House Majority Whip Tom Emmer is turning up the pressure on the U.S. Senate, demanding to know why legislation requiring proof of citizenship and voter identification remains stalled despite what he described as overwhelming public support.

Appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Emmer argued that the Republican-controlled House has repeatedly done its job by passing major pieces of the GOP agenda — only to watch them languish in the Senate.

“The House has been working,” Emmer said. “We’ve been getting our stuff over to the Senate. The Senate’s got to start to perform.”

Among the legislation Emmer singled out was the SAVE America Act, which would establish new federal election-integrity requirements centered on citizenship verification and voter identification.

“We sent the SAVE America Act several times, and it sits over there languishing in the Senate,” Emmer said.

The Minnesota Republican also pointed to the CLARITY Act on digital assets and what he called “Reconciliation 3.0” as additional House priorities awaiting Senate action.

But Emmer reserved some of his strongest criticism for the Senate’s apparent inability to assemble the votes necessary to advance the SAVE America Act.

Guest host Cheryl Casone noted that it remained unclear whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune had enough support to move the legislation.

Emmer was incredulous.

“What’s coming out of the Senate? Everybody has heard them say, ‘We don’t have the votes.’ Really?” Emmer asked. “You don’t have the votes for something that is an 80 percent issue across this country?”

Emmer said the basic principles behind the legislation should be straightforward: voters should establish that they are U.S. citizens and verify their identity when casting a ballot.

“People believe it’s reasonable that in order to vote in this country, you must first establish that you are a lawful citizen,” Emmer said.

He continued by arguing voters should also be required to confirm their identity with photo identification.

“That’s an 80 percent issue,” Emmer said.

The House GOP whip then challenged senators who claim the votes simply are not there to explain exactly which provisions they oppose.

“When you say you don’t have the votes, tell us what the problem is,” Emmer said. “What exactly do you disagree with when it comes to the American people? And they are not telling us that.”

The confrontation comes as Congress prepares for a compressed legislative stretch, with lawmakers facing government funding and other major deadlines.

Emmer said the House expects to address a continuing resolution that would fund the federal government through December 11, along with appropriations measures and a surface transportation bill.

But his message to the Senate was unmistakable: the House has already sent over major pieces of the Republican agenda, and senators now need to act.

“It really is going to be on the Senate’s shoulders to start getting something done when we get back,” Emmer said.

With the SAVE America Act still hanging in the balance, the pressure is increasingly shifting toward Senate Republicans — and toward an uncomfortable question raised by Emmer:

If citizenship verification and voter ID really command the level of public support he says they do, why can’t the Senate find the votes?

Big League Politics

The U.S.–Canada trade talks broke down on Aug. 21. Although both sides hold completely different views, they agreed on two common dealbreakers: bilateral coordination on Canada’s future trade deals with third countries and how deep tariff-rate cuts should go across sectors like autos, steel, and aluminum.

A third, exempting U.S. companies from having to feature French-language content on streaming platforms, was resolved on Aug. 27 when the United States dropped the demand.

Analysts say both sides share one other thing: the China factor, which neither names but looms over both positions.

Neither the Canadian Prime Minister Carney nor U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in their own public accounts, named China as a reason for the collapse, although both cited the same three sticking points: tariff-rate cuts, trade-deal coordination, and French-language protections.

The United States is concerned that Canada could be used as a backdoor for Chinese overcapacity to flood the U.S. market despite tariffs on Chinese imports. For Canada, China is also part of the calculus for offsetting U.S. pressure, but analysts say that could bring long-term damage to Canadians.

Meanwhile, Yeh Yao-yuan, professor of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, sees Beijing’s hand in Ottawa’s approach to Washington.

He told The Epoch Times that it’s “very likely” Beijing is involved behind the scenes because Ottawa is taking an “unnecessarily hardline position” against Washington that may harm the Canadian economy.

The Epoch Times has contacted Carney’s office for comment.

Stephen Nagy, a senior fellow at the Canadian think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, lays out a more specific mechanism.

He warned on Aug. 25 in an article published by nonpartisan Canadian think tank MLI that Canada “must prepare for a targeted wave of Chinese cognitive warfare designed to exploit our domestic anxieties regarding the failed trade pact.”

He wrote that Beijing is exploiting the diplomatic impasse between Washington and Ottawa to play wedge politics and further divide North America.

‘Chinese-Styled Counterattack’

Global Times, the English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), celebrated the U.S.–Canada rift.

In an editorial, it called Canada’s tariff retaliation a “Chinese-styled counterattack.” It claimed that Canada, a member of NATO and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, dealt a heavy blow to the United States’ “unilateral bullying.”

Carney on Aug. 22 described his position as defending sovereignty when he was explaining why he suspended trade talks with the United States the night before.

“We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty, or to undermine our key industries,” he said on national television.

On the same day, a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, previously paused pending a deal, took effect. Three days later, Canada announced its retaliatory tariffs—its prime minister called them “dollar for dollar”—effective Sept. 8.

“Canada is the only country to retaliate against us besides China,” Greer said in an interview with Canada’s national public television network, CBC, on Aug. 26.

