“Sometime this weekend, perhaps late at night, you may have typed a question into the assistant that now lives inside Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It might have been about a loan you cannot cover, or a parent whose health is slipping. Since December 16, 2025, Meta has used those exchanges to choose the posts and ads you see. The company’s own example was gentle: chat with its assistant about hiking, and offers for hiking boots may follow. Reporting at the time found no opt-out short of staying away from the assistant altogether.” (11/09/26)
“Predictably, Donald Trump blamed Thursday’s market tumble on the Democrats, or more accurately, ‘Dumocrats.’ As I’ve written for three decades, deflating a bubble is good news. If stock prices don’t reflect fundamental values, then we should want to see them fall. Otherwise, we are getting a misallocation of resources.” (11/09/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“I hope the Democrats understand what the results of the midterms really mean. They didn’t just win Congress in a landslide. They landed a two-year job interview with the American people, with the presidency in 2028 as the real prize if they do well, a chance to prove in hard policy terms they should be handed the White House. Or they could squander it beating up on the lame-duck President Donald Trump.” (11/09/26)
“Mexican police shot dead a 7-year-old American girl when they opened fire on her family’s vehicle from a helicopter during a drug enforcement operation, the state prosecutor confirmed Friday. Police captured a local criminal in Matamoros, which borders Brownsville, Texas, on October 29, triggering a series of street blockades by gunmen in the area. The Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office said Friday that Aranza, a 7-year-old who was born in the United States, was hit in the head by police gunfire. The girl’s mother told Mexican media she was traveling with five children and her husband in a pickup truck when they noticed a police helicopter was following them. She said the family stopped the vehicle and her husband got out to say they were civilians with children but they were fired at anyway.” (11/09/26)
“With Jonah Goldberg sleeping off his election-night hangover, Dispatch in-house grumbler Kevin Williamson takes the helm for today’s conversation with author Jeanna Smialek. The pair discuss Jeanna’s new book about the novelist and cover economist Maria Edgeworth, digging into political economy, Adam Smith, moral novels, women’s education, Harriet Martineau, early feminism, utilitarianism, value theory, Ireland, Little House on the Prairie, and the Great Potato Famine.” (11/09/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“After the Bourbons were restored to the French throne, Talleyrand is credited with saying they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The family had been driven from power, watched a king lose his head, and spent a quarter century in exile, yet it came back to Paris determined to govern exactly as it had before the deluge. Within fifteen years, the senior Bourbon line was gone again, this time for good. Much the same could be said of the Trump Administration one week after the midterms. … President Trump’s response has been to push out the person rumored to want a change and promote the person most responsible for what voters rejected.” (11/09/26)
