Jon Stewart kicks off his Daily Show Monday night residency by coming to grips with the reality of America's two chronologically challenged presidential candidates: Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
"Argentine president Javier Milei... has consolidated eighteen government ministries into nine... and introduced a 350‐page package of economic reforms that would make Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek smile." - Michael Chapman, Cato InstituteIt was only episode 73, when I thought it was going to be too difficult for Javier Milei to actually downsize government spending.Now, it's episode 80 and we already have good news to report from Argentina! There are dramatic cuts.On top of that, the first economic miracle has arrived, thanks to deregulation.We break it down with all of the juicy details in an episode we're calling "Javier Milei Early Report Card"...
Remy pushes for a complete ban on petroleum, no matter the cost or the amount of artwork he is forced to splash with soup.
Health reporter Emily Kopp and biologist Alex Washburne discuss new documents that detail plans to manipulate bat-borne coronaviruses in Wuhan on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis.Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the genome for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, Alina Chan, a microbiologist affiliated with MIT and Harvard and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, says that because the documents in questions are from early 2018, they do not constitute direct evidence, meaning there still "isn't enough to say a lab accident happened beyond reasonable doubt."Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter working for the public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, obtained and published this latest batch of documents, which she obtained through a FOIA request to the U.S. Geological Survey, on January 18. The more than 1,400 pages are communications about and early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, a grant application seeking funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collect and manipulate bat-borne viruses. Ecohealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, authored the grant, which they proposed as a collaboration between U.S.-based virologists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab located in the city where the first known cases of COVID-19 appeared. DARPA ultimately rejected the proposal as too risky, but critics like Ebright believe that the work likely continued on in Wuhan anyway.Kopp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller to discuss the documents on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Also joining them was mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, who co-authored a pre-print in October 2022 arguing the genome of SARS-CoV-2 had a "fingerprint" indicating that it was created in a lab. The virus that scientists proposed creating in the newly released DEFUSE documents shares several characteristics that Washburne and his colleagues flagged in the study, such as unusually uniform segment lengths and the presence of the enzyme that Ebright flagged as a "smoking gun."In this conversation, they discuss the documents in detail, the ways in which they validate predictions in Washburne's paper, the remaining unknowns in the COVID origin case, comments from Ecohealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak seemingly downplaying that most of the proposed virology work would be done in China, and the difficulty of getting the scientific and media establishments to take new evidence pointing to a lab origin seriously.
Oregon wants to regulate small farms like large commercial dairies. Why? Not because of real environmental concerns, but because large commercial dairies insist that small dairies somehow have a “competitive advantage” over big ones—that is, that they don’t have to install expensive infrastructure to manage waste.But small dairies don’t need that infrastructure because the amount of waste generated can safely decompose in fields or be composted for other productive use. The state is wrapping small dairies in meaningless red tape just to please big dairies. That is protectionist, irrational and, moreover, unconstitutional. Sarah, and three other small farmers, are now teaming up with the Institute for Justice to file a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Agriculture and save small dairy farms in the Beaver State.
After 22 years, it's time to abolish the TSA. The agency gets billions a year, is notorious for failing undercover weapons tests, and repeatedly violates sick or disabled passengers. You should not have to let the government grope your private parts just to get on a plane.
"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the nuanced and hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus.Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke to Kirchick about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.
