“President Donald Trump said Saturday that he has offered the job of White House press secretary to his friend and UFC boss Dana White, an announcement unconventional even for the norm-busting president. White said Saturday that he plans to meet with Trump on Monday at the White House. … White, who was in London on Saturday for a boxing event, was asked at a news conference about Trump’s post and responded by saying that he planned to fly to Washington right after and meet with Trump on Monday. When asked how he would balance the job with the current positions he has in the fighting world, White seemed confused by the question and then said, ‘Yeah, I got a lot of jobs already.'” (11/08/26)
“One of the best nonfiction books to appear following the onset of the Great Depression was by the financial journalist Garet Garrett (1878–1954). It is called A Bubble That Broke the World (1931), and it was a bestseller. His analysis was exactly right. This was not a crisis of capitalism, he wrote, but of postwar credit expansions and imbalances. The economic downturn represented the coming due of the bill, and a cry for rebalancing production, consumption, savings, and interest rates in the US and all over the industrialized world. If Garrett is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life that it brought about. They were a rare breed, and largely forgotten. Aside from that, there is much more to Garrett than people know.” (11/06/26)
“Numismatic egomania aside, the ballroom and the arch are exercises in grandiosity and vulgarity, monuments to Trump’s fragile ego, excrescences on the face of the nation’s capital city. Shubow professes to defend aesthetic standards—except, apparently, when the patron is Donald Trump. Trump may aspire to be a strongman, but he is no Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, let alone a Hitler or a Stalin. He is an aged lame-duck president who, belying his pretensions to strength, frequently drifts off to sleep in front of television cameras. The new Democratic-controlled Congress should halt the bulldozers and cranes in their tracks and begin restoring what Trump has taken without the public’s consent.” (11/06/26)
“No one needs reminding that populism is fashionable. That might sound good to opponents of elitist authoritarianism, but it is not good. That’s not to say the latter is attractive to liberty-loving individualists who cherish the pursuit of happiness through, among other voluntary institutions, the marketplace. Not a whit. Yale Professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) would agree. Yet the remarkable classical-liberal sociologist insisted that populism would provide no relief whatsoever from government oppression.” (11/06/26)
“Paraguay’s Senate on Friday impeached President Santiago Pena over a banking crisis that left millions of people unable to access their deposits. Senators voted overwhelmingly to remove Pena for misconduct in office. The move cleared the way for Vice President Pedro Alliana to succeed him. He will serve the rest of the presidential term, which ends in August 2028. Pena had already resigned on Thursday, but by impeaching and convicting him instead of accepting his resignation, senators stripped him of the lifetime Senate seat and immunity granted to former presidents, leaving him vulnerable to prosecution. Following the Senate vote, prosecutors ordered the arrest of the ousted president alongside former central bank chief Carlos Carvallo as part of a criminal investigation. Officials later said Pena was placed under house arrest pending a decision by the public prosecutor’s office on the final charges against him.” (11/07/26)
“Norm [Macdonald] was extremely intelligent, even though his comedic approach often entailed playing the ‘dumb guy.’ He was also deeply introspective. He suffered from bowel cancer in his twenties and thought often about death, faith, and the human condition in the postmodern world. He was a devoted reader of great literature, especially Tolstoy. And of course, for over his last eight years, he waged his courageous battle with leukemia without telling anyone outside his immediate family and agent. He was a joke maker who was very familiar with the deeper questions of human life. But like most good comedians, he wasn’t out there to show off his own smarts. His intelligence manifested in his ability to puncture the stupidity around him—usually not by straightforward mocking, but by subversion.” (11/06/26)
