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Tag Archives: straight line logic
The Exponent Problem
The Exponent Problem 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192… Most people find managing their own affairs sufficiently challenging. Earning a living, establishing a family, rearing children, saving for college and retirement, and dealing with illness and aging fill the days and leave little time, attention, or energy to […]
State Property
State Property Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal wrung from the trauma of the 1930s a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, including the Social Security Act, new banking and financial laws, regulatory legislation, and new opportunities for organized labor. Taken together, these reforms gave a measure of security to millions of Americans who had […]
The Aristocratic Illusion
The Aristocratic Illusion They’re not as smart as they think they are. If you draw your sustenance from the government—as an employee, contractor, or beneficiary of redistributed funds—the money you receive comes from someone who had no choice whether or not you got paid. Except for those jobs the government mandates, private sector workers’ compensation […]
By Imperial Decree
By Imperial Decree A dangerous expansion of presidential power has gone virtually unnoticed. Trump’s supporters can’t believe their man’s primary motivation is acquiring power. Trump’s enemies, other than Senator Feinstein, can’t believe how good he is at it. Neither side will recognize the real danger until it’s too late. Legions of worrywarts fret that an […]
The Kids Are Not Alright
The Kids Are Not Alright Debt initially dazzles and deceives, then it disappoints, disillusions, devastates, and destroys. The thing governments do best is borrow. Performance varies across the range of their purported functions—warfare, maintenance of public order, provision of goods and services, redistribution, regulation—but they all go into debt. The structure of governments and their […]
Pay Any Price, by Robert Gore
Pay Any Price, by Robert Gore Empires get stupider and more corrupt as they age. Why are US Green Berets, four of whom were recently killed, in Niger? Why does the US have at least 36 bases, outposts, and staging areas in Africa, located in 24 countries? Why does a website, TomDispatch, have to file a […]
You’re On Your Own, by Robert Gore
You’re On Your Own, by Robert Gore ichef.bbci.co.uk If the world seems incomprehensible now, just wait. Within a twenty-four-hour span the Catalonian people voted 90 percent in favor of secession from Spain, despite the Spanish government’s effort to violently squelch the referendum, and a man in a Las Vegas hotel room opened fire on a concert, […]
Humor is Where You Find It, by Robert Gore
Humor is Where You Find It, by Robert Gore Looking for a good laugh? Consider the United States. Football is a tedious game that fills three-and-a-half hours of airtime with 30 minutes of action, commercials, commentary, instant replays, more instant replays, closeups of pretty cheerleaders, and halftime pageantry. The players are paid great gobs of money […]
So Deep, It’s Sunk?
So Deep, It’s Sunk? If you strike the king but do not kill him, by definition your position is weak. There has never have been a deeper deep state than the Soviet Union’s. It controlled everything: the military, intelligence, the judicial system, the rest of the government, the press, and the economy. It operated in […]
Cataclysm
Cataclysm Collapse generally comes as a surprise, even to those who predict it. The USSR didn’t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: “Your daily […]
Start Dealing
Start Dealing Empires have one historical constant: they fail. President Trump likes deals and campaigned on his deal-making prowess. Negotiation requires parties who respect each other enough to bargain in good faith. It is a lost art in US foreign policy, replaced by imperatives: we tell you what to do and you do it. This […]
How to Defeat Your Government
How to Defeat Your Government In a recent article, “How to Defeat Your Enemies,” SLL maintained that governments and their people were natural enemies, and that the most powerful adversarial tactic is “getting one’s enemies to fool themselves.” The article detailed the effective use of this tactic by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The […]