In the same interview, Greer clarified that the United States wants bilateral coordination when Canada strikes a trade deal with another country.

“When it comes to things like steel and aluminum, the idea is if we’re going to lower our tariffs and give you the best deal in the world on steel and aluminum, we can’t have Canada be a place where you can get flooded with steel and aluminum from other countries and be used as a backdoor into the U.S.,” he said. “We have to have mutual protection.”

The idea of coordinating economic security has not been one-sided. In May, Carney mentioned at the Global Progress Action Summit in Toronto that “Canada remains open to deeper integration, including options for fortress North America in selected sectors.” The core issue is the “economic boundary of the North American economy,” Ian Fletcher, trade-policy author, told The Epoch Times.

He has written two books, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work” and “Industrial Policy for the United States,” and also serves on the advisory board of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a trade advocacy group for American manufacturers and farmers.

Sometimes, transshipments don’t literally mean goods shipped from Shanghai to Vancouver and then to U.S. ports.

He added a scenario he called a “virtual transshipment situation,” in which the Canadian market is overtaken by, for example, steel and aluminum from China and then Canadian businesses export freed-up domestic production to the United States. That’s not illegal and is very hard to control with rules of origin.

Such potential transshipment is a major concern for the White House.

In the report “The Great Transshipment Scam,” released on Aug. 13, the White House identified Canada as a tier 1 risk, categorizing transshipments as “embedded in broad legitimate trade flows.” The report estimated lost tariff revenue due to transshipment through all countries at between $15 billion and $27 billion.

Therefore, requiring Canada to control its economic border directly affects U.S. interests. For that reason, a similar clause is in effect in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Under Article 32.10, any of the three countries shall inform the other two countries three months before negotiating a free trade agreement with a non-market economy, and the others have the right to exit the USMCA with six months’ notice.

Yet Canada said such a right-to-know request violated its sovereignty. Yeh said the framing echoes CCP-style logic, suggesting Ottawa’s posture may not be its own.

Using Beijing to Counter Washington

Carney’s approach to Beijing may have also added to the Trump administration’s concerns.

Carney visited Beijing in January. During his visit, he announced a deal allowing China to export up to 49,000 electric vehicles to Canada each year at the most-favored-nation tariff rate of 6.1%. That reversed the 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs that the Trudeau government implemented following the United States.

The Biden administration imposed the tariff over national-security concerns that connected Chinese EVs could be used to surveil the United States, echoing the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s 2024 warning that Chinese autos entering the U.S. market could be an “extinction-level event” for the industry.

The 49,000 quota in the Canada-China deal might increase in the future. The deal also allows Chinese green investments in Canada. In return, China lowered its tariffs on Canadian agricultural products.

Along with the EV deal, Beijing and Ottawa also announced a new Canada-China “strategic partnership.”

In Carney’s defense, the deal was not a free trade agreement and therefore was not applicable under Article 32.10 of the USMCA. It was unclear whether he coordinated with Washington on the Chinese EV deal.

Washington didn’t react favorably. President Donald Trump threatened a 100 percent tariff on Canadian goods if Canada integrated further with China.

In June, a hot mic moment captured Carney and Trump discussing the EV deal Canada struck with China. Carney assured Trump it would not open the floodgates to Chinese products, and Trump responded, “That’s good.”

Electric vehicles are one of the high-stakes issues on which China uses “selective, reward-heavy pressure” to prevent Western coordination, Nagy said, arguing that breaking apart a North American manufacturing alliance is a bigger prize for Beijing in maintaining its global economic leverage.

That tension resurfaced as the scheduled USMCA review began on July 1.

William Lee, chief economist at consultancy Global Economic Advisors, doesn’t believe that Canada’s integration with China will stop at the EV deal. “The [lowered EV] tariff rate is the biggest piece of evidence the United States has about how earnest Prime Minister Carney is about allowing China into the supply chain,” Lee told The Epoch Times.

“That’s really the camel’s nose under the tent. If it’s successful, that will be the beginning of even more industrial inputs from China into the United States,” he added, acknowledging the difficulty of curbing Chinese products at the U.S.–Canada border.

He cautioned that there could also be large volumes of “Chinese proxies”—transshipments from Cambodia and Malaysia.

His read is that Carney is determined to address inflation in Canada by allowing cheap Chinese imports. The resulting job loss won’t show up in the economic data for a while.

Carney is enjoying the rising tide of nationalism. Three in four Canadians support his decision to suspend trade talks with the United States, according to nonprofit research organization Angus Reid Institute.

Before the trade talks collapsed, his approval rating fell from 63 percent in February to 51 percent in July, according to the same nonprofit. His hard line against the United States will reverse the slide, said Lee.

Because Canada’s economy depends so heavily on the United States, and cheap Chinese imports carry their own long-term costs, both Yeh and Lee think Carney is pursuing political gain at the expense of longer-term damage to the Canadian economy and the lives of average Canadians.

“The lesson here is: be very careful of nice, glittery, pretty stuff that is offered by China, because that glitter will not last,” Lee warned. “You’ll wind up in worse trades than when you started.”

