Author: nick

[ad_1] Slave quarters at Monticello, James C. Sawders, Keystone View Company, Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside. The segregated American media spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July praising the founding fathers and paying tribute to other American heroes. Heroes to them. Monsters to us. For CNN, Kit Carson is a hero. They showed a scene in which Carson walked miles, nearly barefoot, to rescue his men. We grew up watching the exploits of Kit Carson on cartoon shows. Our Settler education didn’t inform us that  Kit Carson committed atrocities against the…

[ad_1] In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here. Joanna Andreasson There are a lot of words you could use to describe America’s Founding Fathers: geniuses, visionaries, ideologues, perhaps even bros. Here’s another word you could use to describe them: drunks. America was founded by drinkers, distillers, and maltmen whose consumption would be labeled problematic or worse by today’s public health authorities. In a recent Supreme Court argument about marijuana and gun rights, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted the Founders’ penchant for heavy boozing. “John Adams took a tankard of hard cider…

[ad_1] Mitchell Zimmerman Otherwords  This Fourth of July marks the 250th birthday of a new kind of nation state — based not on ancestral ties to a land or on the territorial reach of monarchs, but on shared principles about the rights of citizens and the purpose of the state. The Founding Fathers set forth those principles in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal” and have “unalienable Rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” To “secure these rights,” Jefferson wrote, the government must “derive just powers from the consent of the governed.” America has come a…

[ad_1] The Coming Supply Chain Collapse No One Is Talking About The AI data center buildout is heading for a catastrophic supply chain collapse, and almost no one in the tech or investment world is talking about it. The bottleneck isn’t energy, water, or even land — it’s a soft, silvery metal called indium. China has placed indium phosphide on its export control list, and this single move will cripple the optical networking that every hyperscale AI data center depends on. The Pentagon is already racing to stockpile critical minerals amid China’s export stranglehold, as reported by Kevin Hughes for NaturalNews.com,…

[ad_1] If Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was well-suited for the pieties of the Obama years, then the anti-Hamilton, Gore Vidal’s Burr, was even more auspiciously timed. The 1973 novel came out not just as the Bicentennial was approaching but while the Watergate hearings were underway: a great moment for a tale that treats the Founding as a time of grimy scandal. Add the fact that the book is immensely entertaining, and it’s no surprise it was a smash hit. The story zigzags between the USA’s early days and the 1830s, when a newspaperman (working for the proto-libertarian journalist William Leggett) pumps an aging Aaron…

[ad_1] A Delegation of the Creek tribe meets with the Trustees of Georgia by William Verelst. Public domain. It took a single sentence in Ken Burns’ documentary series The American Revolution to change the way I thought about the American Revolution. It was a passing reference to British agents living among the Cherokee. The documentary quickly moved on, but I couldn’t. Who were they? Were they soldiers, diplomats, or traders? Did they wear uniforms? Did they speak Cherokee? What I found showed me an often overlooked side of the Revolution. Away from the famous battlefields, it seems Britain’s war was…

[ad_1] Anti-Brexit protesters in Manchester. Photo: Robert Mandel, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0 The tenth anniversary of the British vote to leave the European Union raises two immediate questions: Was it worth it? Can it be undone? The answer to the first is increasingly clear. Experts generally agree that the British economy has suffered for a decade, accompanied by political instability. The second question is more complex. Democracies are built on the assumption that citizens can change their minds. Elect a new government. Hold another referendum. Reverse course. But can a nation ever truly return to where it was before…

[ad_1] After a deadly school shooting in Tacloban, Philippines, the government has temporarily banned the video game Gorebox because one of the teenage suspects allegedly played it. Two boys opened fire in a classroom, killing three students and wounding 20 others. Police say one of the shooters was “heavily influenced” by content online, including the game, which lets players use weapons and explosives in a virtual world. The government wants to investigate if it played a role in the attack. The post Brickbat: Not Playing appeared first on Reason.com. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Hurricane Iwa bearing down on Hawai’i, 1982. We’re in for it. At least that’s the dire warning from scientists about the El Niño conditions now brewing in the Pacific Ocean. What’s actually in store may be up for debate, but it’s clear the developing patterns may place this El Niño on par with the strongest in over a century, which hit in 1982-83, killing 2,000 and leaving few corners of the planet untouched. It was a devastating El Niño that struck before climate change had fully taken hold of our world. But before we look back at the early…

[ad_1] Americans reading this are lucky enough to be alive on the 250th anniversary of their country’s declaration of independence. How independent the United States actually is these days or how much the country remains dedicated to the ideals of the founding is highly debatable. What is not debatable is that it was the colonies making a break from old Europe and formally beginning a new nation as a distinct people in their own country. What kind of people? For America’s 150th anniversary, President Calvin Coolidge said in a speech on July 5, 1926, “In its main features the Declaration…