoin: the moment government began paying attention, regulators attacked it with taxes, rules, and other interference. This destroyed much of the freedom and utility of cryptocurrency. Keep your filthy government off my life! Government doesn’t need a process to smother every human activity. Life doesn’t need to be micromanaged by politicians. Liberty — freedom tempered with responsibility — is enough. The market regulates itself when freed from government meddling. Dishonest companies go broke without government protecting them from competition or from cheated customers. Anyone seeking government protection from competition or consequences is in the wrong. Monopolies can only persist with government help. Irresponsible individuals never learn to be better when protected from consequences, or from their victims, by government rules.” (12/03/25)
“The history of the twentieth century is, in large part, the story of competing totalitarian ideas put into practice, and the destruction, immiseration, and death they produced. … A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the difference between then and now could not be more stark. While ours is a moment racked by popular discontent, the diminution and desecration of formal and informal institutions (often at the hands of these institutions’ ostensible leaders), and a significant increase in the breadth of ideas in circulation, there has been very little in the way of legitimately new ideas this century, either at the level of ideology or public policy. Indeed, most of the bad ideas in circulation today are old bad ideas, not new bad ideas.” (12/03/25)
