Justice Ginsburg Warned Court Packing Was a “Bad Idea” — Here’s Why You know there is something profoundly wrong with the Supreme Court appointment process when the dying wish of an 87-year-old Supreme Court Justice is “not to be replaced until a new president is installed.” One thing is clear: the last thing an already dangerously... Read More...
Is America on the Verge of Another Civil War? The 20 Million Die-Hard Trump Supporters Who Could Start a Second Civil War. Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash War is the continuation of politics by other means, Carl von Clausewitz said. The same holds true for civil war. A recent Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public... Read More...
7 Dumbest Mistakes of Wannabe Presidential Assassins Since the Secret Service was charged with protecting the President only one President has been assassinated. Most wannabe Presidential assassins don’t really need the Secret Service to prevent them from killing the President, though. They are perfectly capable of... Read More...
Alt-Left: The New Bigot On The Block Liberals have grown alarmingly intolerant towards people espousing views at odds with their own. Oppose Black Lives Matter and you are immediately accused of being a racist, voice reservation against Muslim immigration and you are a fascist, oppose abortion and you are a... Read More...
Why we are not in a post-racial society after eight years of Obama Eight years ago, many hoped, declared even, that with the election of the first black President, America would finally enter a post-racial society. In hindsight, it seems silly to believe that centuries of institutionalized slavery, segregation, degradation and... Read More...
Zero Hour Workweek: Why the era of big government is only just beginning We are on the cusp of a seismic socioeconomic shift, one even bigger than the Agricultural Revolution that began 12,000 years ago and which transformed human societies from hunting and gathering to farming. Bigger also than the Industrial Revolution that began around the... Read More...
Why liberals should accept the election results and move on By demanding an audit and recount of the presidential election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Green Party nominee Jill Stein and the Clinton campaign are playing into the narrative that the elections might have been manipulated and that Donald Trump might... Read More...
The US and EU, Divided They Stand Before last week, the last time large-scale demonstrations had broken out against a President-elect who had secured a clear-cut victory was in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election with virtual no support from the Southern States. Things were a... Read More...
Is Civil War Brewing in the Democratic Party? For weeks, it appeared the Republican Party was headed for imminent civil war. Eminent Republicans disavowed their own presidential nominee, Senators and Representatives seesawed, there were the #NeverTrumpers and the #RepublicanwomenforHillary. It seemed all but certain... Read More...
The Man Who Already Knew He Would Be President What if Donald Trump already knows he will become the 45th President of the United States? What if, after watching The Simpsons episode “Bart to the Future”—which actually predicts a Trump presidency—he has slowly but certainly become... Read More...
A Lesser Evil Dear undecided progressive millennial, You are in a tough spot. For you, the presidential election effectively ended when the fiery septuagenarian from Vermont and his political revolution were defeated by Hillary Clinton and her army of super-delegates. She has... Read More...
After November 8, The Issues Will Remain If Donald Trump loses the election on Nov. 8, he will not have lost it on the issues. He will have lost it because he made fun of disabled people, insulted a Gold Star mother, fat-shamed a Miss Universe, was caught on audio tape giving his views on genital grabbing... Read More...
How Putin Will Win the US Election The last time a large part of the electorate refused to accept the clear results of a presidential election, it triggered the start of the Civil War. And although another civil war is unlikely, the chance that the results of this year’s presidential election will not... Read More...
Why a Terrorist Attack Could Make Trump President Let’s not beat around the bush. This is no ordinary election, it’s a battle for America. We have two very different presidential candidates, who are selling two very different visions of the kind of America we had in the past, the kind of America we have right... Read More...
Who Would Benefit The Most If Donald Trump Were Assassinated? Earlier this year, a mentally disturbed British national tried to assassinate Donald Trump by grabbing a police officer’s gun at a Trump rally in Las Vegas. Like most mentally disturbed would-be assassins, he failed. (...) But although the chance... Read More...
Who would replace Hillary Clinton if she withdraws? The news that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has pneumonia, immediately kicked off speculation about what would happen if Clinton needs to be replaced for health reasons. It would also be the first time in more than 220 years of U.S. presidential history that a... Read More...
This is Not Just a Race Issue - It's a Gun Issue 990 people were shot dead by the police in the United States in 2015. I know your first question. How many of them were black. But that shouldn’t be the first question. The first question should be: why so many? In Germany, a country of 80 million people, it was 8. In the... Read More...
The Traveling Book - Gift it Forward A book wants to be read. It wants to travel, experience new things, meet new people. No book wants to be bought, half-read, and then spend six months on a nightstand with a bunch of other half-read books, before being put away at that place where books go to be forgotten,... Read More...
Why Republicans want a Constitutional Convention and Democrats should not be Afraid of it When you are faced with a no-win scenario, there are only two ways to avoid losing: refusing to play or changing the rules. Realizing they are losing the battle for (their kind of) America, Republicans — perhaps mindful of what transpired 150 years ago — have begun... Read More...
