Republican “tax reform” theatrics have worn thin over many months of waiting, but I still prefer a more theatrical title. “A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” rings true. Four centuries later, Shakespeare’s MacBeth is a better description of the matter than any coming out of Washington, DC.
Category: Libertarian Advocacy Journalism
Will the Real Populism Please Stand Up?
Populism is quite easy to define. It is the separation of people into two warring classes. Let’s call them “the righteous masses” and “the power elites.” The populist, of course, sides with the righteous masses. It’s as simple as that. But the devil is in the details of defining those two classes.
Twitter versus RT: Which One is State Media Again?
Twitter is fast becoming a branch of US state media itself. For a company with such a large international user base, that seems like a bad business plan. And it’s certainly a bad thing from the perspective of achieving the not quite realized, but clearly to be pursued, promise that the Internet holds out to humanity — connecting people around the globe without kowtowing to the increasingly obsolete and disintegrating concept of national borders.
Encryption: Christopher Wray’s “Huge, Huge Problem” is an Age-Old Inconvenience
Theoretically unbreakable encryption has been around since at least as early as 1882 when Frank Miller invented and described the “one-time pad.” A pen, a piece of paper, and a way to generate random numbers is all anyone needs to frustrate Christopher Wray’s desire to read our mail.
The Cure for Weinstein is a Cultural Change
We have to shift the fear away from would-be victims and strike it into the hearts of would-be victimizers. We have to make it preemptively clear that we will always ostracize those who harass and punish those who assault, not those who are harassed or assaulted.
Hillary Clinton: Cold Creepiness with a Side of Corruption
Was Clinton’s latest lunge at Assange and WikiLeaks a preemptive strike? An attempt, perhaps, to get ahead of extreme ugliness in the coming news cycle?
Microsoft Corp. v. United States: Jeff Sessions Wants Open Borders, But Only for Police
In 2013, Microsoft refused to turn information from a customer’s email account over to law enforcement pursuant to a warrant in a narcotics investigation. The information, Microsoft noted, was stored on a server in Ireland. Ireland, as you may have learned in elementary school, is neither one of the fifty states nor a US territory. It’s a sovereign state with its own laws. US search warrants carry no weight there.
Excessive: Bail Isn’t Meant to Enable the Holding of Political Prisoners
The US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment forbids “excessive bail” in criminal prosecutions. That prohibition seems somewhat vague. I guess we’re just expected to know excessive bail when we see it. Two current cases demonstrate not just excessive bail, but abuse of the whole idea of bail for the purpose of holding un-convicted defendants as political prisoners.
Take a Knee. Take a Seat. Take a Chill Pill.
If it bothers you to the point of distraction that some people are, by your lights, insufficiently respectful of the Stars and Stripes, your priorities are way out of whack. And if the flag does indeed stand for freedom, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Bump Stock Ban Boogie: The Latest Silly Political Dance Craze
Every time there’s a “public mass shooting” in America, the usual suspects climb atop of the pile of bodies before they’re even cold and start doing the funky chicken to the tune of “gun control, gun control, this wouldn’t happen if we just added one more gun control law to the hundreds of gun control laws that we already have.”