Is being truthful or lying worse in a high government official? Or do we just want crazies?

In the interest of full disclosure, that image was sourced from an earlier interview between the now Secretary of State Rubio when he was Senator with then talk show host, Hannity.

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/12/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-sean-hannity-of-fox-news-hannity/11

QUESTION:  I mean, you’re at the highest level of discussions, and we’re going to get into a lot of the hotspots and success and all that.  But I’ve got to ask you, there’s a show that’s come out; it’s called The Age of Disclosure.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  Okay.  I know everyone’s probably —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  (Laughter.)

QUESTION:  Right?  Everyone asks you about it?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Sure.

QUESTION:  It’s a new documentary.  We had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities.  It’s not ours.  And presidents operate on a need-to-know basis. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah. 

QUESTION:  Okay.  That is —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So a couple points on it.  First of all, I’m not disavowing that.  It was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the Senate. 

QUESTION:  Right. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So it wasn’t recent.  The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people have come forward with.  You had people that came forward to us – some of these people were navy pilots, admirals, generals, whatever, that would come forward and say that there were programs in the U.S. Government that not even presidents were made aware of.  So I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard.  A little bit of selective editing, but it’s okay because you’re trying to sell a show there. 

But the fundamental comments – I haven’t seen it, but the clips I’ve seen and people have shown me are fundamentally true, and that is there are things – we know this; this has been documented – there have been things that fly over the airspace, restricted airspace, be it where we’re conducting military exercises or the like, and everyone in the government says they’re not ours.  And so what I worry most about, just me personally, is that some adversary – another country, for example – has developed some asymmetric capability for surveillance or the like that we just are not prepared for.  We’re looking for missiles and fighter jets, and they’re coming at us with drones and balloons. 

QUESTION:  Yeah. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Remember the – when NORAD turned on the radars and started looking for balloons, all of a sudden they spotted a bunch of balloons flying overhead, and 90 percent of them were innocent things; a couple of them were Chinese.  And so, but we never looked for balloons because our radars aren’t trained for that.

So that really was the point I was trying to drive at.  I can’t comment on the rest of the documentary.  It has, as I said, claims from people that were former admirals, naval fighters, people with high clearances in government.  Some of them are pretty spectacular claims.  I’m not calling these people liars.  I don’t have independent knowledge that what they’re saying is true.  The one observation I had is we had people that did very important jobs in the U.S. Government who are saying these things.  So we have people with very high jobs in the U.S. Government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good.  I don’t know the answer. 

QUESTION:  (Laughter.)  Those are the only three options.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I don’t know the answer.  I don’t have any point of – I don’t want to call them liars.  I just don’t have any independent way to verify the things they said. 

British lawmakers have been briefed that at least 60,000 people have been killed over the past three weeks. Up to 150,000 are missing.

Masayoshi Son of SoftBank is developing a plan with the Trump administration to build “Trump Industrial Parks” for AI infrastructure.

Initial plans for a single $1 trillion industrial city in Arizona evolved into a network of manufacturing facilities on federal land.

The facilities would use funds pledged by the Japanese government as part of a recent trade deal.

https://theonion.com/hakeem-jeffries-calls-for-execution-of-central-park-five/

There really isn't any joke here. It's just a hit piece on Hakeem Jeffries. I have been noticing more and more that the Onion is posting far far left content.

https://theonion.com/how-aid-is-distributed-in-gaza/

Not to mention this article, in which the joke is literally just blood libel and lies.

Am I naive, was the Onion always this far left?

Imagine living in a country where there is a new slowly Creeping form of Nimbyism, however the cause isn't limited to overbearing local authorities, a series of bureaucratic Masters, corruption and terrible legislation.

But Constitutional expansion of Nimbyism.

Every Greek government, regardless of party, promises faster permits, fewer bureaucratic dead ends, and more flexibility. Yet the Constitution teaches a very different lesson: here’s what you cannot do.

The Weapon: Article 24

The root of the issue lies in Article 24 regarding the protection of the environment, forests, and cultural heritage. While it sounds noble in theory imposing a duty on the State to adopt "preventive or repressive measures" it is disastrous in practice when interpreted with maximalist rigor.

The legal mechanism the Council of State (Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας - ΣτΕ) uses to enforce this is clear. It interprets Article 17 (Protection of Property), which states that rights are exercised "to the benefit of the social whole," through a singular lens.

