Enjoying the view from Limbo
Everyone who is even vaguely attentive to American politics, and even half-honest about the evidence of his own senses, knows that Joe Biden is no more serving as the active president of the United States — the “here” at which, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops — than I am. That is to say, everyone can see as clear as day that...
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 16, 2023
Death counts, be not proud.– If you want to sound credible criticizing pandemic alarmists for padding the Covid death numbers and overstating the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, then it would be a good idea to stop shouting “Aha! The vaccine again!” every time an athlete, actress, or geriatric rock star happens to die. Reminder to both tribes: Dying was invented, and...
A U.S. president should only be truly relevant during a crisis, when someone — someone with authority over the military, for example, or even just having the sobriety and character to set the right national tone — must have the capacity and the will to make essential decisions on the fly, based on a combination of adequate information, sound principles, long-range vision, and,...
If politicians figure out there is big money to made in something, they will legalize it — but regulate it at the same time, to ensure they have first dibs on the profits. If politicians are desperate for votes, they will lower themselves to anything to entice anyone, no matter how worthless and mentally decrepit, to support them. And so, in a perfect confluence...
The reason bureaucrats love to produce litanies of rules designed, in substance and in spirit, to reduce everyone to generic, interchangeable minions is obvious: Bureaucracy is the definitive realm of the generic, interchangeable minion, in whose work flexibility, contextual choice, and free-thinking are not merely discouraged but absolutely counterproductive. Is it any wonder that the denizens of such a mechanized realm succumb, in...
The clever fence-sitting, bandwagon-hopping, finger-in-the-wind, trail-sniffing businessmen of the “conservative media” who pretend to be leaders and trend-setters — perhaps best epitomized at the moment by the teenage “debate champion” Ben Shapiro — are quietly urging their Republican-friendly audience to stop making everything about Donald Trump in these months leading up to the midterm elections. Their reason for this urging, quite explicitly stated,...
The U.S. Congress has passed, and President Biden has signed into law, The Inflation Reduction Act. This law will bring sweeping changes to the United States economy and society, and, indirectly, to the world. None of those changes will be in any way related to inflation per se, let alone to reducing it. So why, the innocent child might reasonably ask, is it...
If you found a woman’s private diary under a pillow at a drug rehabilitation facility, would you read it, publish it, use it to humiliate her family and potentially cause serious material harm to the woman herself? If you would, then you would fit right in among today’s American conservatives. Perhaps I come to this story very late, because I try to avoid...
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
Donald Trump used a media interview this week to directly ask Vladimir Putin to help him defeat their mutual enemy Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Putin’s state media (the only media allowed to speak in that country anymore), in criticizing Biden and calling for regime change in the U.S., has lamented losing its “partner” Trump….
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