Lighting Fires and Filling Buckets

Feature Article by , June 25, 2017

Policy Ideas for the Age of Automation, Part One: Education Everyone is starting to become concerned that the machines are about to take away all of our jobs—at least, all of the jobs that we do now. Everything is on the chopping block to be automated, from flipping burgers to driving trucks to filing legal […]

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You Can’t Buy an Election

Feature Article by , June 21, 2017

Of course Jon Ossoff didn’t win yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th district. Heck, it wasn’t even all that close. Karen Handel beat him 52% to 48%, a few points better than Donald Trump did in the same district. This was predictable. Ossoff was born in the sixth district, but he had lived an awful […]

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Freedom Is Not Perfection

Commentary by , June 15, 2017

The congressional baseball game shooter was clearly motivated by political hatred of Republicans. This hatred was clearly fed and magnified by his listening to hysterical partisan rhetoric and participating in online discussions that reinforced his political biases, painted caricatures of the evil of his future targets, and reinforced his emotions of anger and resentment. But […]

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Fear and Loathing in Charlottesville

Feature Article by , June 12, 2017

The fight over confederate statues in my hometown of Charlottesville has some of the fighters feeling pretty traumatized. Here is Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s Supreme Court commenter, who is also a local. My little city in central Virginia has become the stuff of reality TV…. Now, when we come to meet in our town square, we […]

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Seven Solutions Flying Cars Need (and One They Don’t)

Feature Article by , June 8, 2017

Everyone’s very excited right now about “flying cars” because—hey, who wouldn’t be? It’s right up there at the top of the science fiction wish list, along with the robot servant who cleans your house for you. And now we’re being told pretty frequently that the flying car is on its way. But we’re not getting […]

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The Media Is Now Leaking Classified Information Just Because They Feel Like It

Feature Article by , June 6, 2017

This morning, the New York Times brought us another breathtaking expose of classified national security information which is really important for the public to know because…um, well, because they just kind of felt like it. The story is about a contractor for an international shipping company who was captured and held hostage by rebels in […]

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Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Trump

Feature Article by , June 2, 2017

I’ve changed my mind. For a while, I was anti-Trump. Then during the first days of the administration, I flirted with being anti-anti-Trump. Then for a while I was in the anti-anti-anti-Trump camp. But gosh darn it, I’m fed up with the anti-anti-anti-Trumpers, so now I’m anti-anti-anti-anti-Trump. So wait, where does that put me, exactly? […]

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The Global Warming Doomsday Cult

Feature Article by , June 1, 2017

So what are the consequences of Donald Trump pulling America out of the Paris Agreement on climate change? Bad news: the planet is going to die. No, really. That’s what the left is actually claiming. Scientific American tweeted out a photo of the Earth made into a barren wasteland as a result of this one […]

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Guns and the Monopoly on Force

Note by , May 30, 2017

The Objectivist corners of the Internet have been lit up recently by some new comments from Yaron Brook (executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute) about the Second Amendment and gun control. I’m not going to take on these comments in much detail because they strike me as offhand, flippant, and offensively arrogant—you really have […]

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More Science Without Numbers

Feature Article by , May 29, 2017

Recently, I noted the basic pattern of science reporting on global warming, particularly as practiced by the New York Times: feeding you an overall conclusion, illustrated with pretty pictures designed to make you feel like you’ve been given information—but withholding from you the real numbers you would need to actually evaluate and understand the issues. […]

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