“Two years ago, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers stood in a grocery store for an advertisement blaming Joe Biden for the price of eggs (without mentioning the bird flu that was jacking prices). This week he’s back in nearly the same folksy jacket telling voters that it’s time for Trump to end his illegal war against Iran so gas prices can come down. Rogers new ad leaves out, of course, the fact that he’d cheered for the war on the day it began in February, claiming Iran was an imminent threat to the United States (it wasn’t and isn’t), and hit multiple rightwing podcasts and media opportunities to demand Americans unite behind Trump in prosecuting the war.” (09/28/26)
‘The global trillionaire count returned to zero not long after SpaceX’s IPO. Market fluctuations show the danger of imposing cash tax bills on stock-price wealth.” (09/28/26)
“People in a president’s party might be satisfied, complacent, a little disappointed, or deeply disillusioned, but they are rarely pumped up and energized, thinking, ‘I can’t wait to go vote.’ Conversely, people in the opposition party, particularly in this era of hyperpartisanship, hate anything the president is doing. They hate everything he might even think about doing. Everything. They want to relitigate the last election. They can’t wait to vote. And then you’ve got this little slice of pure independents, and I’m not talking about the 45 percent of all adults or the third of all registered voters who claim to be independents but consistently lean toward and vote for one party. I’m talking about the three to six percent who don’t lean toward either party and are legitimate independents. They tend to be very fickle.” (09/28/26)
‘A Canadian shop mailed me the hard-to-find part to save my wife’s old blender. How do prices help strangers cooperate on a scale no one can engineer?” (09/28/26)
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Lucio Saverio Eastman
“In-group or out-group. Clean or unclean. With us or against us. The post-pandemic world seems dominated by themes of a society corrupted by political hatreds, born of hostile emotions constantly on the hunt for targets. Remember the masked and the unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the essential workers and the nonessential? This wasn’t just a national issue. It burrowed deep into our personal lives and into our own hometowns.” (09/28/26)
“Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants New Yorkers to think he got DoorDash, one of the country’s biggest food delivery companies, to pay a huge $131.5 million settlement to its workers at his command. ’DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back,’ he boasted last week. Headlines aside, that’s hardly the full story. Yes, DoorDash made a mistake. The company admitted that $6.6 million in payments never reached NYC Dashers, and that a further $5.7 million arrived late. That’s unacceptable: Gig-delivery workers deserve their earned wages, and the administration was right to ask for compensation and corrections. Yet that doesn’t mean $131.5 million was stolen from workers by a greedy delivery company, as Mamdani suggested Tuesday in a press conference complete with a giant prop check.” (09/28/26)
“Western countries, including the US, will have to make a choice. … One can spend endless hours dissecting October 7th, a fake genocide claim, Hamas, the Palestinians, etc. Or one can make the topic a very simple choice. The West can once again get rid of its Jews, or it can value their role in society and send away those who are fanning the flames against them. One does not have to like Jews. He can list reasons, real or imagined, why he doesn’t like Jewish people. They have all of the money! They control everything! They are rude! Our religion teaches us to hate them! It doesn’t matter. All of us may have affinities or the opposite towards various groups, and far from this being ‘racism’, it is called being normal. If a person acts on these feelings, then his behavior might enter the world of racism.” (09/28/26)
“The tone shifts from one administration to the next. The premise never does. Every president treats European defense budgets as figures for Washington to set, audit, and enforce. That premise collapses on its own terms. Europe’s security belongs to Europeans. The continent commands an economy many times larger than Russia’s and fields two nuclear powers of its own. If Poland wants to pour 5% of its GDP into its army, Warsaw should make that call. If Spain values its welfare state more, Madrid should make that call. … As long as Washington sits at the head of the table, NATO serves as a vehicle for schemes hatched in the Pentagon, in think tanks, and among the oligarchs and defense contractors who profit from every new benchmark.” (09/28/26)
