Just a couple of weeks ago the financial world’s biggest worry was the plunging price of oil. Supply was up, stockpiles were building and speculation was pointing towards $40 a barrel, a price at which the fracking/shale oil “miracle” would evaporate. A trillion dollars of related junk debt would default, taking a big part of […]
Maybe Politics Matters After All
Looking strictly at the numbers it’s hard to work up much interest in whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge after 2020. Either way, trillion-dollar deficits and extremely easy money are guaranteed, which means the US – along with most of the rest of the world – will fall off a financial cliff shortly. After […]
If You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse For Chicago …
This is the second post in a week on Chicago’s epic financial train wreck. That’s a lot of attention and it probably won’t happen again, given the target-rich world we live in. But jeeze, talk about not learning from past mistakes. This latest chapter begins with the Chicago mayoral race and the two candidates’ stances […]
The Coming Wave Of High-Tech Authoritarianism
One of history’s hard lessons is that collapsing financial systems beget authoritarian politics. Today’s world, alas, is following this script, as rising debts lead to wrenching political changes in nearly every country that holds free elections, while fascism and socialism are once again being taken seriously by people who in normal times would inhabit the […]
Poetic Justice For The Aristocracy
Two points about today’s political economy – and then a prediction involving Illinois: Point One: What’s coming is poetic justice for the aristocracy. The wave of populism/socialism/proto-fascism that’s sweeping the US and Europe is a direct result of the breathtaking hubris of a ruling class that didn’t know when to quit stealing. While it is […]
Really Bad Ideas, Part 7: Open Borders
Now that we’re all free to speak our minds (maybe we should we call this the “post-political-caution world”) a lot of previously discredited ideas have re-emerged and are being tossed into the debate – apparently without much thought to, for instance, their horrendous unintended consequences. One such idea that’s, ahem, gaining a lot of currency […]
Finally, Asset Forfeiture Is Ruled Unconstitutional — Sort Of
Among all the many things governments do that seem to violate the Constitution — not to mention common sense and basic fairness – asset forfeiture stands out. Believe it or not, states and cities now partially fund themselves by arresting people, taking their stuff and then failing to return said stuff after deciding not to […]
With AOC, The Dems Get Their Sarah Palin
It’s easy to forget, in light of subsequent events, how terrified the Democrats once were of Sarah Palin. As an attractive Christian woman with a bunch of kids, who apparently liked to hunt moose with her hunky husband, she was an arrow aimed at the heart of a long list of liberal convictions. Watch her […]
And The Verbal Part Of The Civil War Begins
With the election of Donald Trump, the US right let its id off the leash. Now pretty much everything conservatives have thought but not said is finding its way to Facebook, Twitter, and the evening news. So it’s no surprise that the left, wildly envious of conservatives’ newfound rhetorical freedom, have decided that what’s good […]
Why We’re Ungovernable, Part 16: France On Fire
Back in 2017, when some countries were handing power to populists promising variations of “drain the swamp,” France went for continuity with Emmanuel Macron, a young, moderate-sounding technocrat from the world of finance who promised to modernize the country without threatening the elites, the welfare state or the bureaucracy. Fast forward a couple of years […]
Why We’re Ungovernable, Part 15: After Germany’s Merkel Comes Chaos
After a long, initially-successful run promoting European integration and mass immigration, German Chancellor Angela Merkel saw the bottom fall out of her political fortunes this year. This morning she stepped down as leader of the formerly-dominant Christian Democrat party and promised not run again when her term as Chancellor ends in 2021. What happens next […]
US Political Center Is Being Devoured From Both Right And Left
President Trump will soon nominate his second Supreme Court justice. The first, Neil Gorsuch, has so perfectly replaced the late Antonin Scalia that it’s safe to assume retiring justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor will be in the same mold – which is to say formidable and unapologetically conservative. The result will be a solid conservative majority […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 5: “the world’s most sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over citizens”
Maybe this series should be renamed “Galloping Fascism”: China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People (Wall Street Journal) – HANGZHOU, China—Alibaba Group’s sprawling campus has collegial workspaces, laid-back coffee bars and, on the landscaped grounds, a police outpost. Employees use the office to report suspected crimes to the police, […]
Be Careful What You Wish For, Police Body-Cam Edition
After the recent deluge of videos showing police abusing and sometimes flat-out murdering more-or-less innocent citizens, the willingness of a growing number of cities to equip officers with video cameras has been hailed as a victory by civil libertarians. But what if those cameras also extend the surveillance network exponentially? In the future, if a […]
In The Police-State-Versus-Freedom Arms Race, Freedom Seems To Be Winning
In the past 48 hours, two stories broke that illustrate how dominant technology has become in the age-old war between freedom and control: Malware Lets a Drone Steal Data by Watching a Computer’s Blinking LED (Wired) – A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion’s cybersecurity lab has devised a method to defeat the security protection known […]