November 28, 2025

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DIPLOMACY:

Posted at 12:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

AMITY SHLAES:  Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects.

According to [John Kenneth Galbraith], quoted approvingly as “seminal” [in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929], the worst day of the Great Crash — Tuesday, October 29 — was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”

The stunning story of the market’s plummet, however, also emboldened Galbraith to moot, without seeing any necessity of proving, a second thesis relating to years outside the scope of his title: that the 1930s policy applied by President Roosevelt, the New Deal, somehow made matters better, or could have, had the crash not been so violent.

The 1929 frame likewise enabled Galbraith to establish villains of speculation, and hero rescuers such as President Roosevelt. Roosevelt rated the damage of the national “fever of speculation” as so devastating that, at his inauguration in 1933, he announced that his presidency would begin a new, post-speculation era.

“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” the new president proclaimed. (Yes, FDR, talking like Tucker Carlson, actually said “money changers.”) “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

By titling his book 1929, not 1929-1940, Galbraith skated past the inconvenient truth of the record of the 1930s. The New Deal honored Roosevelt’s anti-market “ancient truths.” Fueled by its own rage against Wall Street and a wrongheaded notion that Main Street would return to prosperity if it took lessons from planning boards, the Roosevelt administration never allowed either to find its footing. The result was that one in ten Americans remained jobless for a full decade. That is a level that today looks worse than inconvenient: It looks incomprehensible.

Galbraith’s primary thesis, that speculation caused the crash, was questionable. The second thesis, that the crash rendered the Depression “Great,” was spectacularly wrong.

One can make like [William F. Buckley], smile indulgently at Galbraith as a man of his time, and move on. But Sorkin is publishing in 2025, after a number of market drops that have not been followed by a depression, including the October 19, 1987, “Black Monday” drop and the Covid drop on March 16, 2020 — both statistically larger than the single-day drops of 1929.

Mark Steyn once wrote that “Lots of other places — from Britain to Australia — took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That’s why in other countries they refer to it as ‘the Depression,’ but only in the U.S. is it ‘Great.’” For those who want to explore why, there’s FDR: A New Political Life, by David T. Beito, which Reason’s James Bovard dubs, “An Antidote to the FDR Cult:”

Rexford Tugwell, Wallace’s no. 2, idolized Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collective farms, declaring in 1934: “Russia has shown that planning is practical….The success and enthusiasm of Sovietism almost guarantees an unlimited rise in Soviet standards of living.” This was after an artificial famine in Ukraine killed millions of peasants who had not surrendered their land. Tugwell also lauded fascism as “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” In 1934, the top Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, hailed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies….The president’s fundamental political course still contains democratic tendencies but is thoroughly infected by a strong national socialism.'”

Roosevelt sought to leave no vote unbought. Priming for the 1936 election, he launched the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which paid more than 4 million people in 1935. The WPA, popularly known as “We Poke Along,” aimed to hire as many people as quickly as possible for labor-intensive projects. The agency quickly gave leaf raking a bad name.

Beito highlights the WPA’s role in constructing concentration camps for Japanese-American detainees, noting that this was “perhaps the most gigantic single ‘WPA project’ of all time.” The agency’s employees built guard towers and spotlights to prevent any escapes, and they helped staff the camps. After World War II ended, the Japanese-American roundup was recognized as one of the greatest civil liberties atrocities of the 20th century. The fact that it took only a few memos to shift legions of WPA workers from leaf raking to concentration camp guards should be a red flag for future mass employment schemes.

In 2007’s Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Many New Deal agencies, the famous “alphabet soup,” were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR’s public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I–era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer.

Presumably it is not necessary to recount how similar all of this was to developments in Nazi Germany. But it is worth noting that for the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms (though Hitler faced severe constraints on rearmament). The Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smaller warships, and over one hundred army planes parked at fifty military airports.

As Jonah concluded, “Perhaps one reason so many people believed the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal’s segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.”

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

GAME OVER? Trump Cracks Down on All Immigration From Third-World Countries –‘You Won’t Be Here for Long’

Trump’s comments bear the hallmarks of the incredibly blunt, candid leader we’ve come to expect. Sarcasm runs throughout, as he begins his message: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.”

What follows, however, is a man who perfectly encapsulates the raw emotions we all feel when an entirely preventable tragedy unfolds before our eyes.

