Category Archives: History

Business, Economics, Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Pre-Trump World

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Was it normal, or abnormal?

One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.

Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.

Business, Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The First Amendment

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…and the lesson of Robespierre:

Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.

This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.

Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

The Fate Of The ISS

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Matt Fitzgibbons says it’s like the ancient Roman roads. I’m not sure the analogy works very well, but I do think that it would be wasteful to deorbit it. When he says it’s “only” three or four billion a year, I don’t think he appreciates how much more we’ll be able to do for much less in the near future, But I also think in the next decade we’ll have the ability to move it higher, and preserve it as a museum.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Peter Strzok

3 Comments

…got his start in the FBI’s dirty Boston Office.

Mueller is guilty of framing people and withholding exculpatory evidence in the past. Why should we think he’s not doing the same thing now?

Saturday-morning update]

Lee Smith has a pretty comprehensive description of everything that was going on.

[Saturday-evening update]

Related: Watch Kimberly Strassell dismantle the WaPo “fact checker” on Bruce Ohr.

As an aside, Twitter threads have become a way of routing around the limitations of first the 140, then 280-character limit of the medium, to turn them effectively into blog posts, at which one can jump in at any time.