“It’s understandable that Trump’s team likes to pretend that his random ramblings and angry acts of revenge are all part of some grand strategy, but why would anyone not on his payroll play along with this obvious absurdity? To anyone paying attention, it should be pretty clear that Donald Trump is clueless about the economy. Just to take an obvious example to make the point: Trump has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices by 800, 900, or even 1,500%. As he rightly says, no one thought it was possible. It wouldn’t be a big deal that he got confused once or twice and forgot that you can’t lower prices by more than 100%, unless you envision drug companies paying people to use their drugs. But Trump has done this repeatedly, over many months.” (10/28/25)
“Economists have an old habit of assuming that people are strictly selfish and rational, maximizing their ‘utility.’ In theory, everyone is ‘Max U,’ as Deirdre McCloskey mockingly puts it. The assumption can be useful — people often do act selfishly, and belief in market efficiency sometimes clarifies moral choices — but it is false as a generalization. Virtue and capitalism need each other, and have long quietly collaborated to improve the human condition. That truth is kept quiet, ironically, by economists themselves. They understand capitalism better than most, and generally defend it, but Max U is a moral blind spot that causes them to underrate capitalism ethically, and teach others to do so. With friends like these, capitalism hardly needs enemies.” (10/28/25)
“The death toll from the president’s murder spree has now risen to 57 with the latest attacks …. The illegal attacks are coming faster now as the spree approaches the end of its second month. First there were a few strikes spread out over weeks, and now there are several attacks each week and sometimes multiple strikes in one day. There have now been at least thirteen U.S. military strikes on civilians at sea. The administration shows no sign of slowing the pace of the senseless killing.” (10/28/25)
“In early September 2025, United States immigration authorities carried out the largest workplace enforcement action in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. At a Hyundai–LG electric vehicle battery plant in Savannah, Georgia, agents detained nearly 500 workers. More than 300 were South Korean nationals employed by subcontractors or on temporary business visas. Images of handcuffed workers being led to buses circulated widely, prompting Seoul to dispatch diplomats and announce a charter plane to bring its citizens home. … For Washington, the operation was presented as the routine application of immigration law. For Seoul, it was a national crisis that required emergency diplomacy.” (10/28/25)
“‘Pastor, have you ever read Thomas Sowell on this high school?’ Elaine asked me as we stood outside Paul Laurence Dunbar High School — or Dunbar, for short — in Northwest Washington, D.C. I told her that was why I made a point of making Dunbar a stop on my Walk Across America to revive merit and the American Dream. I had asked her, a mother of two kids in the school, what it was like, and her verdict was sadly negative. ‘Sowell said Dunbar was an example of excellence back in the day. What happened?’ From 1870 to 1955, this all-Black public school drew ambitious families from across the country — parents relocating just to enroll their kids for the best shot at life. Sowell described these families as ‘aspirational,’ meaning they sought to overcome any obstacles.” (10/28/25)
“Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration has launched a blitzkrieg against Americans’ free speech rights. The scale and speed are dizzying — and they jeopardize the United States’[s] credibility as the world’s leading defender of free expression as other democracies continue to falter. … the Trump administration’s deliberate and focused attacks on free expression don’t just impact America, they reverberate globally. Across the democratic world, a free speech recession continues to worsen. Rather than defend this foundational human right at home and abroad, the U.S. government is abdicating that responsibility and undermining the legitimacy of free speech in an increasingly illiberal and authoritarian world.” (10/28/25)
“Power has been centralizing in the U.S. for its entire history, to the point we have reached today where a president has seemingly breached all limits, as exhibited by the East Wing demolition in violation of law and custom. What is going to pull us back from this?” (10/28/25)
“Defense officials consistently tout the Replicator initiative — an ambitious effort to ‘swarm’ thousands of attritable, inexpensive drones at a break-neck pace to counter China — as a great success. … Despite officials’ assertions, the Congressional Research Service points out that only ‘hundreds’ rather than ‘thousands’ of these systems materialized by the August 2025 target date. Not only that but critical technical issues procuring the systems persist, and associated costs remain unclear.” (10/28/25)
“Prior to 9-11 the US fought proxy wars and launched coups throughout Latin America, supporting autocratic regimes. In Indonesia it helped kill about a million leftists. During the Vietnam War, it killed several million. Since just 9-11 the US invaded or bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Serbia, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, and Niger. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, US wars since 9-11 killed 4.5 million people and cost over $8 trillion. The US aided war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. The US has occupied one-third of Syria, the parts with oil, since about 2015, with help from a proxy army, the SDF. The US allied with al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups in Syria, as reported here, here, and here. It killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians through brutal sanctions. The Trump administration is now bombing Venezuelan boats and is preparing for a land invasion.” (10/28/25)
“‘It’s a landslide victory compared to expectations,’ Lizzy Burden announced for Bloomberg Television, going on to report that U.S. President Donald Trump has taken some of the credit for the successes, Sunday, of President Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances). On Truth Social, Trump wrote ‘BIG WIN in Argentina for Javier Milei … He’s making us all look good.’ But how does this redound to Trump’s, er, biglyness? Well, Trump provided a bailout.” (10/28/25)