Terri Wu, Epoch Times

A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has put a precise number on something many people already suspected: most people retiring this decade will collect more from Social Security than they and their employers paid in.

Using Congressional Budget Office figures, CRFB finds scheduled benefits equal about 133% of combined payroll taxes on a present-value basis. In plain terms, the typical retiree is slated to get back $1.33 for every $1 contributed, plus interest. Lower-income retirees do even better; the top fifth of earners roughly break even on the combined worker-plus-employer tax.

Those numbers are not a rounding error. They are why the program is on a collision course with insolvency — the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund is projected to be depleted around 2032, after which automatic cuts would hit unless Congress acts. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. Current workers fund current retirees. The “trust fund” is an accounting device, not a lockbox of your personal savings plus investment returns.

That reality undercuts the popular slogan that beneficiaries are “just getting their own money back.” CRFB published the analysis in part to answer that claim. For most people outside the highest earners, the math does not support it.

Recasting Social Security as Welfare Has Consequences

Some conservatives have used this fact to reframe Social Security as welfare rather than an earned pension. They are not wrong about the structure. But if that is the standard, consistency quickly becomes inconvenient.

Why Keep a Flat Payroll Tax?

If Social Security is welfare, why finance it with a flat payroll tax that hits low-wage workers hardest? FICA takes 12.4% for Social Security (plus Medicare) with no deduction for the working poor. A program sold as social insurance for people we want in the labor force is funded in a way that makes work more expensive at the bottom. Treating it as welfare would argue for scrapping the dedicated payroll tax and paying for it out of general, progressive revenue. Higher earners would pay more. That is the logical implication, not a talking point most fiscal hawks enjoy.

“I Want My Money Back” Does Not Stop at Social Security

The same “I paid in, I want my money back” test does not stop at Social Security. Adjusted for inflation, the federal government has spent tens of trillions on national defense over a lifetime. Individual taxpayers received no itemized return on Vietnam, the Iraq wars, the Cold War, or current operations. The Constitution never required a large standing army; the Second Amendment assumes an armed citizenry. If the metric is personal ROI, a lot of Pentagon spending fails it.

The same applies to schools if you have no children, and to highways if you do not drive or live in the states that receive the transfers. Once government is treated as a personal investment account, almost every program looks like a bad deal for someone.

The State-Level Balance Sheet Is Even More Awkward

The same pattern appears at the state level, and the political alignment is awkward. Federal data compiled by the Rockefeller Institute of Government show that many states receive far more in federal spending than their residents pay in federal taxes. The biggest net beneficiaries tend to be lower-income, rural, and Republican-leaning states. Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, Montana and several others consistently come out ahead on a per-resident basis. Virginia and Maryland look generous too, largely because of federal payrolls and contractors clustered around Washington. New Mexico is an outlier on the Democratic side.

The states that typically send more than they get back include New Jersey, New York, California, Washington, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. If the rule is “stop subsidizing people who take more than they put in,” a lot of red-state budgets would feel it first.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has praised Ayn Rand. Wisconsin, like many states in that cohort, is a net recipient of federal dollars. Applying the Social Security critique uniformly would require telling those constituents to stop living off transfers they did not fully fund.

Selective Accounting Is Not a Fiscal Argument

None of this proves Social Security should be left untouched. The program is underfunded relative to promised benefits, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. What it does show is that “give me my money back” is a terrible organizing principle for a national government. Taxes fund public goods, insurance, and transfers that do not produce a clean personal ledger. People who apply that ledger only to Social Security, and then stop, are not making a fiscal argument. They are picking the one program they dislike and ignoring the rest of the balance sheet.

If the country wants to debate whether Social Security should become a more explicitly progressive welfare program, or whether benefits should be means-tested, or whether the payroll tax should be replaced, that debate is worth having. Selective accounting is not.

Global Market News

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune.

There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age.

Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.

Unless it can be resolved, an eager China may very well seize the advantage and get ahead in a technological revolution that, until now, has been led by America.

Over the past few months, there has been an explosion of protests about data centers as well as legislative moves against them. As Robert Bryce reported in our last issue, the first seven months of this year saw 274 cases in which the construction of data centers across the US was either banned or subject to severe restrictions. Until this year, developers had few problems building them wherever they wanted. Now, we see increasing hostility from local residents and politicians.

New York State has passed a one-year moratorium against new construction. In Maine, legislators tried to block the building of large centers altogether, until their bill was thrown out by Governor Janet Mills. Even Loudoun County, Virginia – which is known as the world’s data-center capital – is looking at new restrictions.

There are a number of reasons for the resistance. Data centers bring noise and urbanization without, crucially, creating much in the way of employment. But above all they are voracious consumers of power and water. While it might be tempting to think the current industrial revolution is much cleaner than the original one, with its boilers and smokestacks, the energy consumption of data centers is extraordinary, and is growing rapidly.

Every time AI bots are upgraded, their need for power leaps to a new level. According to McKinsey, 5 percent of last year’s US electricity consumption came from data centers. Google is said to use as much energy as a city of 250,000 people.

