“Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s exit from politics after nearly 40 years in the game is a stark reminder that too much of our political class is like her: Long-haul careerists who cling to the reins of power — while making bank off their positions. On Thursday, the ex-speaker announced she won’t seek a 20th term …. she’d been pointedly prepping for another run at age 85, defying younger members of her party (including, reportedly, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, 55) who wanted her to let someone born after World War II take over. This reluctance to let a new generation step up is far from rare: Three others in the House are even older than her, and Congress held at least 20 octogenarians as of this past January.” [editor’s note: One more time, “career politician” should only be an epithet, not a lifelong goal – SAT] (11/08/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Rowan Parchi
“A paradox now sits at the center of global finance: the US government, in trying to stabilize its debt markets, has legitimized the very free-market forces that are eroding its monopoly over money. In mid-2025, the United States enacted the GENIUS Act, the first comprehensive legal framework for stablecoins — privately issued, fully backed digital dollars that move instantly across open blockchain networks rather than through the regulated banking system. The law gave official legitimacy to an already booming industry, but its deeper consequence reaches far beyond cryptocurrency. It has turned stablecoin issuers into a new and dependable class of buyers of US government debt.” (11/07/25)
“A progressive firebrand has taken New York’s mayoral race by storm with a campaign driven by the smothering cost of housing. Propelled by a coalition of middle-class liberals and heavily burdened renters, the upstart has terrified the city’s business elite. The year is not 2025, but 1886. The politician is not Zohran Mamdani, the city’s new mayor-elect, but Henry George, a superstar author. George believed he had identified the cause of the wealth and want of the Gilded Age: In the late 19th century, technological progress — symbolized by new networks of rail, telephones and electric power — was paired with new forms of urban destitution. The egalitarian spirit that had transformed America was ebbing. Landlords, George said, guzzling the fruits of progress, left little for anyone else. To fix these ills, George proposed an extraordinary levy on the value of land, taxing its rental value at 100 percent.” (11/07/25)
“There’s a certain kind of film that weighs heavily on America’s collective nostalgia for kinder and gentler times. Yet in the same breath that we yearn for this simplicity, we often can’t help but scoff at it. For most of us, there is a specific film that comes to mind: one that we remember fondly from childhood, or the one we watch each year on the holidays. … The Sound of Music, re-released in 4K to commemorate its 60th anniversary this year, is the quintessential example, precisely because it hits on the extremes. It’s cloyingly saccharine in both style and substance, so much so that critics initially deemed it an emotionally manipulative flop. Yet it proved the test of time, sweeping the Oscars to become one of the highest-grossing movies in history and a staple lesson in both morality and musical education.” (11/07/25)
“A perennial characteristic of Silicon Valley startup companies is that they lose a lot of money, at least at first. That’s what happened to Amazon, Uber, YouTube, etc. But to my knowledge, no tech company has ever burned more cash more quickly than OpenAI. In 2024, it lost about $5 billion; in the first half of 2025, it lost a reported $13.5 billion; and in the last quarter alone, it lost another $12 billion. For artificial intelligence to ever pencil out, some truly enormous revenue streams will be required — $2 trillion by 2030, according to Bain & Company. As the company at the center of the AI boom (along with Nvidia), OpenAI would represent a sizable chunk of that money. … OpenAI is getting ready to run hat in hand to the taxpayer for subsidies, like every great Ayn Randian self-created entrepreneur, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.” (11/07/25)
“We all know that Trump is not telling the truth about inflation. He apparently believes the phony numbers that the various federal agencies and Wall Street ‘geniuses’ are pushing. Yes, gasoline (and even Diesel) prices are down, but not as much as he is telling us and the press. Yes, prices between $2.10 and $2.50 across much of the Heartland and South are good news. But prices on everything else are continuing to go up (and stay high) after the disastrous actions of Uncle Joe’s regime. And The Donald is not doing – and not able – to do very much. Of course, the problem is that we are not only NOT on a real standard – gold or silver, for example. We are far, far beyond the debasing of the coin that Hickman wrote about in the 1400s in England, and that plagued the SPQR (Rome) and hundreds of regimes throughout history.” (11/07/25)
“New York City is expensive. Housing is expensive, often prohibitively so. The city has crime problems. Other problems. Answers: Unshackle the housing market? Slash regulations and taxes? Make it easier to catch and punish bad guys? No. Prevent builders from supplying more and cheaper housing. Further hobble the police. Etc. Pro-Hamas socialist Zohran Mamdani has a slew of such pseudo-solutions. And has a large following.” (11/07/25)
Source: The Peaceful Revolutionist
by David S D’Amato
“Class analysis is unsettling to many Americans because if it is true, then the wealth and political power of elites comes into question; we begin to see the means of extraction, and these means don’t look like the concepts in political and moral philosophy. It is almost like the philosophers were looking for after-the-fact ways to paper over what ruling classes had in fact done. This is why we must insist that the observable facts are more important than philosophical abstractions.” (11/07/25)
“After the terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I watched in disbelief as the world elevated the perpetrators and ignored the victims. Overnight, terrorism became something to excuse rather than condemn. The moral protections we assumed were universal, no longer applied to Jews. Outside my New York City home, protests erupted with vandalism, violence, threats and intimidation. Demonstrators acted with striking confidence, as if a new permission structure had been activated in which boundaries no longer existed. During that time, I helped expose university professor Amin Husain who said that Hamas was not a terrorist group and that reports of Oct. 7 atrocities were ‘not true’. He boasted openly about his reputation as an antisemite and his students laughed. In that moment, it became clear to me that someone was rewiring how a generation perceives morality, conflict and identity, shaping belief, weaponizing language and re-engineering society.” (11/08/25)
“Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City is a triumph of moral barbarism, economic illiteracy, illogic, and just plain envy. Mamdani’s campaign had a double pitch: billionaires should not exist, and ‘the people’ deserve free stuff.” (11/07/25)