Is YouTube Enabling Child Exploitation? There is a 5-year-old girl on YouTube who unwraps surprise eggs for a living. Well, not her living, but it must be a pretty good living for her parents, because some of her videos have logged over 20,000,000 views. That’s right, 20 million views. There are also two... Read More...
Want to Own a Gun? Join the Militia! There is no point in trying to convince a junkie that drugs are bad. Even if he agreed, he’d still want to keep using. And he probably won’t agree. He’ll say that drugs are only bad if you don’t know what you’re doing. That he has it under control, that there are... Read More...
Now That Same-Sex Couples Have a Right to Marry, Should States Have a Right to Divorce? On June 26, 2015, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that marriage is a Constitutional right for straight and gay people alike, meaning individual States must recognize it, whatever the convictions of (the majority of) their respective populations.1... Read More...
Diary of a History Book Writer: How to Ram Through a Constitution USA Style In September 1786, twelve delegates of five states met at a tavern in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss how to fix the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The main problem was that almost all executive, judicial and legislative power was wielded by the... Read More...
Diary of a History Book Writer: Anatomy of a Footnote On October 31, 1786, George Washington wrote a letter to one Henry Lee in defense of a stronger federal government. The letter contained an excellent quote for my book, showing how momentum was building up for replacing the Articles of Confederation - the first U.S.... Read More...
Why We Need a United States of Europe and the 9 Steps to Get There Many European citizens may still cherish the idea of being from Germany, France, Spain, Italy or the Netherlands, but in reality Europe is already a country, they just don’t know it yet.1 In particular the nineteen countries that share the euro are far less sovereign than... Read More...
Germany had Already Lost World War I Before it Began After the German army had begun its retreat to the Aisne River on September 9, 1914 (following its defeat at the first Battle of the Marne), Helmuth von Moltke, the German Chief of Staff, told Emperor Wilhelm II: „Majestät, wir haben den Krieg verloren!" (Your Majesty,... Read More...
The Uncomfortable Truth about the Banality of Evil I just watched Generation War, A German miniseries about the lives of five young German friends in the throes of World War II. In Germany, the series - whose original title, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Our mothers, our fathers), is considerably more personal and... Read More...
Uncivilization “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to... Read More...
Does Crimea have the right to self-determination? 20 Maart 2014 Referendum on Sunday, independence on Monday, annexation on Tuesday. This week Crimea rushed back to Russia. Was it all legal according to International Law? Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was. In a speech on March 18, before signing the treaty with... Read More...
That Wall 5 November 2009 IN NOVEMBER 1989, weeks -days even- after the Berlin Wall had fallen, my brother went on a week long excursion to Berlin with his history class. Senior year, 18 years old, traveling from Holland to Berlin, Germany, where it was all happening. The Germans, who never partied, never did anything spontaneous,... Read More...
Mao China, Where did it Go? 21 September 2009 IN A FEW DAYS, it will be 60 years since the Communist Party of China (CPC), led by Mao Zedong, established the People's Republic of China. After a civil war that had lasted 22 years and was only interrupted so both sides could fight as allies in another war (against Japan, from 1937-1945) -talk about a... Read More...
Survivor: Total Annihilation Edition 21 May 2009 As the famous quote from the movie Fight Club goes: "On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero." True though this may be (how can we ever know for sure?), some people have beaten remarkable odds; twice. First, by utterly defeating -and subsequently annihilating by proxy- those other 150... Read More...
One Last Story from the Dutch Underground 22 April 2009 Here's one item that could have made the Dutch news 66 years ago: "Man found dead this morning in the village of Staphorst. He was shot in the head 7 times. The police has reason to believe it is the work of subversive elements wanting to overthrow the government. Chief of police Oberst Rattenhauer... Read More...
A Strange Year For Democracy 2 November 2009 THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, it will be exactly 1 year since Democracy celebrated one of its more promising victories, when the United States elected as its President a black man who campaigned on positive change. This year, so it seems, democracy hardly has reason to party at all (if not mourn over lost... Read More...
Towards a new Islamic Golden Age 3 September 2009 Summer break is over, and while Western countries are preparing for widespread outbreaks of the Mexican flu in schools and universities, the Iranian regime seems to be preparing to combat an even more elusive virus, believed to be going around Iran's universities: independent thinking. Last Sunday,... Read More...
What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us 10 August 2009 Last year's presidential elections evolved around health care, the war in Iraq and the economy. Republicans wanted to keep government out of health care, in Iraq and out of the economy. In other words, the Iraqi people should be helped (whether they wanted to be or not) GoldMan Sachs, A.I.G and Morgan... Read More...
Islam and the Summer of '09 9 July 2009 IS 2009 GOING TO BE the summer of Uyghur and Iran? Are the Muslims waking up to a revolutionary era of their own? Are they warming up to the ideas of certain inalienable rights, democracy and the rule of law? Hard to say. The revolutionary process knows several stages, and the Iranians only just... Read More...
