“On Friday, Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary, Musk, opened nationwide. The film presents Musk as a deeply flawed man whose wealth and power have become dangerous. There is plenty of evidence for the first part of that judgment. But the documentary raises a larger question. How much offensiveness should society tolerate from people who push the technological frontier forward? My answer is quite a lot.” (10/20/26)
“The Nobel prize in economics for 2026 was awarded to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford. According to the Nobel committee, the laureates had developed macroeconomic models that significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilization policies. The committee is of the view that on the basis of these models, well-timed fiscal and monetary policy measures can reduce the economy’s peaks and troughs. The models developed by the laureates are based on the ideas of English economist John Maynard Keynes. In the Keynesian framework, the output that an economy can generate with a given pool of resources i.e. labour, tools and machinery, and a given technology without causing inflation, is labelled as potential output.” (10/20/26)
“In popular rendering, international politics since 1945 has been shaped by the so-called ‘liberal order.’ Led by the United States, a bundle of international institutions, rules, and norms intended to limit interstate competition and facilitate cooperation were widely embraced, contributing (per this narrative) to a peaceful and prosperous world. Today, that system seems to be breaking down, leaving policymakers, pundits, and scholars grappling with what a future order should entail and how this system should be orchestrated. Rivers of ink have already flowed in service of this foundational question. To the mix we can now add Charles Kupchan’s Bringing Order to Anarchy.” (10/20/26)
“On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump declared that the United States was experiencing a ‘national energy emergency.’ The ‘harmful and shortsighted policies of the previous administration,’ he wrote in an executive order, had left the nation’s energy resources ‘far too inadequate,’ a situation that ’causes and makes worse the high energy prices that devastate Americans.’ … Almost two years later, as Trump stares down a midterm election, his claim of an emergency has an ironic ring. The United States is experiencing a kind of energy emergency characterized by high fuel prices, but it is not the one he described when he took office. Not only that, but the executive powers he unlocked with his emergency order have proven useless for mitigating the current crisis and for lowering the high prices he decried upon taking office.” (10/20/26)
“The stock market crash may have started the trouble, but Federal Reserve failures and New Deal interventions transformed a downturn into the Great Depression.” (10/20/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Adam Schwartz
“Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are mass surveillance. They photograph every passing car and log where and when it was captured, building a searchable record of where nearly everyone drives. Cities should not buy them, and cities that already have them should shut them down. Where these systems still operate, courts and state legislatures must reduce their harms by (among other things) requiring police to get a warrant before searching stored ALPR data. A warrant requirement would not make mass surveillance acceptable, but it would require police to justify a search to a judge before accessing records of people’s movements.” (10/19/26)
“With Saturday’s mid-day murder in the tourist-packed 7th Avenue subway station at 53rd Street, the city has now seen seven transit killings since January — almost double the number over the same period last year — and the politicians plainly won’t do what’s needed to seriously reverse the trend. That grim milestone indicts Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his movement’s anti-public-safety policies — as he all but acknowledged Monday with a long, ugly silence before claiming to be ‘heartbroken’ over the death of Darrel Rodriguez and vague noises about addressing gun violence. Progressives have been on a ‘criminal justice reform’ roll for over a decade now — starting with the disastrous ‘success’ of getting city district attorneys to quit prosecuting fare-beating, even though such perps are regularly wanted for more serious offenses.” (10/20/26)
“Are Democrats spending money quixotically and stretching themselves too thin? Is there any chance Democrats can win in places that Donald Trump has consistently won by double digits? Especially in Senate races that could seal control of the upper chamber? Yes, there is a chance. Probable, no. A chance, yes.” (10/20/26)
“The House’s control over its own membership does not put members beyond the reach of the ordinary law. A representative who takes a bribe can be investigated, indicted, and convicted like anyone else, and nothing in Article I stands in the way. A conviction is not among the qualifications and does not by itself cost anyone a seat. What is different about the Omar investigation is its purpose. It is not aimed at punishing a crime but at taking away one of the three constitutional qualifications for the office she already holds, her citizenship. … The House may have ultimate control over its membership, but the attempt to short-circuit that authority by abusing other processes does real damage. The House would keep its power on paper while being dared to assert it, and to assert her privileges as a member in full standing.” (10/19/26)
“[M]aking homelessness invisible generally means forcing people into shelters, or letting the weather do that for you. But solving homelessness? That is more complicated.” (10/19/26)