Moreover, the rush of data centers comes just as Americans are seeing their fuel bills rise. Data centers are not the only cause, of course – there is also the small matter of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20 percent of the world’s crude oil supplies used to pass.

At the same time, it should not come as a surprise that people make a connection between their soaring bills and the construction work down the road: the installation of data centers is competing with domestic demand and pushes up prices for everyone.

Vice President J.D. Vance has addressed the issue. If developers want to build data centers, he says, they are going to have to address the issue of local power supplies. The federal government, he claims, will make it easier for them to combine construction of data centers with the construction of power plants.

Some have suggested that the centers provide a prime opportunity for renewables. Wind and solar plants might suit the image of a fast-growing 21st century, but sadly those who are in the business of operating data centers are generally less keen. They need access to reliable power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Without a leap in battery technology to allow large quantities of energy to be stored at far lower costs, local gas plants are more realistic. But that does leave the issue of water consumption which, in some locations, may prove a bigger problem.

The obvious places to put data centers are in the desert, where they will annoy the fewest people. But desert areas have an acute shortage of water and present the biggest risk of the machines overheating.

It may turn out that these are transitory issues. Over time, it is quite possible that the trend in energy consumption by AI models will be reversed. It is perhaps a good thing that there is some pressure on Big Tech over energy consumption now, because it will incentivize developers to look for ways of improving the efficiency of their technology as well as its performance. This is one aspect in which China may be outpacing America, with DeepSeek claiming that its large language model can operate at one tenth of the energy consumption of its US competition. And if AI starts to consume less power, then water, used for cooling, will become less of an issue.

Even so, if America is to continue to be the world leader in AI, it is vital Americans learn to live with data centers. Democracies do not have the advantage that Chinese industry has in being able to foist its plants on the population, regardless of the level of civic opposition.

To win public affection, the data-center industry is going to have to accept that it can’t simply plug its plants into the existing grid; it is, as the Trump administration insists, going to have to become a significant supplier of power, too. That will not guarantee the US eternal success in the tech sector. But it would move an important obstacle out of the way.

The Spectator

All the shopper wanted was to buy a laptop.

Instead, a routine trip to a Best Buy turned into a bizarre confrontation over gender, pronouns and whether a customer should be compelled to address a biological male employee as “ma’am.”

Video of the encounter shows the Best Buy employee, who presented with a distinctly masculine appearance, objecting after the customer referred to the employee as “sir.”

The employee insisted on being addressed as “ma’am.”

The customer wasn’t having it.

His position was straightforward: the person standing in front of him appeared to be a man, and he wasn’t going to be forced to say something he didn’t believe simply because an employee demanded it.

You can argue that mistakes happen and that most decent people aren’t deliberately looking to insult a stranger.

But that’s not what made this encounter different.

The confrontation represented something much bigger: a “woke” ideology that reached its cultural peak several years ago and somehow transformed ordinary human interactions into ideological minefields.

Today, even progressives have a name for that era: Woke 1.

And apparently Woke 1 “was crazy.”

During a recent ABC News interview, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated a phrase connected to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” The phrase has since exploded.

Woke 1 basically describes the cultural and political environment surrounding the pandemic and the upheaval following George Floyd’s death, an era when ideas previously considered fringe suddenly became fashionable.

Defund the police, abolish the police, cancel culture, you name it. Identity politics seemingly injected into everything. And increasingly complicated rules governing what ordinary Americans were permitted to say about race, gender and sexuality.

But now some liberal politicians who embraced that environment are distancing themselves from their old rhetoric.

For example, Wisconsin progressive Francesca Hong declared in 2020, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” She later moved away from those positions. Ocasio-Cortez has likewise said rhetoric from the lockdown era isn’t rhetoric progressives would necessarily use today.

The political winds changed.

Perhaps politicians discovered what millions of Americans already knew: telling people that police departments should disappear, prisons should be abolished or that ordinary language must constantly be reconstructed around someone’s personal identity was never going to work in the real world.

Which brings us back to Best Buy. The employee in that viral confrontation appears to be living in a cultural moment that much of the country — and increasingly even parts of the political left — has already begun leaving behind.

Yet somehow even that became a cultural confrontation.

That apparent retreat from Woke 1 hasn’t escaped the attention of Joe Rogan, who recently challenged politicians who once embraced the “defund the police” movement to explain exactly what changed.

“How far out did you track the consequences of defunding the police?” Rogan asked. “Because I immediately went to… you’re gonna have more crime because no one’s gonna be able to stop the crime.”

Then he posed perhaps the most important question:

“What did you think defund the police meant? Everyone’s gonna, like, eat mushrooms and we’re all gonna, like, be flower children? What did you think? Because there’s no police around, no one’s gonna do crimes?”

Behind Rogan’s sarcasm was a legitimate criticism of the Woke 1 era: what was the actual endgame?

His criticism went further. He questioned whether politicians genuinely reconsidered those policies after examining their consequences or simply abandoned them once public opinion turned against them.

“Or have you changed your opinion?” Rogan asked. “And if you did change your opinion, what were you thinking back then?”

That’s the question politicians who embraced Woke 1 should have to answer.

