Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 53
"If [Donald] Trump and [Bernie] Sanders take the same position on Big Tech censorship," David Catron writes at The American Spectator, "the issue deserves serious attention." He's right, but in pretty much the opposite of the way he intends. When the mainstream "right" and "left" agree on anything, that's almost always a blazing neon sign warning us that our freedoms are under threat. Catron (and Trump and Sanders) want the US government to seize control of social media platforms and dictate which users those platforms must accept and what...
On March 14, Missouri governor Mike Parson signed HB 85, aka the Second Amendment Preservation Act, into law. HB 85's first two sections can reasonably be read as "nullification" of a sort, insofar as they point out the unconstitutionality of a number of federal laws that violate the Second Amendment. Oddly, however, the US Department of Justice seems more concerned with its third and fourth sections of the bill, which prohibit Missouri's courts and law enforcement agencies from enforcing, or assisting with the enforcement of, those unconstitut...
On June 16, US president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a Joint Statement on Strategic Stability, in which they "reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" and "seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures." With the extension of the New START treaty and joint statements like that, it might seem that things aren't looking too terribly bad with respect to reducing the threat of nuclear war. But talk and action are two very different things. Let's...
For the first time in its more than eight decades of surveying Americans' religious attitudes and practices, Gallup reports, church members constituted only 47% of the US population in 2020 -- down 23% since 1999, prior to which the percentage seldom dipped below 70%. Why the precipitous drop, and what might it portend for the future? "The decline in church membership," the Gallup report says, "is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference." In 2000, Americans who didn't consider themselves...
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel said in November 2008, shortly before becoming White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration. Left unsaid: Even if you have to make something into a "serious crisis," molehill-to-mountain style. There are plenty of real crises. There's almost always something important that's going wrong. But real crises are difficult to exploit. Getting important things done well is hard work, and who deserves credit isn't always obvious. Political grandstanding is easier, leading to what...
In late January, a band of merry men (and women) organized via Reddit and other Internet forums to stick it to The Man. They began buying shares of failing retail chain GameStop to drive its stock price up. Their target: Wall Street hedge funds engaged in the tactic of "shorting" GameStop's stock. Their main weapon: Robinhood, an app which allows pretty much anyone to buy stock in small amounts. Its stated mission is to "democratize finance for all." You've probably read 20 explanations of "shorting" by now, so I'll keep it simple: To "short" a...
"[T]o restore the soul and to secure the future of America," President Joe Biden said in his inaugural speech, "requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. ... This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward." The bad news: Where politics is concerned, "unity" is a pipe dream. The good news: Where human flourishing is concerned, the ersatz "unity" demanded by politicians like Joe Biden is neither necessary nor desirable. There's nothing wrong with unity as such....
On January 7, the day after rioters entered the US Capitol and put hundreds of politicians to flight in support of Donald Trump's election fraud claims, Wisconsins's State Assembly passed a resolution. The money line: "[P]olitical violence in any form has no place in the American system of government and should never be tolerated." If the Assembly (and other government bodies passing such resolutions) had followed up by dissolving themselves and sending their members home for good, I might believe they mean what they're saying. Otherwise, no di...
The Hill reports that US House Republicans, who made a show earlier this year of opposing remote and proxy voting in Congress, are warming to the latter practice. US Representative Paul Mitchell (R-MI) gave his proxy to US Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) in early December, declaring by tweet that "I will not risk my family’s health in order to vote on key items." Fast food cooks and grocery store cashiers don't get to assign their work to proxies. They show up each day or lose their jobs, risking their health with every shift. Apparent...
In Joe Biden's "Emergency Action Plan to Save the Economy," the president-elect proposes to "[f]orgive a minimum of $10,000 per person of federal student loans." Wait, some protest. That would be a subsidy for the more well-off, at the expense of the less well-off. They have a point. "[D]ebt relief overall, the New York Times notices, "would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates ... especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and...
A November 23 headline at ABC News reads: "Joe Biden's presidential transition allowed to proceed after 16-day standoff." The 16 days in question, ABC tells us, are the 16 days since Biden "clinched the presidency." "Clinched the presidency" is ABC News-speak for "the media decided he won." In point of fact, the 2020 presidential election isn't over yet and won't be for another three weeks. No, I'm not referring to Donald Trump's campaign of vexatious litigation, which is going, and will go, nowhere. On November 3, American voters chose...
"One day after the state reported a record 92 COVID-19-related deaths," the Wisconsin State Journal‘s Mitchell Schmidt reports, "Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday he plans to extend the state's emergency declaration and accompanying mask mandate through mid-January. ... The current mask mandate was issued in July and extended by Evers in September." The first two mask mandates didn't achieve the desired result! Something must be done! Hey, I've got an idea! How about another mask mandate? At first blush this sounds like the old Alcoholics A...