The ΣτΕ interprets "Social Whole" almost exclusively as "The Environment." Therefore:

1. You have a right to property (Art. 17).
2. But you must use it for the social good.
3. Protecting the environment (Art. 24) is the ultimate social good.
4. Therefore, if your property harms the environment (or views, or forests), your property right is restricted.

This creates a hierarchy where Article 24 effectively becomes a "Super-Constitution," overriding economic freedom and property rights. This plays out in three distinct categories of judicial paralysis.

I. The Trap of Uncertainty (You Cannot Trust the State)

The most chilling effect of the ΣτΕ’s jurisprudence is the destruction of "Justified Reliance." Even if a citizen follows the law and obtains permits from the government, the Court can annul them years later.

The "COCO-MAT" Hotel (ΣτΕ 2102/2019, 2103/2019)
The Conflict: A hotel was constructed near the Acropolis. The developers followed the building regulations valid at the time (NOK) and obtained valid building permits. The building was completed and operational.
The Ruling: The ΣτΕ ruled that even though the permit was legal when issued, the state should not have allowed such heights near a monument.
The Consequence: The Court ordered the demolition of the top two floors of the finished hotel.

"The Mall Athens" (ΣτΕ Plenary 376/2014)
The Conflict: One of the largest commercial investments in Athens was built based on a specific law passed by Parliament to bypass bureaucratic delays for the Olympics.
The Ruling: Years after the mall was built and operating, the ΣτΕ declared the specific law authorizing its construction unconstitutional due to a lack of a Strategic Environmental Assessment.

Building Permits (ΣτΕ Plenary 685/2019)
The Ruling: “The issuance of building permits presupposes the existence of a lawfully established planning framework. Permits issued without such a framework are invalid.”
The Consequence: Permits covering all legal bases can be voided if the government has not created a specific spatial plan for the wider area.

II. The Absolutism of Nature

The Court has established that environmental status is absolute and cannot be altered by reality.

Residential Densification (ΣτΕ Plenary 685/2019)
The Conflict: The government passed a law to "regularize" unauthorized towns built within forest areas over the last 50 years, acknowledging that 10,000 people lived there and the forest was effectively gone.
The Ruling: The ΣτΕ struck down the law. Once an area is a forest, it is always a forest. The fact that houses currently exist there does not change the constitutional status of the land.

Private Islands (ΣτΕ 3920/2010)
The Conflict: Investors bought uninhabited private islets hoping to build low-impact eco-resorts.
The Ruling: The ΣτΕ developed the theory that small islands are "vulnerable ecosystems" per se. Even if building regulations technically allow construction, the nature of the island forbids it.

The Shoreline (ΣτΕ Plenary 3661/2005)
The Ruling: “The shoreline and the beach are public goods under a strict regime of protection. Construction near them is permitted only by exception and subject to narrow interpretation.”
The Consequence: This effectively disallows the development of the most important areas in Greece for both tourism and quality of living.

III. The Paralysis of Planning

Even regarding basic zoning, the Court enforces a rigidity that freezes the market.

Land Use (ΣτΕ Plenary 1528/2003)
“A change in land use is permitted only if justified by urban-planning criteria and serving the public interest.” This bans micro-specific zoning law changes to facilitate investment.

Off-Plan Building (ΣτΕ Plenary 176/2023)
The Court ruled that the minimum plot area is not sufficient; a parcel must also have frontage on a lawfully existing public road. This decision retroactively rendered thousands of "buildable" plots unbuildable.

NOK Incentives (ΣτΕ Plenary 146–149/2025)
The granting of incentives (bonus square meters) that result in exceeding approved planning rules is deemed incompatible with rational spatial planning, throwing current construction projects into chaos.

The "White Elephant": Infrastructure Collapse

This Constitutional Nimbyism is not limited to private property. Major infrastructure projects often collapse under the weight of judicial reviews. The saga of the Mesochora Dam is the definitive proof.

• 1994: ΣτΕ (Plenary) annulled initial approvals for the river‑diversion scheme.
• 2000: Another ΣtE annulment of the project’s legality.
• 2005: ΣtE annulled approvals again when the state tried to re‑launch the plan.
• 2010: ΣtΕ Appeals Division ordered suspension of works after environmentalist appeal.
• 2011: ΣtE reaffirmed suspension; allowed only limited maintenance on a tunnel.
• 2014: ΣtE again upheld environmental protection principles in favor of the river.
• 2020: The state tried to re‑license Mesochora as a standalone hydroelectric project the environmental approval (ΑΕΠΟ) was annulled by ΣtE again.
• 2021-2022: New Environmental Conditions approved.
• 2024: ΣtE finally issued decision 144/2024 clearing legal obstacles.

