Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of colossally failed cryptocurrency platform FTX, is just the latest swindler to parlay grandiose aspirations into a scam that goes down in flames and takes other people’s money with it. Bankman-Fried (who goes by “SBF”) set records in that department; he is said to have lost up to $51 billion. SBF claimed to be a devotee of “effective altruism,” a philosophy that argues in favor of becoming “filthy rich” so that one can then “give it all away.”

In case you missed it, fashion house Balenciaga created a furor last week with its ad campaign featuring toddler girls holding teddy bears sporting BDSM (bondage and sadomasochism) outfits. Lest you think the kiddie porn reference was somehow a misunderstanding or a one-off, yet another photograph in a separate ad campaign featured a page from the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Williams, a case involving -- you guessed it -- child pornography, discreetly peeping out from underneath a Balenciaga bag. How very edgy. The statement Balenciaga finally issued reveals much. Although the company took responsibility and stated they “strongly condemn child abuse,” the statement also admits “grievous errors” and a “wrong choice” in “assessing and validating images.”

The week before Thanksgiving, another evil mass shooter unleashed horror at a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing five and wounding another 25. The shooter -- whose name I refuse to mention in order to disincentivize future shooters who seek notoriety -- was clearly mentally ill: Just last year, the shooter reportedly threatened his mother with a bomb, resulting in his arrest.

What would you think of a person who never asked the price of anything he or she bought? You would assume the person was inordinately wealthy. But if the person wasn’t, you would dismiss him as a fool, and you would certainly never ask this person for advice about how to spend your money.

One of the worst aspects of an everenlarging government is that it begins to take on an outsized importance in our daily lives. The political parties and people who control them become more important than they should be. Disagreements over those policies become more frequent and fraught with tension and consequence than they otherwise would be. And those disagreements spill over into our relationships with colleagues, co-workers, friends and family members, poisoning them sometimes permanently. All the above (not to mention the fact that government does so many things poorly and at exorbitant and wasteful expense) are powerful arguments for reducing the size of government. But even in the midst of heated exchanges over the direction of our country, there is much to be thankful for.

Some people might think sitting high up in the end zone of a college football stadium is not a good place to watch a game. They would be wrong.

My beloved 96-year-old father is an elder statesman of his beloved Lampasas. We as a family agree that it is his right to be allowed to live as independently as possible, so he does things all over town, and the town takes good care of him: the girls at First State Bank, the ladies at the utilities office, the people at Ace Hardware, the guys at Auto Zone and O’Reilly’s, the people at Wal-Mart, and the wonderful folks at his beloved H-E-B.

Last week, The New York Times published a column by a left-wing academic (forgive the redundancy), John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. In his first sentence, Mr. Della Volpe reveals his politics. He described young Americans as “stressed and sickened by thoughts of their rights and democracy slipping away.”

In a recent Fireside Chat -- my weekly podcast for PragerU, half of which is dedicated to my taking questions from (mostly) young people around the world -- a man in his 20s asked how he was supposed to figure out who is telling the truth and who isn’t. He undoubtedly was speaking for millions of his peers.

President Joe Biden’s $400 billion 2022 election bribe -- also known as student loan forgiveness -- has been now stopped in its tracks on two fronts. First, in Texas, federal district court Judge Mark Pittman – one of nearly 300 federal judges appointed by former President Donald Trump – ruled the initiative unconstitutional.