“Numismatic egomania aside, the ballroom and the arch are exercises in grandiosity and vulgarity, monuments to Trump’s fragile ego, excrescences on the face of the nation’s capital city. Shubow professes to defend aesthetic standards—except, apparently, when the patron is Donald Trump. Trump may aspire to be a strongman, but he is no Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, let alone a Hitler or a Stalin. He is an aged lame-duck president who, belying his pretensions to strength, frequently drifts off to sleep in front of television cameras. The new Democratic-controlled Congress should halt the bulldozers and cranes in their tracks and begin restoring what Trump has taken without the public’s consent.” (11/06/26)
“No one needs reminding that populism is fashionable. That might sound good to opponents of elitist authoritarianism, but it is not good. That’s not to say the latter is attractive to liberty-loving individualists who cherish the pursuit of happiness through, among other voluntary institutions, the marketplace. Not a whit. Yale Professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) would agree. Yet the remarkable classical-liberal sociologist insisted that populism would provide no relief whatsoever from government oppression.” (11/06/26)
“Norm [Macdonald] was extremely intelligent, even though his comedic approach often entailed playing the ‘dumb guy.’ He was also deeply introspective. He suffered from bowel cancer in his twenties and thought often about death, faith, and the human condition in the postmodern world. He was a devoted reader of great literature, especially Tolstoy. And of course, for over his last eight years, he waged his courageous battle with leukemia without telling anyone outside his immediate family and agent. He was a joke maker who was very familiar with the deeper questions of human life. But like most good comedians, he wasn’t out there to show off his own smarts. His intelligence manifested in his ability to puncture the stupidity around him—usually not by straightforward mocking, but by subversion.” (11/06/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“On October 28, 69 people were killed in a train crash in the Toledo province of central Spain. The collision occurred on the high-speed line connecting Madrid with the southwestern city of Seville, just one month before a general election on November 29. It is the second disaster on the Madrid–Seville corridor this year, after a crash near Córdoba in the south in January killed 46 people. Due to its timing, the Toledo collision is likely to be even more politically contentious than the last, further diminishing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s chances of reelection. Both tragedies suggest that a once cutting-edge rail network is now showing its age—and that successive Spanish governments have failed to invest in its maintenance.” (11/06/26)
“The day after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a video that encapsulated the left electoral movement he helped bring to life. Set to David Bowie’s iconic song ’Starman’, the video shows Sanders clasping hands with many of the candidates he endorsed this cycle. Not only did Sens.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), James Talarico (D-TX), Troy Jackson (D-ME) and Peggy Flanagan (D-MN) (along with more than 50 U.S. House and down-ballot victors backed by Sanders) win their races, they were instrumental in delivering Democrats’ sweeping tidal wave in this year’s midterms. Far more than just a flex, the video served as a reminder of how deeply Sanders — the iconoclast democratic socialist leader — has transformed U.S. politics over the past decade.” (11/06/26)
“The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies, financed through public stock markets, and traded like any other holding, and the firm that has carried the process furthest spent most of its life making radios for freight trains.” (11/06/26)
“Two tribes, one reflex. When we are frightened, the person who chooses differently stops being a neighbor and becomes the threat. Every uniparty election campaign in America is built to harvest it. Politics learned the curfew lesson long ago. Fear travels faster than facts, and every cycle brings a new creature under the bed with a party beside it holding a flashlight and a donation link.” (11/05/26)
“The ultimate testament to [Patrick] Stewart’s acting skill is that he made it hard not to suspend disbelief, one hour at a time, in what [Ryan] Zickgraf calls ‘authority with authoritarianism apparently filtered out.’ In the real world, we have what we need to exclude authoritarians from getting in the way of getting things done.” (11/05/26)
