As unprecedentedly awful as America’s politics are right now, in one way, we’re perfectly normal, because we’re just like everyone else. The monumental disarray of our Republican and Democratic parties is perfectly mirrored in the UK by the Conservatives and Laborites. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could be twins. The specter haunting Europe these days…
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Brexit, Part 2: What is to be done?
The impact of Brexit continues to roil and rumble. Paul Krugman say’s it’s not that big a deal—well, not unless you live in the UK itself, where “it looks all too likely that the vote will both empower the worst elements in British political life and lead to the breakup of the UK itself.” So,…
Democrats hold a Tea Party
From all accounts, Democrats in the House of Representatives are delirious over their defiance of decorum, their recent all-nighter on the House floor, where they pushed the envelope to the extent of shouting down House Speaker Paul Ryan, perhaps the most pummeled personage in the history of this blog. Well, I have a hard time…
The F-35 “Hanger Queen”
I recently stumbled across an intriguing site on the Internet,“War Is Boring”, which featured a necessarily long article—necessarily long because it was titled “Everything Wrong With the F-35”, the F-35 being America’s newest and (of course) most expensive fighter jet. The F-35 is in fact the most expensive weapons project in history, and one that…
Left and Right: The Ugliness of the Antipodes
Extremism on both the left and right have emerged with startling immediacy and intensity this year, as an entirely unintended result of the presidential primary process, which was largely “intended” to produce a near re-match of both the 1992 and 2000 elections, featuring Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, that was just too goddamn boring…
Nick Gillespie’s journée de folie
A stopped clock is right twice a day. Nick Gillespie, Editor in Chief, Reason.com and Reason TV, is wrong once a year. This year, Nick’s journée de folie fell on May 23, when he came up with less than scintillating thumb-sucker, “This Used To Be a Helluva High-Trust Country, But Our Leaders Are Destroying That”….
Ben Sasse, Wall Street Tool
Nebraska Junior Senator Ben Sasse recently posted “AN OPEN LETTER TO MAJORITY AMERICA”, bemoaning the fact that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump offers what the American people—the real American people, the folks down at the WalMart—really want. When ole Ben finally gets tired of patting himself on the back for being the fine, down…
What Hath Trump Wrought?
Which is more decadent, Donald Trump or the Annual Gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Okay, trick question, because there is no wrong answer. But putting the Donald in perspective does take some work. Yet the sources of the Donald aren’t hard to find: the stumblings and…
Bill Nye, the not science guy
Reason’s Nick Gillespie catches Bill Nye in act of being a total asshole when, in a discussion regarding climate change, he “explained” why fear of jail time ought to be a necessary part of scientific inquiry, at least for climate change “deniers”: “In these cases [cases where people say things that Dr. Bill disagrees with],…
Neoliberalism and its discontents
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a contemptuous take down of Thomas Piketty’s then notorious book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. If anyone has been citing Piketty’s arguments in the current presidential primary season, I’ve yet to hear it, but that hardly matters, because global capitalism is taking a pounding from all quarters, a…