Author: nick
Donald Trump saw the decay early and chose to fight it. In 1945, the United States stood alone in its strength, industrial supremacy, nuclear monopoly, and no peer competitor. It chose not empire, but order. Through Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and a durable security architecture, Washington did not merely defend the free world – it rebuilt it. War-torn economies were revived, trade was re-anchored, currencies stabilized, and former enemies turned into productive allies. At the height of its power, the United States exercised restraint. That restraint gave the system its legitimacy and made possible decades of shared growth under…
As the national debt rises ever higher, Congress is gearing up to pass an enormous infrastructure spending bill. Earlier this week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the BUILD America 250 Act. The sprawling 1000-page bill combines some hits—including provisions to streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects—with some obvious misses. Lawmakers claim that the bill would strengthen the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for both road maintenance and mass transit investments, by levying a new registration fee on electric vehicles (E.V.) and plug-in hybrids. But Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this…
U.S. officials announced federal charges May 20 against former Cuban President Raúl Castro for the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes that killed four people, including three Americans. Officials made the announcement on Cuban Independence Day at Freedom Tower, a downtown Miami skyscraper known for processing thousands of Cuban refugees in the 1960s and ’70s. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and other officials said the charges were the result of decades of investigative work and intelligence gathering. “President Trump is committed to restoring a very simple but important principle,” Blanche…
The history of the 20th century, and especially the history of the Holocaust, is replete with bureaucratic heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara, Frank Foley, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, diplomats who combined to save hundreds of thousands of lives by bending the rules and issuing unauthorized passports or visas to people fleeing persecution. Now, in the 21st century, as we stand ever closer to repeating the horrors of the past century, these rule-bending insiders are nowhere to be found. It isn’t that people aren’t capable of morally taking a stand. It’s that they physically can’t do so. I would…
Conservatives have been slamming Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper for getting married and embracing motherhood after creating a podcast that failed to shame women for having premarital sex. Their criticisms ring ridiculously out of touch. Many center on the supposed unlikelihood of a woman being able to snag a husband after hooking up with others in her 20s, while some simply seem angry at an openly promiscuous woman not being punished for it. You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth’s sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage. Cooper “has…
Download Audio. Scott brings Dave DeCamp back on the show to run through some of the biggest foreign policy news. They start with Trump’s trip to meet with Xi in China which may have had some implications for US policy towards Taiwan. They then discuss whether Trump is really planning to bomb Iran again if talks continue to get nowhere. DeCamp then provides an update on the chaos and violence that has kicked off in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s decision to launch their regional war. Discussed on the show: “Trump Says He…
Last year, Larry Bushart spent 37 days in a Tennessee jail because he had shared a widely circulated anti-Trump meme on Facebook. Today his attorneys announced that he had agreed to settle the resulting federal lawsuit in exchange for a payment of $835,000. “No one should be hauled off to jail in the dark of night over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message,” said Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which represented Bushart along with local attorney Katherine Phillips. “We’re pleased that Larry has been compensated for…
Block, Inc.’s Square has auto-enabled roughly 1 million U.S. merchants to accept Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network, letting customers pay in BTC while merchants automatically receive USD settlements with near-instant conversion in the background. Block Inc.’s (XYZ) Square has crossed a threshold of roughly 1 million merchants now enabled to accept Bitcoin payments. The figure, cited by a member of Block’s team, reflects a wave of auto-enrollment that began March 30, when Square automatically switched on BTC payments by default for eligible U.S. sellers. At its peak pace, a new business was activating the feature every eight seconds. The rollout is powered by…
None of this proves that extreme views are always right, and moderate ones always misguided. The point is not that we should always adopt the most extreme possible positions, but that there is often little or no relationship between the validity of a position and its distance from mainstream opinion. Mainstream public opinion is heavily influenced by ignorance and irrational thinking, and therefore is at best a very weak barometer of truth. Extremism isn’t always a virtue, but neither is it necessarily a vice, either. I think extreme libertarian views are largely correct. Yglesias thinks otherwise. But such disagreements should…
Billionaire Tom Steyer used his money to attack a lone climate researcher. Roger Pielke Jr.’s research on climate and disaster policy wins awards and is cited by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “My views are entirely mainstream,” says Pielke. “My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There’s nothing contrarian.” Both Steyer and Pielke agree that “greenhouse gases warm the climate,” but Pielke’s sin was saying, “it’s not the apocalypse.” Because of that, “the Center for American Progress decided to make me a target,” he says. The center is a lefty group…