“People want to understand how the Columbine shooters, or Adam Lanza of Sandy Hook, or Payton Gendron of Buffalo—who murdered 10 black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022—could do something so terrible to their fellow human beings. We seek and we find unsatisfactory answers. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were goths, were Mansonites, were bullied at school. Adam Lanza was autistic and had OCD. Or, in Payton Gendron’s case, we get the least helpful answer of all: He was ‘radicalized online.'” (11/09/26)
“Many complaints about immigration are really byproducts of state interventions elsewhere in the economy, preventing markets from responding to new arrivals.” (11/09/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Hope Schumaker
“For all its novelty, the technology industry is not immune to the laws of economics. The principles of competition and the rules of supply and demand still apply, even to the most cutting-edge devices. Efforts to manipulate the market through bureaucratic regulation threaten to stifle both innovation from businesses and the consumer experience. Recent developments in the world of broadband internet offer a case study in the power of competition. Internet access is becoming more affordable because competition between different methods of home internet services are driving down prices.” (11/09/26)
“When Donald Trump made the stunning announcement that Stephen Miller is his new chief of staff–preempting the New York Times by a few minutes–I literally said: ‘”Watch for a barrage of negative Miller stories in the next couple of days.’ I was wrong. It was the next couple of hours. MS NOW anchor Katy Tur said: ‘Donald Trump’s whole immigration agenda is Stephen Miller, and for Stephen Miller, it has always been absolutist: do whatever is necessary, as much as we can possibly do, be as cruel as possible as a warning sign for anybody who might want to come over.’ ‘Stephen Miller, one of his most notorious staffers, will instead be taking over as chief of staff,’ CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins … called him a domestic terrorist.'” [editor’s note: “Domestic terrorist” is about the gentlest accurate descriptor I’ve heard – TLK] (11/09/26)
“Ten weeks ago, Donald Trump called Marjorie Taylor Greene, his former ally and a former Georgia Republican congresswoman, a ‘LOSER.’ Greene shot back that Trump was a ‘neocon puppet for Israel.’ Both of them do this a lot these days. Last week, it was Republicans who were big losers in the midterm elections. The president might have been the biggest loser of them all. Greene knew why.” (11/09/26)
“The 2014 Australian psychological horror movie ‘The Babadook’ is generally well known for a handful of things. … Mostly, however, it is known as the source of a once-ubiquitous internet meme. Long story short: ‘The main character of the film is a mother of a young boy with social difficulties who believes The Babadook, a character from a terrifying children’s book they read together, is real.’ In one particularly distressing scene, the mother (Amelia) is exasperated, driving her son (Samuel), who is screaming and generally freaking out in the back seat. Amelia, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, turns to Samuel and yells, ‘Why can’t you just be normal?!’ at which point he starts to scream louder and more violently.” (11/09/26)
“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)
