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NEW: In response to yet another egregious doxxing case, we published the following article making the case for a Federal anti-doxxing statute.
#Immigration – Very important report from The Federalist: according to South Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal government is forcing them to hand out voter registration forms to foreigners. According to a Biden rule, Medicaid providers are obligated to hand out voter registration forms to everyone, including non-citizens. Investigations are ongoing, but this seems to be a smoking gun.
#Immigration – Meanwhile: according to census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies, just 46% of immigrants who arrived over the past two years are employed. Read our extensive exclusive interview with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian.
#Drugs – Recently, a biotech firm named Lykos Therapeutics announced that the FDA had accepted its application to use MDMA to treat PTSD and granted it an expedited review. The agency is expected to announce its ruling as soon as August. According to a long, well-written report in Business Insider, it turns out that there is a powerful lobby pushing to legalize (and profit from) MDMA and Ecstasy as “mental health” prescription drugs. The effort has prominent donors, on the right (the Koch family) as well as the left. What could go wrong? MAPS, the company pushing MDMA as a magic cure for PTSD and other ills, has been pushing studies boasting impressive results; it turns out, however, that these studies have lots of problems.
#Trade #Chyna – The Biden Administration has gone from threats to action. They are increasing tariffs on a broad range of imports from China, including steel, aluminium, semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells, medical products, and more. The tariff increases are substantial. The White House fact sheet is here.
#Trade #Chyna – Speaking of global trade and China: “According to the EBRD, Chinese investments across eastern Europe, north Africa and central Asia have far outpaced those from the US and Europe. The US and Germany each accounted for just under 8% of greenfield foreign direct investment in the regions covered by the EBRD, versus nearly 39% for China.” The Financial Times has more.
#Life #CivilRights – The Biden EEOC is trying to use a…very audacious legal interpretation to force a national abortion regime. Here is how it works: there is a law called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a bipartisan bill originally intended to provide protections for pregnant women in the workplace, including “reasonable accomodations” related to pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions; the EEOC is alleging that employers, including in states that have banned abortion, are in violation of that law if they do not provide accomodations for their female employees’ abortions. The attorneys general of Mississippi and Louisiana are suing to overturn the rule. Just The News has more.
#AI – Yesterday, we wrote about a letter by free-market groups opposing state-level regulation of AI and endorsing a Federal approach. We were inclined to agree with the letter, given the scale of the challenges that AI poses and that, while in general state-level regulation allows “a thousand flowers to bloom”, in the case of rapidly-evolving and border-defying technologies like AI a patchwork of state-level regulations would create more problems than it would solve. People can make up their own views about this. Anyway, today Politico has a report on the efforts of several states, notably California, Colorado, and Connecticut, to put up their own AI regulations.
#FamilyPolicy – Good article from Vox‘s Rachel M. Cohen, debunking the alarmist notion of a “child-care cliff,” that once Covid-era subsidies expired child care in America would fall off a cliff. “We don’t need apocalyptic economic predictions to advocate for better family policy,” Cohen writes. Indeed.
#Crime #GoodGovernment – The Biden Administration is touting declining crime numbers. The problem? Crime statistics have also become much more unreliable under the Biden Administration, according to a RealClear Investigations report. Homicide numbers are down, but this may be due to under-reporting or just bad bookkeeping. “[A]uto thefts better capture the state of crime and perceptions of it: As thefts of essential registered property, they tend to be reported,” the report says, and they are dramatically up. There is good reason to believe that Americans’ lying eyes are a more reliable barometer of the state of criminality than official numbers.
#Privatization – The Reason Foundation published its annual report on airport privatization. It points out, correctly, that the US is an outlier in having government-run airports, and that privatization has worked well in many countries.
Chart of the Day
From researcher Ryan Burge: “Catholic Mass attendance was ~50% in 1972. It’s ~25% today. What lead [sic.] to that huge drop? It’s very likely being driven by generational replacement.”
Meme of the Day
