One of the best stories I’ve seen recently comes from Irving, New York, where a man has decided to build his own highway off ramp for his tobacco store. This story has it all, tax evasion, Indian tribal sovereignty, and an answer to the question “who will build the road?” The video is worth watching.
It’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion.
Tucker Carlson’s monologue last night was one of the most powerful moments in cable news history.
Prior to the 2016 election, Ryan McMaken noted that history shows the fastest way to increase government spending is to vote Republican:
[F]or decades, we’ve been told that a vote for the GOP is a vote for “smaller government.” This is repeated both by Republicans, who say it like it’s a good thing, and by Democrats who still seem to think that the GOP is committed to cutting grandma’s safety net.
Fifty years separate us, now, from 1968 and the two momentous legacies of the then soon to ending failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson: The declaring of war on America’s supposed domestic ills in the form of the “Great Society” programs, and the aggressive military intervention in a real war in Vietnam. Both of these “wars” reflected the arrogance and hubris of the social engineer who believes that he has the power and ability to remake and direct society in his own preferred image.
Bob Haber at Forbes has a short and sweet column warning about crazy conditions in the Vancouver real estate market. Prices for single-family detached homes have more than tripled just since 2002 in Canadian dollars, even with a Bank of Canada that has been far more circumspect in expanding its balance sheet than the Fed.
So I watched “Do you trust this computer?”, a film that “explores the promises and perils” of artificial intelligence. While it notes both the good and the bad, it has an obvious focus on how AI might bring about “the end of the world as we know it” (TEOTWAWKI.) That is, if it is left unregulated.
Big government, big banks, and big tech are now all on the same side in the war against cash. Government — we all know about already. Big banks — they do not want to see the users of cash in retail transactions (for goods and services) getting keener prices than the users of their electronic payment systems. They use their oligopoly power to suppress as far as possible any such differential emerging (as would be the case in a free market) and so expand the market for their plastic alternative.
With the 2018 Colombian presidential elections rapidly approaching, presidential front-runners Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro face numerous challenges ahead.
Demarchy — also called sortition — is a form of governance that selects the representatives of the people as a random sample from a pool of candidates. Such a governance by selecting the people’s representatives by lottery instead of elections can look back on a venerable history.