On October 4, three scientists published "The Great Barrington Declaration," a statement named for the Massachusetts town in which they met. Infectious disease epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School call for a "focused protection" approach to overcoming COVID-19. Versus the "lockdown/shutdown" efforts we've suffered through for the last seven months, they support letting the young and healthy...
"Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg's Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence," reads the headline at Buzzfeed. One such employee asks "[a]t what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?" The apparent outrage and the specific question both conflict with Facebook's mission statement ("to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected") and the second half of its vision statement ("to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and...
Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin prefers Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That's according to William Evanina, Director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center. "Many foreign actors," he says, "have a preference for who wins the election, which they express through a range of overt and private statements; covert influence efforts are rarer." I don't have the words to express how un-surprised I am to learn that foreign governments take an interest in, and have opinions on, who gets to run...
Included in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act were three programs with less euphonious acronyms: FPUC, PEUC, and PUA. These programs extended (by 13 weeks), expanded (to self-employed workers), and added a $600 per week federal kicker to, state-level unemployment benefits. As July comes to a close, more than 25 million Americans are about to lose that federal kicker. The usual setup for the usual partisan fight over whether generous government benefits help the congenitally hard-working American people th...
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he has an economic plan for America to "Build Back Better." US president Donald Trump complains that Biden "plagiarized" significant elements of that plan from, you guessed it, Donald Trump. Both plans are packed full of bad ideas that have been proposed a thousand times by a thousand other politicians, so the plagiarism claim seems more trollish than truthy. The problem with both economic plans isn't that they're plagiarized, it's that they ARE economic plans. What is an economy? Ask a...
If there's been one bright spot in America's COVID-19 experience, it's the near-complete shutdown of an expensive and obsolete government education system cribbed from mid-19th century Prussia. Across the country, "public" pre-K thru 12th-grade programs closed their doors this spring. Some districts attempted to hobble along using not yet ready for prime time online learning systems. Others just turned the kids loose to likely learn far more than they would have in the combination daycare centers and youth prisons that pass for schools these...
In mid-May, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution authorizing remote voting by proxy. Per the resolution, one congressperson may vote on behalf of up to ten others. In theory, as few as 40 of the House's 435 members could show up in Washington for the House to do business. But Article I, Section 5 of the US Constitution says otherwise: "[A] Majority of each [house of Congress] shall constitute a Quorum to do Business." That means 218 members must be present for the House to do anything. As May draws to a close and the House...
As the COVID-19 pandemic ran its deadly course in New York, governor Andrew Cuomo affirmed a state policy forbidding nursing homes to reject suffering from the disease. At least partially as a result (Cuomo himself acknowledged early on that the virus spreads through such facilities "like fire through dry grass"), nearly 6,000 long-term care residents have died so far. Cuomo, of course, denies any personal responsibility in the matter. He blames the homes ("Do you believe a nursing home operator would accept a patient who they knew they couldn'...
Writing at Reason magazine, Eric Boehm notes two trends revealed in data released by Apple and Foursquare. Trend One: Americans began reducing their outings and social interactions before, not because of, "shelter in place" orders issued by grandstanding, opportunistic politicians. Trend Two: Americans started coming back out and resuming something like normal life before, not because, those politicians started lifting those orders. In other words, with COVID-19 as with everything else, government policy is a trailing, rather than leading,...
On April 25, 2020, US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement commemorating the 75th anniversary of "Elbe Day" -- the day, presaging the end of World War 2 in Europe, when Russian and US troops met near the German towns of Strehla and Torgau. The Wall Street Journal reports that this congenial interaction between the two presidents "stirs concern among" members of Congress and officials at the US Departments of State and Defense. What's inherently controversial about the Trump/Putin statement that...
Anyone who tries to tell you that the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated social, political, and economic panics, are good things is an idiot, or trying to sell you some kind of snake oil, or both. Society-wide disasters are always net negatives, or we wouldn't think of them as disasters in the first place. Silver linings are never as shiny as the clouds they run through are large. That doesn't mean silver linings don't exist, though. They do, and some of them are significant. One major silver lining in the United States is that the nation's...
On March 3, US president Donald Trump spoke (via telephone) with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, chief of the Taliban's Doha diplomatic office and signer, on behalf of his organization, of the recently concluded Afghanistan "peace deal." "The direct contact between an American president and a top Taliban leader would once have been unthinkable," writes Michael Crowley at the New York Times. Why? Crowley doesn't elaborate, but in my opinion the claim of unthinkability goes a long way toward explaining why the US government spent nearly two decades...
As we enter a new year, the running battle between the world's governments and the world-changing technology known as "cryptocurrency" continues. As 2019 drew to an end, Swiss president Ueli Maurer asserted that Facebook's digital currency (not a real cryptocurrency), Libra, has failed "because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it." Politicians want to regulate -- or, if possible, kill -- cryptocurrency. Large firms like Facebook want to capture cryptocurrency's potential without rocking those governments'...
