“No adult should go by an ‘ie’ or ‘y’ variation of their name – Billy, Timmy, etc. Once puberty hits, any man with self-respect prefers to drop it to sound less like a buddy and more like an adult. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan doesn’t care. While it’s not ‘Donny,’ and maybe it is Donie on his birth certificate, it doesn’t matter – you come off like a douche with the ‘y’ sounds on a name that could easily be shortened to ‘Don.’ Donie, the porky Irishman CNN employs to cut their anti-Americanism with an accent, had a special Sunday night called ‘Misinformation: Extreme America’ that was supposed to be about political extremism. It devolved into what seemed like an attempt to get him laid at the next These Lives Matter or Occupy Someplace mutant march/riots on the left.” (04/15/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Javier Fernández-Lasquetty & Daphne Posadas
“Today we learned the sad news that one of liberty’s greatest champions in the Hispanic world has passed away at the age of 89. Mario Vargas Llosa was not only a Nobel Laureate in Literature and recipient of the Premio Príncipe de Asturias, but also a distinguished member of the Real Academia Española. In 2021, he became one of the celebrated ‘immortals’ of the Académie Française (an extraordinary recognition for a Spanish-speaking writer). In addition to his literary legacy, Vargas Llosa was also a founding member of the Fundación Internacional para la Libertad (FIL) and an active member of the Mont Pelerin Society, firmly grounding his voice in the international classical liberal tradition.” (04/14/25)
“In 2021 I wrote a piece for Quillette arguing that the decline of American power in the world could usefully be analysed in terms of the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle, the process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and the dawning knowledge of imminent demise. The five stages are famously Denial, Anger, Negotiation, Depression, and Acceptance. I concluded four years ago that the United States was still in the Anger stage, something that the re-election of Donald Trump has since underlined, Yet since his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs announcements, America has now moved on from Anger into the Negotiation stage of the Cycle. As with terminal illness and bereavement, it is not a good a place to be.” (04/14/25)
“If Trump’s apparent incoherence is not driven by love, is there some grand plan hidden behind it? Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh argued that there is none: it is irrationality pure and simple. … The problem with this sort of hypothesis, although tempting in this case, is that it can explain everything and its contrary. It is safer—and more natural for an economist—to start with a rational choice framework, even if some qualifications are necessary. Like any individual in the ordinary course of life, Mr. Trump’s first goal is to further his own interest.” (04/14/25)
“When I was 15, I worked at the local McDonald’s in Stittsville, Ontario. It was my second-ever job after under-the-table dishwashing at a Cajun joint and I was excited to see how the mince was made in an iconic restaurant chain. Reality was we had a few laughs — like the time my buddy put pot in the muffin mix — but the job itself was long, hard, badly paid and meant you had to simultaneously deal with an indifferent owner and customers who were surprisingly demanding for a drunk buying a $4 burger at midnight. One day I was asked to rummage through the trash to find a customer’s glasses. … I quit and started working as a grocery store cashier instead, where I stayed for about seven years. Same demanding customers, but sufficiently less greasy to count as a vertical move.” (04/15/25)
“It is abundantly clear that President Donald Trump likes to put people of questionable intelligence and expertise in charge (as demonstrated recently by the Signal chat leak), in part because of the loyalty they appear to demonstrate. A leader like Trump can take a worse step still and choose to actually listen to such people – unfortunately their advice is either a product of some fantasy world or tailored to please the ears of the president. … We can now think of our country as an individual that does not listen to the experts, but only to the fringe – by doing so we can appreciate that Trump’s reliance on people like [Peter] Navarro only increases the likelihood of catastrophe.” (04/14/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will longer want to come here. After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like the United States, North Korea militarized and sealed its southern border, established a police state, and isolated itself from the rest of the world. Today, no one is striving to get into North Korea because the government has made the country so ugly. Many foreigners are cancelling vacation plans in the United States. Others are selling American vacation homes. They are wise to do so. Otherwise, they could suddenly find themselves on a U.S. military transport plane carting them to the maximum-security, anti-terrorist torture and brutality camp in El Salvador.” (04/14/25)
“In his acceptance speech for the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on April 13 at the age of 89, noted that he learned from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that ‘words are acts’ — that writing about the politics of the present and the opportunities to shift direction can, in Vargas Llosa’s words, ‘change the course of history.’ Vargas Llosa’s literature, fueled by a passionate commitment to individual liberty, aimed to do just that. The author of more than 50 books over a span of six decades, Vargas Llosa was a household name in Latin America. He will be remembered as a staunch defender of liberalism and the free market — indeed, that may be his enduring mark on history — yet in his youth he was animated by leftist ideology, discovering then what he called his first ‘utopian illusion’: communism.” (04/14/25)
“Trump’s tariff mayhem has crashed stock markets across the globe. His loyalists are searching for silver linings in these dark clouds, without success. But if you value insight for its own sake, there is indeed a silver lining to be found. While few Americans will profit from this demagogic nonsense, this is a fine opportunity to learn deep lessons about not just trade, but economic policy in general. … Doing nothing would have been far better than doing what he did. Contrary to the famed Dr. Pangloss, all is not ‘for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.’ Once you accept this anti-Panglossian point, however, you ought to wonder: Are there any pre-2025 policies that have already done damage on the scale that Trump is now inflicting on the global economy?” (04/14/25)
“Techno-futurists commonly believe that a totally human-made future will advance individual liberty. Bruno Maçães is doubtful, arguing in World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics that the future will more likely see us living inside a metaverse crafted by one of the superpowers. He foresees AI delivering ‘a radical increase in the centrality of sovereign power’ and believes the goal of today’s geopolitics is a hegemonic second genesis where all reside in an artificial cosmos that will be either American or Chinese. This is not fairyland stuff, argues Maçães, for recent events show that the great powers are trying to scale up the smart city. In the imperialism of the future, a superpower aspires to be ‘a global system administrator.'” (04/14/25)
