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Election 2024: Prediction and Reasoning The last few weeks (sometimes the last few months) of a presidential election cycle always leave me feeling somewhat burnt out. As a political columnist, I prefer to focus on events, policy, and principles rather than on the horse race. I'm really not very invested in which "major party" politician lies convincingly enough, to enough voters, to get hold of the One Ring and attempt (with little success, thankfully) to rule us all for the next four years. Unfortunately, a political columnist lives and dies...
"I'm going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain," presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says, "so that any American -- every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget anytime they want 24 hours a day." That's a great idea, regardless of whether or not Kennedy is a good candidate or has any chance of getting elected and implementing it. A publicly accessible blockchain -- that is, a distributed ledger protected from alteration by cryptography and viewable by everyone -- would let Americans see exactly how tax...
COVID-19: Never Let Them Re-Impose the "New Normal" I keep hearing that COVID-19 is back -- but of course, it never really left and likely never will. Case numbers and hospitalizations are ticking upward, something we're likely to see as a seasonal phenomenon from here on out. I finally experienced the virus firsthand last week. I rate it zero stars, not recommended. As flu-type illnesses go, it was far from the worst I've lived through, but it wasn't pleasant. I suppose I shouldn't complain. I've been getting off easy. It killed my mother in...
Bank Collapses: Yes, It's a Taxpayer Bailout US president Joe Biden "stresses that Silicon Valley Bank is not getting a bailout," The Hill reported on March 13. "[N]o losses will be borne by the taxpayers," he said of the federal government's decision to cover depositor losses in excess of $250,000. "Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund." But Biden's explanation doesn't support Biden's claim. The bank's customers -- and, by extension, the bank itself -- are definitely getting a bailout....
On February 9, US Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and ten Republican co-sponsors introduced a resolution "expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges [sic] all combatants to reach a peace agreement." When Matt Gaetz is right (which really isn't very often), he's right. If two authoritarian regimes -- and make no mistake, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's gang has proven itself just as violent and authoritarian as Vladimir Putin's -- want to fight, there's not...
"Seditious Conspiracy": Trying to Do Unto Government as Government Does Unto You On January 23, a District of Columbia jury convicted three members of an organization styling itself the "Oath Keepers," and a fourth associate of that group, of "seditious conspiracy" for their roles in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. There doesn't seem to be much to quibble with on the verdict, pursuant to 18 US Code § 2384: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow...
World War Three Isn't Coming. We've Been Living it All Our Lives. If I mention the date February 24, 2022 to you, you'll likely note it as the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Whether that date will remain carved in stone in your memory probably depends on where things go from here, nearly a year later, with the war in what looks like stalemate but all sides continually threatening escalation and promising resolution. Humans tend to latch onto this or that "date which will live in infamy," as FDR dubbed December 7, 1941 -- the day...
On June 6, US president Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act "to accelerate domestic manufacturing of clean energy." That goal sounds laudable and, for those of us who don't own stock in oil or coal companies, probably uncontroversial. But once we start focusing on the details, Biden's order turns out to be just another crony capitalist boondoggle that's more likely to increase prices and slow adoption than the other way around. Let's start with the situation as it is, according to the Department of Energy's press release: "Demand for...
The clamor for "gun control" never goes away in American politics. It occasionally simmers down to a dull roar, but every mass shooting recharges the bullhorn batteries. Thus, in the wake of the recent atrocities in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, a Morning Consult / Politico Poll poll says that 56% of Americans consider it "a top priority" or "an important, but lower priority" for Congress to pass legislation "placing additional restrictions on gun ownership," with only 23% saying that "shouldn't be done." To put it a different way, 56%...
"Failed gun legislation is the norm," reads the headline at Axios, "after mass shootings like Buffalo tragedy." Further down in the story, we read that an October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas "prompted fresh calls from lawmakers on both sides to pass gun control legislation." Also relating to the Buffalo shooting, the Sunbury, Pennsylvania Daily Item reports that it "prompted GOP legislative leaders to call Monday for the reinstatement of New York's death penalty law for murders fueled by racism and hatred." I read a lot of news stories...
Why did Payton Gendron (allegedly, but he live-streamed it, so it's not like there's much doubt) murder ten people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store on May 14? The pat, and at least partially correct, answer, is that Gendron subscribes to something called the "Great Replacement" theory. That's mostly what we hear about in mainstream media descriptions of his 180-page "manifesto": He's a "right-wing" racist who believes that political elites are conspiring to replace him and his fellow "white" Americans with people of color. What most...
At this point in my life, I've been consistently opposed to war for about twice as long as I spent as a Marine infantryman (with precisely the attitude toward war you would expect). The change was incremental and took a few years, but I consider my decision to march in the streets against the 2003 US invasion of Iraq to have been moral, and my decision to march in formation toward participation in the 1991 Gulf War to have been immoral. Every international conflict tests that conviction: Will THIS be the one war that makes me reconsider and...
