“At a campaign rally over the weekend, President Trump dismissed Americans’ concerns over high oil and gas prices, claiming that it’s a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars ‘we’ are making from these higher prices. ‘We’re making a fortune,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.’ People are paying a little bit more for gas, he explained, but it doesn’t matter because ‘we’ are making so much money. The question is, ‘Who is ‘we’?’ We know it is not the American people.” (10/27/26)
“For the last twenty years, politics was our most fascinating news story and the most interesting thing on the Internet. Now, one senses huge portions of the electorate would rather take baths in battery acid than listen to even one more word from a politician. Americans have by now been screwed over so many times that the problem may no longer be that the government doesn’t work. It’s that government doesn’t work, and we can’t shut up about it. Other countries manage to deliver lousy economies and naked corruption without so much talking. Can’t we just be Mexico or Paraguay and have peace and quiet while things mostly go to hell?” (10/27/26)
“In mid-September, the next generation of movement [sic] candidates assembled in Washington, D.C. (where they’re on track to be sworn into Congress next year) to scheme how to most effectively bring working-class politics into the halls of power. The group includes Chris Rabb from Pennsylvania, Melat Kiros from Colorado, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier from New York, Adam Hamawy from New Jersey and Donavan McKinney from Michigan. All were endorsed by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) except for Hamawy, who had the backing of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders [I-VT] and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY]. Each of them won their Democratic primaries this year in heavily blue districts with essential locks to win the general in the November 3 elections.” (10/27/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“Plate readers are scanning more than license plates, prompting calls for limits on how governments and vendors collect and use personal data.” (10/27/26)
“This month, a Trump administration report confirmed Joe Biden’s White House secretly connived to destroy Americans’ financial freedom. Those bureaucrats were upholding hallowed precedents stretching back to the Nixon era, when Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act. That law made it a crime for banks to keep secrets from the government. … This is like a bad horror show that gets repeated at least once a decade. During the Barack Obama administration, the FDIC and the Justice Department launched the original Operation Choke Point, supposedly to ‘choke’ illegal businesses’ access to financial services. But the target list was stretched to include attempts to destroy financial access for porn stars, coin dealers, online tobacco companies, and other targets.” (10/27/26)
“In a rather strange lawsuit — United States v. State of Alaska, filed on October 23 — the US Department of Justice asked a court to block that state’s election authority from certifying an election result that isn’t even known yet and won’t be known until, at the earliest, November 3. Weird enough, but it gets even weirder: DOJ wants certification of the result blocked if, and only if, incumbent US Senator Dan Sullivan loses the election. If he wins? Move along, nothing to see here. The ‘problem,’ DOJ claims, is that voters may be ‘confused’ by the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the aforementioned Daniel S. Sullivan, a Republican, and ‘independent’ Daniel J. Sullivan — in addition to Democrat Mary Peltola and a second Republican, Gerald L. Heikes. In other words, DOJ wants the court to rule that Alaska’s voters are really, really stupid.” (10/27/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us. Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting. But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished. Enter the Doomsday Plan. Imagine it: The power grid goes down. Supply chains collapse. Communications fail. Cities are plunged into darkness. Ordinary Americans are left scrambling for food, water, medicine and shelter. Not to worry, though. The government has a plan for the coming apocalypse.” (10/27/26)
Source: The Hill
by Georgy Egorov & Konstantin Sonin
“Fear of artificial intelligence is spreading fast. In the United States, momentum is building for a regulatory framework that would slow progress at the technological frontier. Leaders of the industry sound partial to slowing down. The problem with this approach is that any effective regulation would create risks of its own. In particular, enforcing an AI slowdown would require an extraordinary expansion of the government’s surveillance and investigative powers. History shows that the risks of such an expansion might outweigh the very real risks of unregulated development.” (10/27/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Israeli kibbutzim range in size up to a thousand inhabitants. The oldest is more than a century old and monasteries, an earlier version of the same model, have lasted much longer. Why do such institutions exist, what problems do they encounter and how do they solve them? There are at least three reasons. The first is ideology, religion for the monasteries, socialism for the kibbutzim.” (10/27/26)
“After crossing with his army into Asia, Alexander the Great stopped at Gordium (in modern-day Turkey). He approached the famous Gordian knot: a tangled mass of bark tying an ox cart to a pole, so intricate and tight that no one could unravel it. When told that anyone who could untie the mess would rule all of Asia, Alexander simply pulled out his sword and cut through it, solving the problem and fulfilling the prophecy. The Ukraine war may be our Gordian knot, but (in our current nuclear age) it is dangerous to cut rather than unravel it. No one knows exactly how many people have been killed in the Ukraine war, which has now lasted four years and eight months — longer than World War II in the Pacific, the American Civil War, or World War I. There is still no end in sight.” (10/27/26)
