As President Donald Trump met with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un for the third time at the end of June — becoming the first sitting US president to visit North Korea — the New York Times ran a piece suggesting the appearance of a new option on the proverbial table: A negotiated “nuclear freeze” rather than just another cycle of fruitless US demands for “de-nuclearization.”
Tag: evidence
I Do Not Fear Flat Earthers
I heard someone say if you pursue any field of study deep enough you arrive at mystery. Yet the popular scientistic outlook is the opposite of mysterious. It presents a cocksure, “Everything’s settled but the details, and someone in a lab in Sweden is working those out as we speak”. What kind of invitation to inquiry is that? Where’s the adventure?
The First Amendment Protects Ex-Politicians Too
Most Americans loathe “lobbyists,” and most Americans think “bi-partisanship” sounds like a good, moderate idea representing compromise and common ground for the public good. So a surprise “bi-partisan alliance” between US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), with the proclaimed goal of passing a bill to ban politicians from working as “lobbyists” — maybe for life, maybe just for some long period — after leaving Congress was bound to get some good press.
School Will be Remembered Like Leeches and Cigarettes
How did humans learn stuff the other several thousand years of civilization? How were 80% of colonial Americans literate with no standardized institutional schooling, and when books were rare and costly and most jobs didn’t even require reading? How did people invent stuff, start businesses, write books, create great art, and expand the corpus of human knowledge for thousands of years without certified teachers and grades and degrees?
War Crimes Pardons: A Terrible Memorial Day Idea
As I write this, news reports indicate that Trump intends to celebrate Memorial Day by pardoning several other Americans convicted of (or accused of and not yet tried for) war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s a horrible idea for several reasons.
Don’t Start a Movement
Think about the iPhone, or Apple in general. No movement existed or was needed to make them change the way the world interacts with technology. Sure, there are pockets of True Believer Apple fans, but what actually moves the market isn’t a Movement, but a great product. They just solve a problem and create value for individual customers. Really well.
Two Cheers for Denver: Let’s End the War on Unapproved States of Consciousness
On May 7, voters in Denver, Colorado narrowly approved a measure de-criminalizing “magic mushrooms” — mushrooms containing the consciousness-altering compound psilocybin. The measure, National Public Radio reports, “effectively bars the city from prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them. In the ballot language, adults can even grow the fungus for personal use and be considered a low priority for Denver police.”
“SPD”- Statist Personality Disorder
I’m seeing more and more evidence that statism is more than a quirk; it’s a full-fledged mental disorder. It will never be officially recognized as such, of course, because most of those who with the power to recognize it also suffer from it. And they aren’t likely to recognize their own mental illness as a mental illness, or admit it is even if they realize it.
On Obstruction, the Mueller Report is Clintonesque
The difference between Comey’s treatment of Clinton and Mueller’s treatment of Trump is that Clinton’s immunity to laws meant for mere mortals was unofficial — based on her prominence as a ranking member of the political class — while Trump’s similar immunity is a formal function of his holding a particular office.
Governing Least: A Litany of Insight
“The reason France does not require aid is not because some external group took pity on the French, but that they were able to generate exponential economic growth themselves. This makes it puzzling that philosophers write long books about aid without mentioning economic growth, and generally seem to imply that the path to escaping poverty lies through individual altruism. Why ignore the only mechanism that has ever succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty when thinking about poverty?”