Changing your mind isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when the policy involves policing, crime and public safety, Americans deserve more than a catchy phrase acknowledging that things went too far. They deserve an explanation of why those ideas were embraced in the first place.

For several years, Americans who questioned some of these ideas were routinely told they were the unreasonable ones. Now many of the same political circles that entertained those ideas are acknowledging that maybe things went too far.

Woke 1 is dead, but not everyone is up to speed, like the Best Buy employee. But what comes next?

If politicians themselves now acknowledge that Woke 1 went off the rails, what exactly will “Woke 2” look like?

We’ll find out soon enough, but hopefully it won’t include defunding police!

Eddie Molina, Law Enforcement Today

The Islamic School of Irving is being sued for over $1 million by a female claiming she was brutally raped by a 14-year-old male and school officials failed to call police. According to the Dallas County petition, Doe and her mother were working for a contractor hired to clean the school on the evening of Sept. 27, 2024. The school shares a campus with a mosque and is connected to it by doors that the lawsuit says should have been locked after hours. Doe said she saw a 14-year-old boy, identified only as OEA, loitering in a school hallway during a mosque event and told him he should not be there because the school was closed. The petition alleges that OEA then locked himself in a classroom bathroom. As Doe began to leave the room,“ he suddenly ran toward her, grabbed her by the neck, choked her and slammed her body against the door. He then pulled her back into the classroom, turned the light off, and told her that he was going to kill her.” The lawsuit says that despite her pleas, he continued to strangle her, raped her, threatened to kill her if she told anyone, and took her phone.

Doe said she ran to a security guard in the parking lot and asked him to call police. Instead, the petition alleges, the guard yelled at her to stop crying and alerted school officials. Officials took her to an office and said they would “handle it.” ‘

Rather than calling 911, staff allegedly had her show them the room, photographed the scene, pulled up a photo of the boy, and remarked that he had previously been suspended for attempting to rape a female student. Doe identified him as her attacker.

The lawsuit says no one at the school or mosque summoned help. Officials instead asked whether she was a U.S. citizen and offered her money. Doe then found her mother elsewhere in the building; her mother called Doe’s manager, who called police. Officers arrested OEA on the property and took Doe to a hospital for a SANE exam.

The lawsuit also alleges that the school official told the victim he tried raping another female student previously.

Independent Newsroom

I have been traveling a lot lately, and I keep noticing something that would have seemed genuinely strange not very long ago: Grown adults are walking through airports carrying stuffed animals.

Not parents carrying the stuffed animal their toddler dropped. Adult men and women carrying plush animals through the airport as companions and comfort objects. Apparently, this is normal now.

I realize I am in dangerous territory here because I am about to sound like an old person complaining about the younger generation. But I don’t actually want to make fun of people with teddy bears. I want to understand what changed. I also have very little moral high ground when it comes to childhood comfort objects. I sucked my thumb into college.

Throughout my childhood, adults kept predicting the milestone that would finally make me stop. Kindergarten. Elementary school. High school. Surely, when she gets a boyfriend. Nope. Eventually, acrylic fingernails accomplished what adolescence and boyfriends couldn’t. I started wearing them regularly, as was fashionable at the time, and thumb sucking became impractical.

My mother still occasionally sucks her thumb. She is also one of the strongest and most capable women I know. She built a large fashion company, raised children, worked incredibly hard, and eventually retired to Hawaii. Every once in a while, though, falling asleep or driving when she thinks nobody is paying attention, there goes the thumb.

So my argument cannot possibly be that needing comfort makes you weak. But I do think we are becoming weaker, and I wonder whether the stuffed animals are one tiny, furry symptom of something much larger.

One of the most popular columns I have written for The Epoch Times was about another phenomenon I couldn’t stop noticing: people wearing pajamas in public.

Recently, Tuskegee University, a historically Black university, made news for reinforcing standards restricting pajamas, bedroom slippers, bonnets, and durags in certain campus settings. Critics have characterized such rules as “respectability politics.” I find the phrase itself interesting. When did presenting yourself respectably become politics?

There is nothing wrong with pajamas, a bonnet, or a teddy bear. The question is whether every setting needs to accommodate whatever makes us most comfortable. School is partly preparation for entering the world. Sometimes, that means learning that what is appropriate in your bedroom isn’t necessarily appropriate in a classroom or job interview.

We have seen a similar conversation around emotional support animals. For a period, they became so common on airplanes that airlines were dealing not only with dogs and cats but with increasingly unusual animals being presented as necessary for emotional comfort. People with disabilities who rely on trained service animals are in an entirely different category.

But culturally, something interesting had happened: “This makes me feel safer and more comfortable” had become an argument we increasingly expected the world around us to accommodate.

Perhaps what has changed isn’t our need for comfort. My mother and I are proof that previous generations had plenty of comfort habits. Perhaps what has changed is our expectation that adulthood should require us to leave any of them behind.

There is psychological research supporting the idea that manageable discomfort serves a purpose. Researchers sometimes describe “stress inoculation.” Overwhelming or chronic stress can obviously be damaging, but manageable stress, successfully navigated, can help us develop the ability to deal with future stress.

