“I haven’t written much about Elon Musk these past few years. I’m no expert in rocket science, or in cars of any kind. I tended to think of him as a classic robber-baron type, an American immigrant of excessive energy, pragmatism, and nerve. I watched the video of the flying car the other day and it was as mind-blowing as that now routinely re-captured rocket. But genius and character are not often aligned, and he is becoming, it seems to me, dangerous to our democracy and the world.” (10/23/26)
“During the Cold War, the exclave of West Berlin, isolated in the middle of Communist East Germany, was regarded as one of the most dangerous potential flashpoints for a conflict between the Soviet Union and the West. … It is now common for Western security analysts to describe the ‘Suwalki Gap’ in northeast Poland, situated between Kaliningrad and Russia’s ally Belarus, as the most dangerous point in the growing Russia-NATO confrontation. Yet they carefully omit to recall that it was NATO, not Russia, that made it so.” (10/23/26)
“I know a lot of people, all of whom dated around before finding the person they eventually married. Every single one of them, to a person, knows for certain whether or not the people they dated were related to them. No ambiguity, no open question, no qualifiers on their answer – they knew whether or not they’d been fishing off the family pier. That question, however, gets murky for some… apparently. Where most people could definitively say they’d never picked anyone up at Thanksgiving dinner, many Democrats have to think about it, and some still do not know. Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar, representing Mogadishu, is one such person.” (10/24/26)
“I believe that this lawsuit is abusive in its intentions and borders on frivolous in its arguments, and that it is destined for defeat in the courts should it reach the merits. It borders on frivolous because it attempts to stretch a federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), beyond recognition by snipping language from the law’s preamble and treating it as if it creates vast and open-ended new duties that the federal government can enforce on states. That is not a natural reading of the text, nor is it one that courts have taken. If accepted, it would suddenly federalize many issues of local election administration.” (10/23/26)
“With U.S. President Donald Trump’s approval rating at record lows amid high inflation spiked by an unpopular war, many pundits view the upcoming midterm elections as the only serious emergency brake left for the nation. But even if, as expected, Democrats win substantial victories in the House and possibly the Senate—and if Trump doesn’t follow through on his threats to call it fraud and somehow nullify the vote—the nation may still be heading into a political morass. Rather than rallying around a common direction—other than opposition to Trump—the Democratic Party appears to lack anything like a coherent governing philosophy or compelling leadership.” (10/23/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“If one has any awareness of the Panic of 1837 at all, one has likely been treated to the conventional story, wherein—as usual—the economic crisis and ensuing depression were supposedly caused by a lack of sufficient government regulation. In this case, the blame falls largely on Andrew Jackson and his destruction of the Second Bank of the United States. … the traditional anti-Jackson narrative remains influential in popular accounts of the period. However, an Austrian examination of the crisis raises important questions about the role of government intervention, banking privileges, and the credit expansion that preceded the panic.” (10/23/26)
“‘I am trying to figure out the way to do this’. Those words from MS NOW’s Chris Hayes say all you need to know (and likely all you will get) from his interview on Wednesday with Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. There is a litany of questions the liberal host never asked of Omar. Those questions have only increased over the years, leading to the current criminal investigation into immigration fraud. At points, Hayes sounded more like a supplicant than a journalist given his discomfort with asking pressing questions. The interview had the journalistic nutritional content of a Slurpee that would give any liberal a sugar high and any non-liberal a stomachache.” (10/24/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“There are informal rules for American citizens about living in the U.S. Empire. Mind you, most of them are not codified into law. They are not found in an imperially published citizen’s manual. But American citizens are expected to know these informal rules and abide by them. Violations can result in criminal penalties or, more commonly, social ostracism, accusations of disloyalty and hatred of America, and even charges of sympathizing with terrorists or even being terrorists. In some circumstances, violations of the informal rules can also lead to criminal penalties. One informal rule is that when the Empire initiates a military attack on a small, militarily weak, economically impoverished country, American citizens are expected to cheer for the Empire and support the troops, even though the Empire is the aggressor in the conflict.” (10/23/26)
“Attorneys asked a judge to bar an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter flight from leaving Equatorial Guinea Friday unless their client was onboard in an emergency motion filed shortly after the aircraft landed on the island city of Malabo. An ICE official had told the judge in a sworn statement a day earlier that the flight to Equatorial Guinea had been canceled, a claim the attorneys called ‘plainly false’. Flight data indicates the plane took off two hours and 30 minutes later, before the judge issued a ruling.” (10/23/26)
