“President Donald Trump has seen recent setbacks in his polling numbers on many issues, but one bright spot in surveys has been his aggressive approach to Venezuela, including taking out drug cartel boats. But there is another purpose at work here, one that may help to end the war in Ukraine. What is important to understand is that Venezuela is a client state of Russia, as is Iran, and as was Syria until the recent overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. One by one, Trump has been proving that against American might, Putin cannot keep his sketchy global friends safe.” (12/06/25)
“[T]he Trump administration has its agents arresting green card applicants as they show up for their final meeting. These are not ‘the worst of the worst’ as Donald Trump likes to put it: One was a British mother with her 4-month-old baby in her arms. (The New York Times has the whole ugly story.) These people were not accused of having entered the country illegally or of violating U.S. immigration law in some way other than following a legal process that takes a long time and creates ambiguities. Some of them were shipped off to detention centers. Why are federal agents arresting these people? Because they are the easiest people to arrest …. Some strategy: Abuse the weak, the vulnerable, and the law-abiding — chasing down the actual malefactors is too much work.” (12/05/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The Guardian has a report out which says that at least 60,000 people were murdered by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) when they captured El Fasher in October, which would be the largest single massacre since Rwanda in 1994. Just in the last few days the RSF have reportedly killed 46 children and scores of adults in suicide drone attacks. These massacres are made possible by the United Arab Emirates, who have been funneling weapons to the RSF through a complex international supply chain. Much like the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen from 2015 to 2022 (which the UAE also participated in), this is yet another instance of a tyrannical Gulf state monarchy committing unfathomable atrocities while its friends in Washington look the other way.” (12/07/25)
“Government regulations are sold to the public as protective measures put in place to safeguard consumer health and welfare. And sometimes they do. But as we’ve discussed in this column, they often protect incumbent business interests from competition by making it harder for new or smaller competitors to enter the market. Then there’s a less discussed third intention — one that reflects the incentives of the regulators themselves: growing the government for its own sake.” (12/05/25)
“In 1994, Scott Pung won exemption from a school tax. He died in 2004. But years later, a local tax assessor contended that his widow, now also deceased, should have submitted new paperwork to retain the exemption. … The estate’s administrator, Mike Pung, got nowhere trying to explain things to the tax assessor. So he brought his case to the Michigan Tax Tribunal. The tribunal ruled in favor of the Pungs. Didn’t matter. When Mike paid the property taxes for 2012, the assessor called it an underpayment, since payment for the tax that the Pungs did not owe had not been included. Mike still refused to pay the school tax. So the county grabbed the home that it had assessed at $200,000 and auctioned it for $76,000 to recover the amount of that tax.” (12/05/25)
“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)
