Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein's New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high inflation. Say what you want about Summers, but he admitted he… Continue reading Inflation & Establisment Media
It's October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists' inevitable exhortation "we must do something" has become "we must do everything." In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium climate change projections. In America, there was governmental overreaction to the three great calamities of… Continue reading Overreaction
In one of the most significant leaks in US history, Edward Snowden shared highly classified intelligence documents with the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspapers in 2013. Snowden was immediately charged by the Department of Justice, and among those charges were alleged violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.[1] Like white blood cells reacting to… Continue reading The Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States During World War I
Have you ever taken a personality test? I had to take one several years ago as part of an employer's training program, doing different versions of the Myers-Briggs test and being scored an INTP or an INTJ. My scores for Thinking and Introversion were at extreme ends, I favored my Intuition over my Sensations, but I… Continue reading Opening Moves
To be alive means to cope with constant change, just as it is that living means we face death one day. Nothing about us is permanent except the matter we are comprised of (or, at least, that is what we are told by physicists). We are also told by evolutionary biologists that as animals we… Continue reading Change…and Fade Away
The graphic above is from a discussion on a UK website called The Student Room. Chicago Fog believes this is a good representation of the parameters of political beliefs reflected in contemporary society: communism on one end and fascism on the other. Clearly, the maker of the spectrum must be from Canada, but this graphic… Continue reading The Hazards of Political Belief Spectrums
The Arab Spring, frustration about political arguments, and Nietzsche: Early experiments in essays for which Armchair Mutineer begs the reader's forgiveness in advance of reading.
In retrospect, after further thought and reflection, this was not even true at the time it was written. Under Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy was very expansionist and, as we all know today, played the central role in propping-up Bashar al-Assad’s government in the Syrian civil war. In comparison, so far the Chinese have avoided Middle Eastern embroilment.
This entire essay is half-baked. Don’t bother with it. Chapter 37 of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom does a far better job explaining the perils of violent revolution. Click here to read David’s great book on his website!