Trump argues that the immigration system is overwhelmed, something that has been obvious for decades. He contends that the system reached a breaking point under the previous administration when the country was run by a shadow team wielding an autopen as if a sword to the neck of the American people. And he points out that they, the American people, have put up with this for far too long.

Trump suggests that he would now speak for the people, pointing out that he is not the type to hold back.

Alternate headline: Trump Signs New Full Employment Act for Hawaiian Judges.

Further thoughts on that topic, from John Hinderaker of Power Line: Trump On Immigration: Can He Do It?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Keith Richards Having His Blood Changed to Quit Heroin.

The New Hotness? Simon Cowell is now washing his own blood to ‘age backwards’. What’s so wrong with getting old?

Space X titan Elon Musk is a major investor in the sector. His Amazon arch rival, Jeff Bezos, wants to beat him to the holy grail. Tech magnate Bryan Johnson is a living experiment, and treats his body like a laboratory.
And now we learn that our very own music mogul, Simon Cowell, has joined the bonkers “Midlife Crisis Collective” of men striving to solve the “problem” of – whisper it – ageing.

Yes, the 66-year-old who gave the world The X Factor and One Direction is now setting his sights on if not eternal youth, then its next best equivalent: tinkering with his body fluids to turn back time.

Forget fillers and Botox – if you want to stay young, according to the “Age-Dodgers Alliance”, you have to start from the inside. In a new tabloid interview, Cowell cheerfully admits the lengths he goes to.

“I go to this place, this wellness clinic, where they actually take your blood, they rinse it, they filter it and then they put it back into your body,” he said.

“You do all these tests, and they tell you your age – so I’ve actually aged backwards by eating better, more exercise, less stress, certain supplements.”

I think by “rinsing”, he most probably means therapeutic plasma exchange, a technique employed in longevity clinics in which harmful substances, such as toxins, are removed.

No word yet if Cowell was helping fight the War on Terror in the early 2000s (language alert, not surprisingly):

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

RIP: Robert A.M. Stern, noted American architect, dies at 86.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, Stern founded the Robert A. M. Stern Architects firm, now known as RAMSA, in 1969. He gained acclaim for his decades of work and style, which blended postmodernism with contextual design, drawing inspiration from historic and traditional styles.

He was widely known for 15 Central Park West, a luxury condominium featuring a recognizable limestone exterior in Manhattan bordering Central Park. The building opened in 2008 and has attracted prominent, wealthy and famous tenants.

Stern’s works also include the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Florida.

His heavily-illustrated books on New York City architecture over the decades are a treasure-trove of images and history of many lost worlds. To study the sleek Mad Men-era New York 1960 and compare it to how the city would begin collapsing under Mayor Lindsay just six years later is like looking at images of Pompeii just before the volcano erupted. It’s a good thing that sort of crisis of governing competence can’t happen to the city again…

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

KURT SCHLICHTER: Seditionist Blue Falcon Democrats Stunned to Be Held Accountable for Their Behavior. “The problem with getting a free pass on your responsibilities is that, after a while, you begin to think that you don’t have any. That’s what’s happened to the Democrats. They’ve gotten so used to thinking the rules don’t apply to them because ORANGE MAN BAD that when the rules do get applied to them, it feels like outrageous oppression. Take the ‘illegal orders’ video, a combination of stupidity, narcissism, treachery, and blue falconry rarely equaled even by the low standards of the Dems. . . . I would normally let it be handled in the political arena. But these aren’t normal times, thanks largely to Captain Mark Kelly et al. I have to fall back on the threshold question – what’s the rule? The new rule, supported by all six of these people, is to use the legal system to target political opponents. Would they give Trump or any of his folks a pass? We know the answer because they not only did not do so, but actively invented crimes to harass them. Well, there can only be one rule. I didn’t want this to be the rule, but they overruled us. So they can choke on their new rule. . . . But that is a political analysis, not a legal analysis. Let me provide one; you can weigh my credentials as a retired colonel with command experience and a lawyer with 30+years of experience. This investigation is not frivolous because a potential charge lies here. This is not, like the ‘crimes’ of Donald Trump, a frame job manufactured out of whole cloth. . . .The problem for Captain Kelly is that it’s clear to all but the willfully obtuse that his stupid video was a transparent attempt to undermine President Trump, our elected commander-in-chief.”

Flashback: New York Times: Nancy Pelosi calls for military coup.

Posted at 7:04 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM C. CHANCY:  Pearl of Fire.

Pearl of Fire

Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt