Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on September 30, 1882. Dubbed the Vulcan Street Plant, it was established on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, and was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891.
The candidate wants to increase taxes and government spending, reduce freedom and individual responsibility. The standard Democratic agenda, but foisted bigger and faster.
One announced plan is to scrap mass transit fees.
Taxpayers would then suffer new costs. But so would riders who travel “free.” Greater crowding is one. Another is the kind of people who would be more often riding, no longer discouraged by having to pay fares or having to risk arrest for jumping a turnstile. Riders would be plagued by more bums and more criminals.
Beggars already being a common sight on NYC subways, it’s easy to project that ending financial and physical barriers to entry would only encourage more. Criminals would also be encouraged.
We might consider what happened elsewhere when this has been tried. Kansas City, Boston, Philadelphia — a “scientific socialist” would insist on a thorough study of all those cases, but Mamdani’s merely mentioned Bogotá’s, and is not pushing a study, maybe because he’s seen the mess Albuquerque’s in, after eliminating its one-dollar bus fare in 2023. Buses were soon being used as “rolling homeless shelters.” Local media also reported that they were “being used as getaway vehicles for shoplifters. . . . The addition of security guards on buses has undoubtedly caused criminals to think twice, but it has not solved the problem.”
The author of these words, Paul Gessing, is hoping that recounting Albuquerque’s experience will convince Mamdani to scrap his free-transit proposal. Should Mamdani become mayor, he may eventually be forced do so, but probably only after first making everybody suffer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (trans. Robert Kerr, 1790), Preface, p. xiv.
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
From October 1 to November 9, 2025, Comet 3I/ATLAS (also known as C/2025 N1) will become unobservable from Earth due to solar conjunction — making it too close to the Sun’s glare for ground-based telescopes. Thus it will be unobservable when it reaches its perihelion (point on its trajectory closes to the Sun) on October 29, 2025. It should reappear for observations in early November 2025, though visibility will be limited to equatorial regions initially.
As previously mentioned in these updates, the comet may not even be a comet since it is so weird. And it is so weird that Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has had a field day on newscasts and podcasts speculating on the possibility that the object may be artificial in origin. YouTube is filled with both rational discussion and outrageous hype about this extremely odd interstellar mass, with talk of alien machinery, etc. And is it worth noting that the object will be invisible to us on Halloween day? (See illustration, above, for a chuckle.)
While 3I/ATLAS is in a sense a UFO — we do not yet understand why it is so odd, why it is so different from the previous two interstellar interlopers to our solar system as well as from all other comets, a category it has sort of been shotgunned into by most respectable observers — it is one whose outré status may be falsified in the next few months. If it does not slow down or speed up after its “dark” (eclipsed) period behind the Sun, we can probably determine it’s not “too” outré.
But something interesting is happening right before disappearing: it’s been hit with a coronal mass ejection (CME):
What are the odds? Already the odds of an interstellar object of this size should “do” a flyby of three planets (Mars, Venus & Jupiter) in the plane of the ecliptic boggles the mind. Add all the rest, and now this CME, and what do we get? A riddle orbiting a mystery recolving around an enigma!
This is all not just entertaining science stuff. Understanding objects flying within the orbits of the terrestrial planets has to be regarded as a safety issue for all people on our planet.
It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. . . . If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versa.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement (1776), as quoted in Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 5.
On September 28, 2008, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first private spacecraft to go into orbit around planet Earth.
SpaceX has achieved many records since.
President Trump complained, aloud — that is, on Truth Social, to his Attorney General, Pam Bondi — that there can be no more delays on major cases against Deep State and Democratic corruption. Soon after, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, was indicted on two of three charges, with just days to spare before the statute of limitations kicked in to preclude prosecution. “Comey was charged with one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice,” explains CBS, “related to Senate testimony he gave almost five years ago.”
Meanwhile, the Epstein case appears to be slouching towards disclosure. The O’Keefe Media Group released, on Wednesday, a conversation overheard at an airport that featured an official investigator in the case letting a few cats out of the bag. “Senior Justice Department investigator Glenn Prager revealed Jeffrey Epstein,” Mike Flores summarizes, is “‘CIA’ and confirmed that rapes occurred while Bill Clinton was on the private plane.” That is, the infamous private plane popularly known as the “Lolita Express.”
“I’ve interviewed all the victims, There’s never been an instance where Trump was on a plane with these kids and the rapes occurred. But that can’t be said for Clinton. And it can’t be said for others,” Glenn Prager was overheard saying at a Phoenix airport. “While the Clintons were on the plane, while Bill Clinton was on the plane, there were rapes that occurred.
“They [DOJ] didn’t want to go after him [Epstein] because he’s an asset for the United States and Israel,” he added.
Trump has not been “protecting himself because there’s nothing there,” this Mr. Prager clarified, “but he’s protecting a lot of people.”
The O’Keefe Media Group is the investigative company that James O’Keefe created after his unfriendly ouster from his previous effort, Project Veritas. The conclusion of OMG’s article contains caveats:
When reached for comment by phone Prager simply replied “I can’t talk to you,” before hanging up.
According to a DOJ spokesperson, “This individual [Glenn Prager] worked at the Department of Justice as a program analyst over fifteen years ago. He has no understanding of, or access to, the underlying facts in this investigation. His statements should not be considered accurate. It is disgusting that someone would further exploit victims of sexual abuse by fabricating stories for their personal benefit.”
In April of this year Glenn Prager was announced as Executive Director of Government Risk Solutions for LexisNexis Solutions, a global data and analytics company that provides technology services to the private and public sector.
In a separate article, “DOJ INSIDER: ‘Prince Andrew was on Epstein Island When Rapes Happened’— Claims FBI Kash Patel and DOJ AG Pam Bondi at War over Epstein files,” OMG reveals more of the source’s disclosures.
[F]airly stated, “Say’s law of markets” survives as the most fundamental “economic law” in all economic theory. It enunciates the principle that “demands in general” are “supplies in general” — different aspects of one phenomenon.
W.H. Hutt, A Rehabilitation of Say’s Law (1974), p. 3.
