Free Republic

Richard M. Fierro, who served for 15 years in the military, was at the nightclub in Colorado Springs with his family when the gunman opened fire. “I just knew I had to take him down,” he said.

The New American Millennial Right East Coast and West Coast Straussians do battle for the soul of Trump’s America, or part of it BY PARK MACDOUGALD FEBRUARY 04, 2020 For the last half-century, the GOP has been the party of capitalism—of Wall Street, Walmart, and Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that “government is the problem.” But since the Clinton years, if not earlier, the Republicans have been bleeding younger, more affluent, college-educated voters to the Democrats, while coming to rely more and more on non-college-educated whites to win elections. Thus, the sometimes comical attempts by wealthy patrician Republican politicians to perform...

Diana Hernández has one foot in the Ivy League, where she’s an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and another in the grittier streets of the South Bronx, the mostly working-class area where she lives. Walking down a Bronx boulevard the other day, she witnessed scenes much different from the TV-news version of the coronavirus crisis, where suburbanites stuff payloads of squeezably soft toilet paper and price-gouged Purell in the back of luxury SUVs. Instead, Hernández wrote that she witnessed Bronx shoppers at her local Dollar Tree stocking up on bleach, a tiny...

“We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?” In a conference room overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international community could balance the need for growth with our precarious ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios, everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and democracy’s track record is mixed. A graph from Chinese social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a patriotic retort to the Swedish...

In the video, the Arkansas Capitol dome can be seen lit against the night sky as the Dodge Dart accelerates to 10, then 20 mph. “Oh my goodness,” a man says as he flicks on the car’s lights. “Freedom!” The vehicle speeds up the hill, and the last thing that comes into view before a crash is a large, newly installed monument. Authorities say the man in the video is Michael Tate Reed, an alleged serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments. He was arrested by state capitol police officers at the scene early Wednesday, according to Chris Powell, a spokesman...

Electric cars are coming fast -- and that’s not just the opinion of carmakers anymore. Total SA, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, is now saying EVs may constitute almost a third of new-car sales by the end of the next decade. The surge in battery powered vehicles will cause demand for oil-based fuels to peak in the 2030s, Total Chief Energy Economist Joel Couse said at Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference in New York on Tuesday. EVs will make up 15 percent to 30 percent of new vehicles by 2030, after which fuel “demand will flatten out,” Couse...

Distributism would be of little practical use if it could not provide useful answers to practical problems of the type we face practically every day. I believe Distributism does indeed provide a useful set of tools to analyze these problems and to devise useful solutions. But the proof of this claim can only come in the analysis of an actual problem. For this example of distributist analysis, I choose the American health care system, which is experiencing great difficulties, difficulties for which no one has yet devised a workable solution.Some sign of these difficulties is shown by the fact that in 2007,...

Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregnancy, and then through birth and the immediate period afterward. Although I fear the show will remain unseen by me, it is apparently watched by enough teenagers that all by itself it put a dent in the US teen birth rate. Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine tell the story in "Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing," in a recent issue of the American Economic Review (105:12,...

Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceiling, nutmeg came in 12lb boxes and the express checkout had a sign reading, “1,000 items or less”. In the end the Simpsons returned to Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart. In doing so, the Simpsons were making a choice to reduce their choice. It wasn’t quite a rational choice, but it made sense. In the parlance of economic theory, they were not rational utility maximisers but, in Herbert Simon’s term, “satisficers” – opting for...

Power from the People FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, March 2015, Vol. 52, No. 1 Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron The decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the topInequality has risen in many advanced economies since the 1980s, largely because of the concentration of incomes at the top of the distribution. Measures of inequality have increased substantially, but the most striking development is the large and continuous increase in the share of total income garnered by the 10 percent of the population that earns the most—which is only partially captured by the more traditional...

A different cluetrain By Charlie Stross Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book. And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ... 1. We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society). 2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres...