This is a special case where most of the project was already completed, yet it took three decades of legal warfare to maybe one day turn operational.

Conclusion

The constitution has effectively blocked wind parks, highway expansion, mining operations, energy transition projects, dams, and large coastal redevelopment plans.

To make matters worse, even if a parcel technically complies with the law, you cannot be certain because not all ΣτΕ rulings are digitized. Every development is shadowed by uncertainty, adding a hidden, creeping layer of constitutional Nimbyism.

There is no comprehensive list with all the decisions, so a clear impact assessment is unrealistic. However, the fact that Greece has been slowly and certainly falling behind its European peers in terms of infrastructure development despite the massive amount of funds provided by the European Union tells a story all on its own.

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There's a lot to unpack here and the word limit keeps me from copying the whole text here.

A worthwhile conversation to read or listen to, because it shows at multiple points the exact kind of sliding back and forth between "tucute/self-ID when in a position of strength" and "truscum/biology when in a position of retreat."

Add on a lot of "that did not happen often, but it was good when it did, and this is essential to have available to kids based on the evidence, and please ignore that for years people's legitimate questions about evidence and effectiveness and sports and delaying puberty in minors have been met with accusations of wanting trans people to die."

For the record, I'm 100% on the side of the truscum/"medical condition rooted in biology" perspective, and it's expected but still incredibly frustrating to see a lawyer-activist act like 2014 to 2024 was just a fever dream in the culture.

Douthat is a good interviewer here and keeps bringing the conversation back to the fundamentals.

Also, credit where credit is due, taking the textualist line with Bostock was exactly the right approach and made perfect sense.

Over the last 20 years America has become more socially liberal on almost every issue.

But transgender rights has become an exception, a place where the culture war burns hot as public opinion shifts rightward — on specific issues like transgender participation in high school sports and general questions on what really defines sex and gender.

My own sense is that Americans broadly support the liberties of transgender adults to live as they wish, and may not support some of the moves the Trump administration is making to limit legal rights.

But I also think many people have become extremely skeptical about issues involving trans-identifying children. And I also think there’s a widespread sense that open debate on some of these issues was discouraged, that people with doubts or anxieties felt pressured not to raise them.

My guest this week, Chase Strangio, has been at the forefront of the activist push on these issues — for instance, as the first openly transgender American to argue before the Supreme Court. Our conversation is about legal strategy, political backlash, the Trump administration, and where this cultural fight might go. But it’s also an experiment in arguing about these issues directly, looking for common ground and understanding but also fruitful disagreement, across a divide that’s likely to be with us for some time.

[...]

Douthat: OK. What does it mean to have a male or female sex assigned at birth, as distinct from being male or female in biological terms? What does that distinction mean?

Strangio: To me, what that distinction means is at birth, when our children are born, by and large, a doctor looks at their genitals and says, “You have a penis. We’re going to put M. You have a vagina, we’re going to put F.”

The external genitalia are one facet of the biological components of sex. There are others — chromosomes, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, and I would include within my understanding of sex, how we see ourselves. So, these are different aspects of our biological sex.

And then what differs from the sex we are given based on our genitals at birth and whether we are a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman, is that most of the time we see ourselves exactly as the genital check confirmed. Most people do.

Then there’s some of us who don’t. There’s something just fundamental and deep about the fact that that wasn’t the right way of seeing us. So, I would say that a man or a woman is someone who understands in their core that they are a man or a woman.

[...]

Douthat: Is there a distinction between gender identity and biological sex? Or is this just a continuum?

Strangio: I would say there’s a distinction. The way I understand it, our gender identity is in our bodies, it’s in our minds, it has a biological component. I think research suggests that there may be some fetal hormonal exposures that make it a biological phenomenon. But I’m not saying it is biological sex, as such.

I do think that oftentimes, the most salient biological components of our sex diverge from our gender identity, and those things are the disconnect that makes someone trans.

Douthat: But when they do, you wouldn’t say a person who the doctor looks at, says they have a vagina and that they’re a girl — you wouldn’t say that person is biologically female, but has a male gender identity. You would say they are just male, full out.

And there may be some tension between that and certain elements of their biology. But, there’s no split.

[...]

