Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Rindala Alajaji

“Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn’t get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away. It’s unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs. … This is actually happening. And it’s going to be a disaster for everyone.” (11/13/25)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpns-and-they-have-no-idea-what-theyre-doing

Source: Washington Post
by C Jarrett Dieterle

“Instead of trusting the market and discerning customers, states and cities are considering policies that could end up hurting both restaurants and diners. In New York state, Democratic lawmakers in Albany have pushed their own dynamic pricing bans for food, and Vermont legislators have sought to prohibit businesses from using electronic shelf labels or dynamic pricing. The way these bills are drafted largely exempts longtime restaurant industry traditions such as happy hour but it raises the question: Is it necessarily more problematic if a restaurant utilizes real-time, demand-based dynamic pricing versus more traditional forms of dynamic pricing?” (11/13/25)

https://archive.is/rW2hM

Source: Niskanen Center
by Brink Lindsey

“The past year has shown that the concept of ‘abundance’ has legs. A bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. An expanding shelf of other well-received volumes on similar themes. Policy organizations with abundance in their name. The simultaneous emergence of a more right-coded ‘progress’ movement that identifies many of the same problems and offers similar solutions. … OK, so abundance has legs — but what kind of creature are they attached to? And where are those legs capable of taking us? What are the appropriate contours of the concept — we want an abundance of what, exactly? And what’s the social vision behind this desire for more — we want abundance for what?” (11/13/25)

https://www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-of-what-abundance-for-what

Source: Town Hall
by Derek Hunter

“In September 2010, I’d been dating my future wife for a while and had successfully turned her from a dog person into a cat person. OK, I don’t know that I so much ‘turned’ her as I exposed her to cats and made her realize how cool they are. Living in apartments at the time helped as well, since dogs weren’t an option. For her birthday that year, I bought her a kitten from the Baltimore animal shelter. We named him Ringo because we’re Beatles fans and it suited him. I also call him ‘Buddy,’ as in ‘Little Buddy,’ because he spent a lot of time with me and my cats in Baltimore, adapting to his new family, and would follow me around, weaving in and out of my feet, before we’d settled on a name. To me, he is ‘LB’ from that time. I’m typing this downstairs as Ringo is upstairs dying.” (11/13/25)

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2025/11/13/a-few-thoughts-on-life-death-and-politics-n2666351

Source: The Peaceful Revolutionist
by David S D’Amato

“The twenty-first century has witnessed global land theft on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the years directly following the historic events of 2008. Overlapping crises of the financial, food, water, and energy systems, among others, led to a frantic global land rush that took hundreds of millions of hectares of arable land from some of the poorest people in the world. The pattern of global landholdings is extremely concentrated. A paper published in 2021 noted that ‘[t]he largest 1% of farms in the world (those larger than 50 ha) operate more than 70% of the world’s farmland,’ a situation that poses a looming threat to global food security. Today, while approximately 84 percent of the world’s individual farms are smaller than two hectares, these amount to little more than one-tenth of the total land dedicated to farming.” (11/13/25)

https://dsdamato.substack.com/p/the-land-question