As the founder and leader of Oath Keepers, an organization allegedly organized to defend the US Constitution, Stewart Rhodes seems like the last guy one might expect to "conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof" (18 U.S. Code ...
"I think one lesson in recent history," US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on January 7, referring to the entry of Russian troops into Kazakhstan to save that country's allied regime from an uprising of dissatisfied serfs, "is that once Russians are in your house, it's sometimes very difficult to get them to leave." That's the pot calling the kettle black. More than 30 years after the Warsaw Pact's dissolution, 77 years after the end of World War Two, the US still keeps 40,000 troops in Germany. For 45 years, the justification was to...
"Congress is gradually moving toward having only one bill per year," former congressman Justin Amash (L-MI) tweeted recently. And that bill will have "everything stuffed into it, negotiated by just a few congressional leaders, completely behind closed doors, with no floor amendments permitted." Amash presumably has the current "infrastructure" bill in mind. Weighing in at more than 2,700 pages and chock-full of stuff only tenuously (if at all) related to infrastructure, it's more of a leadership-negotiated door stop than an honestly debated...
"I'm a small business owner," someone identified as "Andy" writes to syndicated advice columnists J.T. and Dale, "and I can't believe how many people just don't want to work anymore. ... my business is suffering, because I can't get employees." My social media feeds are full of photographs -- who knows if they're real or not? I haven't seen any in my town, but friends say they've seen them elsewhere -- of signs at businesses apologizing for being "short-staffed," with "people just don't want to work" complaints appended. The country seems...
On August 25, two days after the US Food and Drug Administration fully approved the Pfizer-Biontech COVID-19 vaccine, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered "full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces." Cue outrage and objection. Some officers have resigned their commissions; some enlisted personnel seem willing to risk court-martial and dishonorable discharge rather than get vaccinated. Some claim the mandate violates their rights or lacks a legal basis. In the quarter century since my honorable discharge from the US Marine Corps,...
"We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin," US President Joe Biden said on September 9 as he announced his plan to require more than 80 million private sector American workers to consent (sic) to a COVID-19 vaccine, or submit to weekly testing, or be fired by companies with more than 100 employees (those companies will be fined $14,000, by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for each instance of failure to enforce the edict). The ostensible purpose of the mandate is to combat a raging COVID-19 pandemic, but that...
History is littered with social and political movements which, while failing to survive as movements, largely achieved their goals. The Prohibition Party's national conventions could take place in a phone booth these days, but its disastrous single policy proposal was adopted as a constitutional amendment, mutated into the equally disastrous war on drugs, and continues to torment the modern marketplace with draconian regulation. Most "socialist" parties have either disappeared into the dustbin of history, or find themselves reduced to glorified...
We're still hearing a lot about "mask mandates" in COVID-19 era America, but my experiences (and those of acquaintances) over the last few days suggest that the supposed mandates have functionally become mere advisories. In my opinion, that's a good thing. Generally speaking, we're all better off when personal health decisions are left to individuals than when government presumes to make those decisions for everyone. Many Americans began voluntarily donning masks when "public health authorities" were still yelling at us not to, and drastically...
As I write this, the Taliban have assumed full political control -- to the extent that such a thing can exist -- of Afghanistan. They've taken Kabul. They've put the US occupation's puppet president, and many Afghans who served the occupation presence, to flight. They've declared the restoration of their "Islamic Emirate." Despite the sometimes ugly particulars, that's good news for America. A war that should never have happened, and that once it happened should have lasted more like 20 weeks than 20 years, is finally ending. So, let's get...
As the US Centers for Disease Control moves to extend a federal eviction moratorium that (including its original CARES Act version) has now been in place for most of 18 months and that President Joe Biden himself concedes is "not likely to pass constitutional muster," most of the public rhetoric and advocacy boils down to "what about the tenants?" That's understandable. Nobody -- at least nobody who's ever faced the prospect of homelessness and has any heart at all -- wants to see tenants kicked to the curb with nowhere to go, especially...
If you only pay attention to the government and establishment media COVID-19 panic machines, you might not know that the US is experiencing fewer than 1/3 as many new daily cases and hospitalizations as in January and fewer daily deaths than at any time since March of 2020. No, I'm not saying things are great. They aren't. But neither is the situation even close to as dire as is being sold. The "Panic! Everyone Panic! Please, dear God, won't you all PANIC!?!" narrative we're being fed doesn't reflect the real numbers. The near-daily flip-flops...
The 1619 Project "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." Naturally, that reframing has enjoyed quite a bit of pushback, much of which amounts to wrestling over whether the US Constitution, as originally written and ratified, was designed around the goal of protecting the institution of slavery. "Nikole Hannah-Jones and other 1619 acolytes," Dr. Brion McClanahan writes at the Tenth Amendment Center, "have been...
"Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at a White House press briefing on July 15. "They've allowed people who intentionally spread misinformation -- what we call 'disinformation' -- to have extraordinary reach." In follow-up questions, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed that the Biden administration is "flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. ... Facebook needs to move m...
