A glance at America’s growing waistline shows closing gyms and limiting travel away from home to combat the pandemic has worsened public health in America. 

Results from a 2021 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found 61 percent of respondents experienced unwanted weight gain during the pandemic (by an average of 29 pounds). Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds children experienced the most significant weight gain over the past two years, many of which experienced an alarming 1.6 percent increase in BMI.

Losing weight is never easy, often requiring daily commitment to dietary and lifestyle changes. The Food and Drug Administration’s latest effort aims to help.

Imponderables about California’s Proposition 1:

Abortion in California is already, indisputably legal during the first six months of pregnancy, and illegal after the fetus has become viable (week 24 to 26), unless necessary for the mother’s life or health.

So why is Proposition 1—which will amend the California State Constitution to enshrine a right, funded by taxpayers’ money, to abortion on demand for any reason for the full term of pregnancy—on the ballot, and why are more than $9 million being spent to support its passage?

The Social Security Administration announced Thursday that beneficiaries will receive an 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment next year. That’s good news for seniors today who—like all other Americans—are struggling with rising costs, but it comes at the expense of a diminished Social Security system for current and future retirees.

Social Security is funded by current workers’ payroll taxes, but since the average worker’s wages increased only 4.1% over the past year, that means Social Security’s revenues have increased at less than half the rate of its newly announced expenditure increase.

Add in the fact that there are 2.8 million fewer people working today compared with the pre-pandemic employment-to-population ratio, and Social Security’s revenues are almost certainly below trend while its costs are above trend.

There are a few people who talk up ‘populism’ as something good, such as Steve Hilton at Fox News. Many others condemn ‘populism,’ including some classical liberals. A lot of the ‘populism’ talk does not sit well with me.

What is populism? I will consider several meanings and ask whether ‘populism’ is apt.

But first, some preliminary reflections on word usage and meaning.

Plaintiffs combatting government actions are increasingly requesting preliminary relief with nationwide injunctions. Such a trend has started stirring debate concerning how appropriate a legal remedy nationwide injunctions are.

Despite their name, nationwide or national injunctions are not defined by geography. Instead, nationwide injunctions are best understood as a court order against the federal government which instructs the government to act or prohibits the government from doing something.

National injunctions differ from typical court orders between two private parties such as a restraining order. With national injunctions, the injunction provides relief to parties beyond those filing briefs or motions in a case.

Martin Pánek asked me to write a foreword to a new edition of a Czech translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He gave me permission to post my original English-language text here. The book will be published in 2023 by the Liberální Institut, edited by Pavel Chalupníček, and translated by Hana Rogalewiczová & Vladimír Rogalewicz. 

Going to the grocery store over the past year has been an experience—and not a pleasant one. From inflation to supply-chain shortages that ensure my toddler will have a meltdown because I can’t find the “right” animal crackers, it’s a trip I dread every week.

But there’s been one aisle I’ve blissfully been able to avoid—the baby formula aisle.

There is no dispute that cell phones contain a lot of personal information. The Supreme Court recognized in 2014 in Riley v. California that a cell phone is “not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life’.” For this reason, the Court held that the police generally need a warrant to search one. But what happens when police do get a warrant? Can they look at everything on your phone?

Well, it depends.

You know a government spending project has run off its rails when the New York Times criticizes it.

That’s what happened in its Sunday, October 9, 2022 edition, as reporter Ralph Vartabedian reports how years of mismanagement by state government officials turned California’s proposed bullet train into a zombie project.

If you search the internet for “U.S. national debt,” one site you’re sure to find is the U.S. Debt Clock. If you want to get a sense of how fast the U.S. national debt is changing, it does its job, I suppose. But it’s a mistake to call it a clock.

It is really a dashboard, and a convoluted one at that. It presents about a hundred points of data. Some are directly related to the U.S. national debt, but more than half are not. From a user perspective, it’s on the level of a video gaming machine in a Las Vegas casino. It features lots of motion, but like trying to win money by playing video slots, it takes a lot of time to extract information from it.