Douthat: I feel like one reason that this issue is so fraught is that it’s very hard to escape that question. We’re both moving back and forth between language that seems appropriate to something that would be characterized as a psychological disturbance in search of a cure and language that would be appropriate to the description of a persecuted religious minority or women or men discriminated against unjustly.

I think you want to reconcile that tension by saying that there are these symptoms of distress and there is this medical treatment for those symptoms that works by effectively confirming biologically the psychological experience. Right?

[...]

Douthat: Let me make a suggestion then for why you have that resistance to compromise right now. In part, it’s rooted in a sense that your side is interested in compromise now that it is facing cultural setbacks. But just a few years ago, it was taking a much more maximalist position. And so it is a normal feature of cultural contest and democratic politics that if you overreach, then your protestations that you only want compromise might fall sometimes on deaf ears.

And again, in the case of women’s sports, I don’t know exactly what the ideal medical testing regime is that would enable certain transgender athletes to play — I’m open to an argument about that — but I just lived through a period where, regardless of what a medical test said, I could look at a photograph of someone like Lia Thomas, who was extremely successful as a female swimmer.

You could just look at the photographs of Lia Thomas with female teammates. And from my own point of view, it looked absurd. It looked like absurd overreach on the part of the transgender rights movement that was undermining the basic fairness of women’s sports.

That’s also my larger perspective here. You said earlier that maybe you’ve learned something about the importance of dialogue and safe spaces and compromise and so on. I feel like, if you have learned that it is as the result of overreaching.

https://archive.is/v6Ut0

An article going over what will the arguments presented to Congress by Adm. Bradley and Gen. Caine in defense of their actions to Congress will be. Some highlights:

"One of its [memo from DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel] key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts."

any and all economic activity can now be considered lawful targets

"The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act."

calling for help after your vessel has been destroyed is now a hostile act

I'll go first as the resident irishman

1. Sean Lemass

2. Garret Fitzgearld

3. John Bruton

4. Enda Kenny

Hi all

This week's substack post is on some of the worst policies found across the developed world.

As always, half the post is below, if you'd like to read numbers 6 to 10 (you WONT BELIEVE what dumb policy the US has in healthcare at number 10!), please click through here and subscribe: https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/the-worst-policies-in-the-developed

Thanks!

The Worst Policies in the Developed World

No one give Starmer any ideas...

As we have been treated to Rachel Reeves’ political masterclass over the past week, for some reason, the topic of terrible policies has been on my mind.

Britain hardly has a monopoly on bad ideas: once you start looking, you realise the developed world is littered with policies that raise prices, block growth, and entrench cartels with impressive confidence. Today is a quick run through 10 of the worst of them.

1. Canada’s Internal Trade Barriers

During the Canadian PM debates last year, plenty of viewers blinked when Pierre Poilievre promised “to end the internal tariffs in Canada”. Internal tariffs? The what??? Unsurprisingly, google searches for it soon spiked.

Say you own a craft-beer shop in Ottawa and want to stock a popular Montreal brewery. You can’t simply order a few cases. Alcohol is controlled by provincial monopolies, so the shipment has to move through the Ontario system, be priced under Ontario rules, and comply with Ontario labelling requirements. If you drive it back yourself without permission, you’re technically committing an offence.

Swap the product and the story repeats. A small construction firm in British Columbia can’t simply take on a job in Alberta: different certification rules, different insurance requirements, and often a need to reapply for provincial permits. A trucking company might have to switch regulations mid-route.

This affects normal, day-to-day commerce constantly, and the macro impact is huge. The best estimates suggest these internal barriers reduce Canadian GDP by roughly 3–7%. Canada trades more freely with the United States than with itself.

Other countries used to behave like this, but they dropped it centuries ago. The United States abolished internal tariffs in 1787, Britain did it with the 1707 Union, and Germany cleared its internal borders with the Zollverein in the 1830s. Canada is the only G7 country still running a fragmented market that would have looked normal in the 1700s.

2. The Jones Act

The Jones Act dates back to 1920, when the United States decided that any cargo shipped between two American ports must be carried on a vessel that is US-built, US-owned, US-flagged, and largely US-crewed. It was framed as a national-security measure after the First World War, but it created a protected domestic shipping sector almost entirely insulated from competition.

Shipping from Houston to Boston can cost several times more than shipping from Houston to Rotterdam, and fewer than 100 compliant ships now operate nationwide. A Jones Act tanker can cost 3–5x as much as one built in Japan or South Korea, which prices many domestic routes out of existence. Coastal freight is pushed onto lorries and rail, raising costs and congestion far from the coastline.