FLY, YOU FOOLS The Consumer Products Safety Commission wants to ban Buckyballs, the magnetic office toy for "adults with Asperger's", because kids swallow them.  ("Hey, stupid, isn't the Buckyballs story two months old?"  I'm writing a book of pornography, it's taking up a lot of my time.  "Of?")This is the kind of story that gets the public to unanimously cry, "We're a bunch of coddled babies!" and if you cried that, please recall my useful heuristic:  if you ever find yourself in complete agreement with the public, especially when "public" includes people you wanted to murder in the last election,...

RAMALLAH - The smiling receptionist indicates that I should take a seat, so I settle into one of the lobby's leather chairs. On a glass table, there’s the latest issue of an American business magazine and a day-old local paper. Flowery wall art contrasts with the space’s cool modernism. But this high tech company is not in Silicon Valley, not in Tel Aviv – but in Ramallah, the unofficial capital of the West Bank that some day is supposed to become part of a Palestinian state. But Murad Tahboub isn’t waiting around for the politicians. "The technology sector is the...

The U.S. has fallen behind much of the Western world when it comes to phone, cable and Internet service. Americans actually pay much more for inferior service compared to their global counterparts. In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston highlights these astounding facts: Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month. The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is...

...Roberts’s historic hand on the scale Thursday was the only way to preserve a central role for private insurers in American health care in the years ahead. In this sense, Roberts’ epic choice is therefore not only small “c” conservative as a matter of judicial temperament but economically conservative to boot. What the chief justice has done is nothing less than save shortsighted partisans bent on overturning Obamacare from themselves. As I and others have long argued, a successful drive to overturn the Affordable Care Act, combined with a continued surge in the ranks of the uninsured, would almost certainly...

We have noted in this space before that government in the United States favors tax-farming solutions for activities that elsewhere in the developed world are usually public functions. Now that notorious RINO, David Brooks, expands on the point: The U.S. does not have a significantly smaller welfare state than the European nations...We do it through the back door via tax breaks. For example, in Europe, governments offer health care directly. In the U.S., we give employers a gigantic tax exemption to do the same thing. European governments offer public childcare. In the U.S., we have child tax credits. In Europe,...

The two-state solution is history, and I was both sad and happy to see that A.B. Yehoshua has come to the same conclusion. Now we need to think ahead: How will the piece of land west of the Jordan River become a place that enables its population to live decent lives? How on earth is this greater State of Israel going to function? Israel is already an anomaly in that it has four separate educational systems: one for religious Zionists, one for the ultra-Orthodox, one for Arabs and one for the secular Jews who are no longer a majority: as...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision last month to dismiss Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi. The ensuing power struggle between Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has left the Iranian president deeply weakened and revealed many useful lessons about the closed and convoluted political workings of the Islamic Republic. On the surface, the battle appeared to be over when Ahmadinejad backed down. But there are deeper issues at stake which remain far from resolved. When Khamenei gave the president an ultimatum to reinstate the minister or resign, the supreme leader was not only preserving his own power -- the supreme leader has...

On Feb. 15, gunmen on a highway in central Mexico stopped a vehicle with U.S. diplomatic license plates and shot the two men inside. Killed in the attack was Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. A second ICE agent was wounded. In response to the attack, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) declared that "this tragic event is a game changer" that "should be a long overdue wake-up call for the Obama administration that there is a war on our nation's doorstep."

Egypt After Mubarak By Barry Rubin Amr Moussa, Arab League secretary-general, went to Tahrir Square to support the protests. The crowd cheered him. This is a symbol that the current government is sinking but also a sign of what the next regime may become. It appears to be sinking, indeed. But Moussa represents the worst demagogic forces of radical Arab nationalism. Syria, Moussa, and other forces in the Arab world represent that radical wing, while Mubarak followed policies that might be deemed more moderate and Egypt-centered. And as brutally repressive as Mubarak's regime was, Syria and Iraq -- radical regimes...