China today holds as many as a million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in “political education” camps. Across China, Xi Jinping is pioneering a technological despotism of ubiquitous cameras, facial-recognition software and mass surveillance. In Vietnam, Belarus, Egypt and elsewhere, resilient tyrants rule through police monitoring, ethnic division and brute coercion. Burma’s liberalization ended in renewed military supremacy and the bloody expulsion of some 730,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh. In its 2019 report, Freedom House notes that last year, more countries became more oppressive than more free — the 13th consecutive year of more decline than progress.

In the first presidential election after the full recovery from the subprime mortgage crisis, which was largely caused by legislation promoting “affordable housing,” presidential hopeful Senator Cory Booker (Spartacus) has released his plan for achieving affordable housing. Thomas Sowell clarifies this way of thinking in his book “The Housing Boom and Bust,” where he explains how the market learns from these mistakes and adjusts with remarkable speed, but “the question is whether politicians and government bureaucrats learn, especially when they pay no price for being wrong, and are able to deflect blame toward the market with denunciations of ‘greed,’ ‘Wall Street’ or whatever other convenient scapegoats are available.”

Wildfires are starting to light up California and other parts of the West again. Vegetation from a very wet winter is drying out. And so the chief of the U.S. Forest Service is warning of another catastrophic fire season. And she's pushing to change how the country gets ready for and fights wildfires. NPR's Kirk Siegler has the story.