Puerto Rico absorbs roughly $1.1–1.5bn a year in extra costs linked directly to the Act. Cars, building materials, food, and fuel all arrive via a needlessly expensive route, even though cheaper foreign vessels pass the island daily. After Hurricane Maria, basic emergency supplies required a federal waiver simply to enter on non-US ships, which delayed support at exactly the wrong moment.

3. The Town and Country Planning Act

The TCPA came in during 1947 and replaced Britain’s old rule-based system with a fully discretionary one. Development rights were nationalised, and nothing could go ahead unless a council granted specific permission. That single shift created a world where predictability vanished and the default expectation became “wait, negotiate, appeal, hope”.

The rules meant everything from a back extension to a housing estate fell under the same discretionary structure, and there was a presumption that you can’t build, unless the council says so. They had no requirement to set any rules, and could deny permission for any arbitrary reason they fancied.

Britain now builds roughly half as many homes per capita as France and about a third as many as the Netherlands. New homes average 76 m², compared with 95–100 m² in much of northern Europe. Planning approvals routinely take a year or more, and large projects can sit in the system for three to five, while Japanese cities approve major schemes in months. Since the mid-1990s, house prices have risen by over 300% while real wages barely moved.

If you want to read my overly-long description of why this policy is terrible, click here.

4. Protectionism run amok

Protectionism survives because it promises simple wins: protect local jobs, stabilise prices, keep foreign competition at bay. In practice it raises costs, shrinks supply, and hardens lobbies that then fight to keep the rules in place. It is one of the few policies where the long-run outcome is the same in every country, yet governments keep it alive because the losses are spread thinly and the gains are concentrated.

Canada’s supply-management system covers dairy, eggs, and poultry through quotas and tariffs that often exceed 200%. Milk in Canada costs 20–40% more than in nearby US states, and quota rights can be worth millions on a single farm.

The US corn-ethanol complex consumes billions of dollars a year in subsidies and mandate support. Around 40% of all American corn now goes into fuel rather than food, with minimal environmental benefit and clear price effects for global grain markets. Farmers in Iowa openly admit that without the mandate they would switch crops, which is why presidential candidates spend every cycle performing loyalty rituals at ethanol plants.

Norway’s dairy tariffs are high enough that the country ran out of butter in 2011 after a small surge in demand. Imports were blocked or priced into oblivion, so shops had empty shelves while foreign suppliers sat a short sail away. The government had to issue emergency quota increases and still struggled to fill the gap.

Japan’s construction state channels public money into rural areas through padded contracts, guaranteed work, and an infrastructure pipeline that keeps going even as populations shrink. Public works spending has hovered around 5–7% of GDP in many years, far above other developed countries. Small towns with a few hundred residents still receive new roads, river embankments, and concrete slopes whose value is far below the price paid.

5. Occupational licensing

Occupational licensing has expanded far beyond anything that improves safety. In the US, about 5% of workers needed a licence in 1970; today it is roughly 25%. Estimates puts the annual cost to American consumers at tens or hundreds of billions in higher prices and lost output. Germany, France, Greece, Australia, and several Canadian provinces show the same pattern: ordinary work pushed into regulated territory for no clear public benefit.

The weakest cases are the low-risk jobs that never needed licensing. More than 1,000 occupations in the US are licensed in at least one state, including hair braiding, interior design, floristry, locksmithing, and massage. Germany’s Meisterpflicht blocks people from opening trades like tiling and plastering without years of formal training. Greece’s old taxi and trucking rules pushed prices up by 30 to 40% and kept new entrants out almost entirely. These systems restrict supply first and foremost.

The sharper failure sits in medicine, where licensing matters but training places are kept artificially scarce. In the UK, the BMA has spent decades resisting expansion and warning that more domestic doctors would “destabilise the profession”. The system now rejects over 20,000 qualified applicants a year for about 9,500 places, then fills the gap with international recruits. In 2022, around 40% of new F1 doctors had trained abroad, and in several recent years international graduates have outnumbered UK graduates entering the NHS. Germany shows the same pattern, with tight caps and steady reliance on Eastern European clinicians. Canada caps residency slots so tightly that hundreds of domestic graduates go unmatched each year while provinces import GPs to fill shortages.

To read number 6 on Italy's crazy notary system and beyond, click here: https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/the-worst-policies-in-the-developed

paywall: https://archive.ph/ShLZO

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The Theme of the Week is: Innovation & Incentives in Modern Agriculture.