POTUS has a disturbing tendency to use more hyperbole with an inverse relationship to the likelihood of outcomes. He tweets that strikes on Syria were “perfectly executed,” when the reality is that execution has nothing to do with how the events will affect the history of humankind. “The operation was a success but the patient died.” “The cop gunned down 12 dogs, but he followed procedure to the letter.”
Tag: history
Feminism or Masculinism? Neither…
In light of the many and varied types of unfairness that both men and women endure today and have endured throughout history, I can’t say that one gender has been treated more unfairly than the other. Both are and have been treated like shit for the benefit of others. But maybe we can agree that the one group of people that is and has been treated the most unfairly… is children.
The Senate vs. Facebook: Beware Untrustworthy Partners, Revisited
Back in early 2015, when then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity “information sharing,” I pointed out in a column that the federal government is the last organization any sane human being would trust to secure the privacy of his or her data. My opinion was swiftly and irrefutably vindicated: That same year produced revelations of government database breaches compromising the personal information of 22 million former government employees, 330,000 taxpayers, and 191 million voters.
Thinking Outside of the Box
The box that has failed throughout history is called politics. Most solutions have been sought through the ballot box with little success. I believe that the ideology of Voluntaryism is that very “outside of the box thinking” that must be studied, understood and then implemented by the masses in order to accomplish the goals of peace, freedom, harmony and prosperity that we all desire.
Mueller is Desperate — But For What?
So far Mueller’s secured indictments of a few Trump associates on charges having little or nothing to do with his overt mission, and of a few Russians for running an Internet “troll farm” that posted some cheesy social media ads. But he has yet to put real meat on his mandate and doesn’t seem to be getting much closer to Trump himself than when he started. Now he’s hitching his wagon to Stormy Daniels’s star. Why? There are two plausible reasons.
Education vs Schooling
I was writing a memoir yesterday of our trip to Chicago with our two youngest granddaughters, who are 13 and 11 respectively. In part of the memoir I began to consider, why the trip itself was educational as opposed to the daily regimentation of schooling (which the girls would be getting if not for Spring Break).
First They Came for Backpage
In 2016, after a court slapped down the attempts of Kamala Harris (D-CA), then attorney general of her state and now a US Senator, to prosecute Backpage for “pimping,” I suggested that merely dismissing the charges was not enough. I am still of that opinion.
Educated: A Must-Read
From the first page, I was captivated and, cliché as it is, I truly couldn’t put it down. I read the book swiftly, entranced by Westover’s vivid depiction of growing up in rural Idaho in a religious fundamentalist, survivalist family. School was where the devil hides, often clothed as socialists, or so her father said. In piercing prose, Westover offers an eloquent illustration of conviction blurring into paranoia, ideology into lunacy. She describes how fragile those lines can be.
Taking the “Digital” out of “Digital Gold”
The idea of digital gold is to take all the amazing attributes of gold and add the one thing it’s missing: portability. That’s what the “digital” part means. The magic of bitcoin is that it found a way to maintain all the very best properties of money found in gold and add to them the greatest portability of any money in existence with instant, near free global transactions.
Uncertainty is the Root of the Current Market Craziness
Investors put their money into enterprises under certain tax and regulatory conditions. When those conditions start suddenly changing or looking like they may change, the investors worry. And when they worry, they get more cautious about where their money is and what it’s being used for. They sell off, move their money into what they hope are less volatile assets, and the stock market takes a hit.