If, every time a child encounters something difficult, we remove the difficulty, how will the child discover, “I can handle difficult things”?

I wonder if my generation inadvertently participated in an enormous parenting experiment. Many of us looked at our childhoods and said: “My parents messed me up. I’m going to be gentler with my children.”

Some correction was undoubtedly needed. Cruelty doesn’t create healthy children. There is enormous value in affection, empathy, and listening. But somewhere along the way, did being gentle begin to mean preventing discomfort?

This extends far beyond parenting because we have constructed a civilization extraordinarily good at removing discomfort. We rarely have to be hungry. We control the temperature. Food appears at our door. Entertainment is available every waking second. We don’t have to navigate without GPS or even stand in line for three minutes with nothing to do.

We reach for our phones, and I certainly do. I am addicted to mine. I sometimes turn my head away from a human being who is speaking to me because something appears on my screen. I know that while I’m doing it, it isn’t appropriate, and sometimes I do it anyway. Maybe the smartphone is just the socially acceptable stuffed animal almost all of us carry.

On a recent flight to North Dakota, something unusual happened. I sat next to a man who worked both as a cattle farmer and in the oil fields. We started talking and kept talking for essentially the entire flight.

We talked regenerative agriculture, watering-trough hacks, repurposing security cameras to watch cattle, stocking density, GPS collars, and everything else two people interested in agriculture could cram into a flight. When I got off the airplane, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked to a stranger beside me for an entire flight.

Airplanes have changed. We sit down, insert earbuds, open the laptop or phone, and disappear into entertainment individually designed for us. Everyone becomes the center of his own little universe. Of course, each of us is the center of our own universe. We are the narrators of the movie happening inside our own heads. Maturity, I think, is realizing that everyone else is, too.

After employing hundreds of people over decades, I have felt a change in this orientation. I increasingly encounter an expectation that the environment should organize itself around the individual’s experience rather than the individual asking how he or she should show up for everyone else.

People ask me almost every day some version of the same question: “How do you do all of this?” “Do you sleep?” I have four young children. We have a ranch and restaurant. I write and travel for speaking engagements.

I make apothecary products for our farm store and homemade ice cream every week. Written down, it does sound like a lot. And yet I somehow still find a remarkable amount of time to scroll through my phone.

So I wonder what people are really asking. Are they asking, “How could anyone possibly accomplish all of that?” Or is the question underneath sometimes, “Why would you be willing to?”

Why choose a life requiring that much work? Why do something difficult and inconvenient for relatively little money or recognition? Why willingly be uncomfortable?

Maybe I am projecting, but I wonder whether effort itself has begun to look abnormal.

For most of human existence, nobody needed to seek out discomfort. Life delivered plenty of it. I certainly don’t want to return to a world where people routinely went hungry or ordinary infections killed children. Eliminating suffering is a tremendous human achievement. But somewhere along the way, I wonder if we confused suffering with discomfort.

They aren’t the same thing. Being bored isn’t suffering. Waiting isn’t suffering. Having someone disagree with you isn’t suffering. Dressing appropriately when you’d rather wear pajamas isn’t suffering. Putting your phone away while another person speaks isn’t suffering. Allowing your child to struggle with something he can ultimately overcome isn’t cruelty.

These are tiny repetitions of something human beings desperately need to know: I can be uncomfortable and still be OK.

Maybe the person carrying the teddy bear through the airport is every bit as capable as I am. My own family history makes it impossible for me to conclude otherwise. But I still have the judgment: You’re a grown adult. Why are you carrying a stuffed animal through the airport?

Maybe we’ve simply become less judgmental about harmless comforts. There are certainly worse things a person can do than hug a stuffed bear. But maybe embarrassment once performed a small cultural function, too. Maybe occasionally being told, “You’re getting too old for that,” was one of countless little pressures pushing us toward adulthood.

Not everything our parents did to us needs to be repeated. But not everything they asked us to overcome was trauma either. Maybe resilience isn’t something we simply possess. Maybe it is something we practice.

The teddy bear probably isn’t the problem. I just wonder whether it is trying to tell us something.

Mollie Engelhart, Epoch Times

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of more than $100,000 for most H-1B visas. The usual suspects have come out with the usual reactions. Doug Brand, a senior immigration official in the Biden administration, called the move “catastrophic,” and the libertarian Cato Institute has warned of “devastating” consequences.

In lieu of abolishing the program altogether – my preference, but something only Congress can do – such a fee is long overdue. It’s chump change compared to the added value a truly exceptional foreign worker could generate, and at the same time would make the program less attractive as a means of importing cheap white-collar labor to undercut Americans.

This latest proposed fee is different from the $100,000 fee the administration announced last fall on foreigners arriving in the US on an H-1B visa – that was enjoined by a federal court. The current proposal would apply to all H-1B visas subject to the numerical caps (universities are cap-exempt), not just new arrivals. That’s important because many foreigners who get H-1B visas are already in the US on some other visa, often as foreign students, and so would not have been subject to the earlier proposed fee.

The specific amount of the new fee would be $103,265. (no cents!) Now, I don’t have $103,265 sitting in my checking account, but Amazon, Google, JP Morgan, Apple, and the other top importers of H-1B workers certainly do.

