This is a catastrophe. This is a disaster. This is the greatest amount of rain ever recorded in a locale in the history of meteorology. How can POTUS say, “We want to do it better than ever before”?
Tag: history
Hurricane Harvey: About That Wall…
It may be weeks before the storms end, the waters recede, and basic utilities are restored. But this, too, shall pass — and then begins the rebuilding. Who’s going to do that rebuilding?
Four Decades of Middle Eastern Disaster: The Proximate Cause
Almost all of the Middle East’s disasters over the past four decades can be credibly traced back to a single highly specific major event: the Iranian Revolution. Let me chronicle the tragic trail of dominoes.
The Existence of the State makes Evil People Far More Dangerous
Donald Trump or Barack Obama or George Bush or Franklin D. Roosevelt weren’t particularly dangerous until they obtained control of the state, and the same can be said of nearly every politician, dictator, and tyrant in history. What makes evil people so dangerous is that they can—often in an ostensibly legitimate manner—assume power over millions or even billions of other people.
The Myth of ‘Good Government’
The history of the US is not that of good government gone bad, but of bad government remaining bad. Yes, it’s improved a bit in some areas even as it has worsened in others, but when it comes to its central evils—plundering, kidnapping, caging, and killing people—it continues to follow the pattern of cruel oppression which has always defined it.
WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does
When the US Senate Intelligence Committee declares WikiLeaks “hostile,” the obvious question is “hostile to whom?” WikiLeaks is allied with the American people, while the US intelligence community — and, for the moment at least, the US Senate Intelligence Committee — is our enemy.
Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?
“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.
Was Antebellum Slavery More Tolerable Than Soviet Communism?
Average slaves in America were ‘owned’ by people who could legally do just about anything they wanted to their slaves. However, since slaves were so costly, and their work depended greatly on how they were treated … slaves generally had plenty of leisure time, rare physical punishment, and various worldly pleasures at their disposal. Of course, this in no way justifies slavery, and there are plenty of stories of absolute brutality of some individuals.
Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse
On July 12, a number of prominent companies joined in the “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.” Among them were GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, and CloudFlare. All four companies issued pious statements about the dangerous possibility of Internet Service Providers cutting off access to perfectly legal content. A little more than a month later, all four companies (and others) are themselves doing exactly what they warned us ISPs might do unless a “Net Neutrality” law forbade it: They’re cutting off access to perfectly legal content (yes, neo-Nazi speech is legal in America).
The Welfare of Society is not the Welfare of the State
Society and the state do not share the same progress chart. The welfare of one doesn’t positively correlate with the welfare of the other. In fact, most of the time, there is an inverse relationship.