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)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“If there is a threat to democracy in Spain, it’s not from the ‘far right,’ that mysterious force to which Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez wants to attribute all the country’s problems. Recent developments have highlighted two issues that are causing much more damage to public trust in democratic institutions—namely, the politicization of the judiciary, or ‘lawfare,’ and financial corruption. Lawfare is alleged to be the reason for an unprecedented ruling against Spain’s former attorney general; while a massive fraud case centered on 95-year-old Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, has tarnished the reputation of a once-revered politician.” (12/05/25)
“Fifty-sixty years ago, no one had ever heard of home schooling here in the States. It wasn’t necessarily nonexistent, but incredibly rare. You might find the occasional rancher or forest ranger or other remote family teaching their own children, but truancy (mandatory attendance) laws, tradition, and above all, public perception looked upon such things as horrible and totally unacceptable. Even parochial (Catholic) and other private (religious or not) schools were seen by the mainstream and general public as tolerated but weird. And rare. Many State constitutions enshrined the idea of ‘free tuition’ – that is, public schools. Then came a combination of measures and events which started gradually to change that. Indeed, to create the modern-day homeschooling movement.” (12/05/25)