Industry lobbyists have been telling us for years that the H-1B program is essential to enable the “best and brightest” foreign talent to come to America. At a time when tech companies are offering multi-million-dollar signing bonuses to star talent, what’s a measly $103,265 fee to help the government run the immigration system if you’re going to land one of the world’s best and brightest minds?

But that’s assuming the H-1B program is actually for the best and brightest. It certainly isn’t. The US Chamber of Commerce spent years retailing the same “best and brightest” fairy tale as the other pro-immigration lobbyists. But the Chamber – the leading voice for big business in the nation’s capital – in its lawsuit to stop last year’s proposed fee suddenly made an about-face and argued that, no, H-1Bs aren’t the best and brightest after all!

That’s because the real purpose of the H-1B program is to provide firms with lower-cost foreign labor at scale. H-1B workers are paid significantly less than comparable American workers, which is why the visa is so often used to replace American workers with foreigners.

Perhaps the most notorious case of this was when Disney fired its entire (American) IT staff in Orlando and replaced them with H-1Bs – whom the fired workers were required to train as a condition of receiving a severance package. This is legal and has happened hundreds of times across the country.

Congress would have to change the law to prohibit use of the H-1B visa to replace Americans, but the proposed fee would at least make that a less attractive option by making the foreign workers more expensive.

And the fee wouldn’t even necessarily cancel out all the wage discount from employing H-1Bs. If you divide the proposed fee by the usual six-year period of an H-1B visa, it comes out to about $17,000 a year. But the average H-1B salary in “computer-related occupations” a few years ago was more than $30,000 less than the median wage for that occupation. In that case, you’d have to double the proposed fee (to $206,530?) to truly make the H-1B visa less attractive as a means of importing cheap labor.

But even the more modest proposed fee would certainly affect hiring decisions in many cases. Of course, some employers would just turn to other ways to import cheap labor that aren’t covered by the new fee, such as the L-1 visa.

But there’s evidence that concern over higher H-1B costs and stricter enforcement is causing some firms to do more hiring domestically. If the proposed fee goes into effect, it will only accelerate that process, to the benefit of American tech workers.

Mark Krikorian, The Spectator

Owen Matthews, The Spectator

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror?

‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale?

Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast). Chayko commanded the northern group of Russian forces which advanced to the outskirts of Kyiv in February and March 2022, which pro-Ukrainian bloggers maintain makes him ultimately responsible for the massacres of civilians in Bucha and Irpin.

Following that logic, the attempted assassination of Chayko stands alongside heroic partisan killings of war criminals – for instance the shooting of Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, gunned down on a Prague street by British-trained Czech agents in May 1942.

But if you believe that the Balzi Rossi bomb was justifiable, what then is the difference between that attack and the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 nail bombing of British soldiers at London’s Chelsea Barracks, or bomb attacks on Household Cavalry troopers and an army band in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park the following year? All were assaults on military personnel in a civilian setting in the cause of overturning a colonial occupation.

Our answer obviously depends on how we feel about the righteousness of the perpetrators’ cause. The US and UK have been taking out al-Qaeda and Isis members in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan by drone attack for years, accepting collateral damage to unlucky civilians as part of the butcher’s bill. Few would shed tears for Mohammed Emwazi – ‘Jihadi John’ – killed in a US-UK drone strike in Raqqa in November 2015 or ‘White Widow’ Sally-Anne Jones, terminated by a Predator drone in 2017. Israel’s Mossad, with its arsenal of exploding pagers and pinpoint hotel-room strikes, is a world leader in taking out enemies en masse wherever they find them.

Nevertheless, approving of extrajudicial execution opens a moral can of worms. We can say that it’s fine when Barack Obama smites his enemies but bad when Vladimir Putin does it because we approve of one but not the other. But that argument quickly slides into a dangerous moral ambivalence, a whataboutism of the kind that the Kremlin loves to exploit.

Kremlin-controlled Russian media have blamed Ukraine for organising the latest Moscow bombing. Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, have remained silent. But the Balzi Rossi explosion is the latest in a long string of bombings targeting Russian officers, occupation officials and propagandists. In August 2022, Darya Dugina, a 29-year-old pro-war commentator and daughter of the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, died in a car bomb blast presumably aimed at her father. In April the following year Maxim Fomin, a pro-war military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette presented to him as a gift during an event in St Petersburg. Zakhar Prilepin, a nationalist novelist and commander of pro-Russian forces in the Donbas, was badly injured by another car bomb.

Similar devices have, since 2022, killed three Russian lieutenant generals, a deputy mayor of Stavropol and the founder of a pro-Russian battalion in Ukraine. Ukraine’s SBU security service has either denied responsibility or said nothing about bombings on Russian territory. But it has claimed several identical bombings inside occupied Ukraine, including two lawmakers in the Russian-installed assembly in Luhansk, an official at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the former head of the Olenivka prison in Donetsk, all blown up by improvised explosive devices. Occupiers were ‘a completely legitimate target’, SBU sources told Ukrainian media.

Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for at least 15 assassinations or attempted assassinations by handgun that killed or wounded, among others, a Russian submarine commander, a cruise missile software engineer and the deputy head of GRU Russian military intelligence. Russia, for its part, has also organised at least six shooting assassinations inside Ukraine.

What makes some of these bombings especially morally complex is the apparent use of unwitting suicide bombers to deliver the devices. Darya Trepova, an anti-war Russian, maintained that she did not know the statuette that killed Vladlen Tatarsky contained explosives (she was nonetheless sentenced to 27 years in jail for murder). Zaur Gurtsiev, deputy mayor of Stavropol, and Armen Sarkisyan, founder of the pro-Russian ‘Arbat Battalion’, were killed by suicide bombers who were both apparently unwitting pawns with no known patriotic links to Ukraine and no observed desire to die for Kyiv’s cause. In October 2022 delivery truck driver Makhir Yusubov picked up a load of goods destined for Crimea after accepting an order on a logistics website. Halfway across the Kerch Bridge the truck detonated, killing Yusubov and damaging the bridge. Vasyl Maliuk, then chief of Ukraine’s SBU security service, publicly acknowledged the operation and admitted that Ukrainian services deliberately ‘used people in the dark’. It’s not known if the woman who delivered the bomb to the Balzi Rossi – reportedly wrapped as a present – volunteered for a suicide mission or whether she was just another expendable human carrier.

Is there a difference between killing a Russian commander on the battlefield and blowing him up at his own birthday party? You can argue that all’s fair in love and war, that the horror inflicted by Russia on Ukraine justifies killing enemy officers even when they’re unarmed and off-duty. But that moral choice comes with an uncomfortable trail of logical contingencies. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, every man who commits evil does it for reasons he considers good.

In the wake of the Hyde Park bombing the IRA put out a statement justifying killing British servicemen because ‘the Irish people have sovereign and national rights which no occupational force can put down’. The Kremlin liquidators sent to murder KGB and GRU defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal undoubtedly saw their victims as traitors who had betrayed their country – and themselves as righteous executioners. Menachem Begin, in his memoir The Revolt, claimed that US president Harry Truman ‘said that he would have joined the “terrorists” had he been in Eretz Israel during the rule of the British’.

Yes, that’s a list of very different cases – bombing as an act of war vs poisoning as an act of state revenge, post-colonial independence movements vs sovereign warring states. But that’s the point. Circumstances matter.

Motivation matters. And here’s the nub of the problem. We can easily agree that our ends sometimes justify extrajudicial means, but not the ends of those with whom we disagree. Ultimately we judge the actions of our heroes and villains by who they are, not by the things they do.

To return to the original question: where does the Moscow bomb attack lie on the scale? Operationally, ordering this kind of suicide bombing is an outlier by the standards of any western army or security service – including the Israelis. Accurate targeting, as well as minimising civilian casualties, is an important part of the moral equation for any democracy. Even if drones inadvertently blow up whole wedding parties in Afghanistan the civilian chiefs who ultimately authorise such operations can be told it was a genuine accident. A 1kg bomb full of ball-bearings brought to a crowded restaurant, as the Balzi Rossi bomb was reported to be, is not by any stretch of the imagination a targeted means of assassination.

To be clear, there is no direct evidence that this attack was the work of the Ukrainian government. Indeed I honestly hope that neither the SBU nor the HUR was involved. Because whoever ordered the bombing is treading a dangerous path. First, being found responsible for an indiscriminate attack of this kind would erode the moral superiority that Ukraine undoubtedly holds as the injured party in this conflict. But more dangerously, it opens the door for a new tit-for tat front in an already supremely vicious war, fought not by guns and missiles but improvised explosive devices in restaurants. Is there a difference between these two methods of dealing death to innocent civilians? For many people the answer depends who’s doing the killing and who’s doing the dying.

U.S. forces attacked two Iranian launchers on Larak Island on Sunday, carrying out the first publicly known American strikes inside Iran since late July, Reuters reported.

A U.S. official said Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel appeared to be preparing the launchers to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. The official said U.S. forces targeted both launchers before they could be used.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the attack killed and wounded several military personnel and civilians, according to state media. Tehran threatened retaliation. The semi-official Tasnim news agency described the operation as a U.S. drone strike.

For investors, the renewed military action raises the risk of another escalation around the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for global energy shipments. Any further disruption could push oil and shipping costs higher, benefiting some energy producers while increasing inflationary pressure and weighing on airlines, manufacturers and other fuel-sensitive industries.

President Donald Trump said last week that mines had been cleared or detonated in the strait’s international waters. He also warned that vessels attempting to deploy additional mines would be destroyed.

The strike follows several weeks of relative military stalemate. Washington has increasingly emphasized the possible use of sanctions against countries supporting Iran since the previous known U.S. attacks in late July.

The conflict began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. Tehran responded by attacking Israel and Gulf countries that host American military bases.

The six-month war, which has also included Israeli operations in Lebanon, has killed thousands and displaced millions. Eighteen U.S. service members have died in the conflict.

Fighting has also resulted in a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, the waterway handled roughly one-fifth of the oil consumed worldwide.

Rob Williams