The Next Roman Empire 16 July 2009 There is a new Rome on the horizon, fixing to dominate the world for centuries to come. And like all the other Romes before, it's hungry. Hungry for commodities like oil, steel and grain, hungry for cheap money to fuel its fast growing economy, hungry for respect. A little over 30 years ago, Mao was... Read More...
How Close Did We Come To Tyranny? 27 July 2009 On Oct. 23, 2001, less than 6 weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the US Justice Department wrote a memorandum justifying the use of the military on domestic soil. The memorandum was already declassified last March, but only a couple of days ago it became known that in 2002, top Bush administration officials... Read More...
China's Brave New World 11 June 2009 REVOLUTIONS MAY BE inspired by philosophers, they are started by the commoners. By the ones who've got nothing to lose and everything to gain; laid off factory workers, students without career prospects, soldiers fighting an endless war they don't understand. The only time people really stand up to... Read More...
Young Iranians Storming Their Bastille 16 June 2009 THERE ARE TWO KINDS of fake democracies: 1) the no-choice democracy 2) the all-you-can-cheat democracy The no-choice democracy is democratic in every way, except when it comes to letting the people decide. They get ample opportunity to vote, polling stations have generous opening hours and scores of... Read More...
The Virus of Absolute Power 22 June 2009 MAYBE IRAN'S SUPREME LEADER, Ayatollah Khamenei, is right. Maybe there was no voter fraud, no election rigging of any kind. Maybe President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really did get 62% of the vote. Maybe the millions that have marched through the streets of Iran are wrong. Seriously, they could be. But it's still no... Read More...
Islamism 200 Years From Now 14 May 2009 Ask people to look 200 years into the future and they will all describe a world very different from today. Many will talk of great achievements, since we've always been a very optimistic species. (unlike chimpanzees, who always seem to have something to bitch about). Space exploration and colonization... Read More...
Would You Bomb Iran? (if you were Israel) 28 May 2009 When Donald Duck is asked to play for Duckburg in an epic baseball match against Goosetown, he asks inventer Gyro Gearloose to invent a bat that cannot miss. There's a lot riding on the game, because Duckburg always loses from Goosetown and this time they desperately want to win. So Gyro, also a citizen of... Read More...
A Constitutional Twitterocracy? 20 April 2009 For all our talk about individual freedom, humans are very easily lured into following others. This has often hurt us more than it helped, but for many, following still beats thinking. Also, not following has frequently meant being beaten, or worse. (you're right, still does) If I'd ask an Afghan... Read More...
5 Reasons Tibetans Beat the Uighurs 30 April 2009 A couple of months ago I read about the Uyghurs for the first time. Their story made such an impression on me, that when I wanted to tell a friend about it a week or so later, I could hardly remember any of the details. Such is the tragedy of the Uyghurs and their struggle for freedom. The... Read More...
Cao Ni Ma (and then some) 12 March 2009 IT'S THE WORLD'S LARGEST CYBER COMMUNITY and yet most of us know almost nothing about it: China. When I first discovered the internet I thought it would revolutionize people living under authoritarian regimes. Dictators would be exposed, people would educate each other at lightning speed, Muslim... Read More...
Walking With Dinosaurs And Burqa's 6 July 2009 THE CREATION MUSEUM in Petersburg, Kentucky, has dinosaurs and man living side by side. According to the Museum, Earth and the Universe are a little over 6,000 years old and were created by God in six days. The dinosaurs died out around 2348 B.C, because of the worldwide flood that God sent as punishment for... Read More...
Helping the Germans Win the War 13 July 2009 SOMETIMES I CAN'T HELP but wish the Germans would have won the war. I'll be the first to admit it wasn't very nice of them to systematically mass murder all those Jews, gays, gypsies and mentally challenged people. Not very nice of them indeed, even bad. But so is a France run by the French. ... Read More...
Four Generations Alive and Kicking A couple of months ago, my grandfather showed me an old photograph of this big band he played in as a young man. Spontaneously pulled it out of the inner pocket of his jacket while my grandmother was making tea in the kitchen. A hidden treasure, about the size of a postcard. "Look, this is me" he said, pointing at a... Read More...
Dutch Bike in New York 21 April 2009 Riding a bike has become all the rage in New York. Seems very logical. It's cheap, healthy and good for the environment. All very good reasons, except that they have nothing to do with the real reason. You can buy a used bike in Amsterdam for 10 Euro (50 if you don't want to buy from a junkie who... Read More...
The Most Beautiful Starbucks in Paris 28 April 2009 I love my morning coffee at the Starbucks just around the corner. Well, around a couple of corners. We also have a Starbucks that's really just around the corner -who doesn't- but the one on Boulevard des Italiens is very beautiful, almost palace like, whereas the one just around our corner is very common,... Read More...
Does Twitter Breed Sociopaths? 15 April 2009 When cinema started to become popular early 20th century it almost immediately unleashed a wave of moral and religious panic. In numerous surveys and reports cinema was held responsible for the growing moral decay, notably among the young. Magistrates even sentenced young offenders "not to enter a 'picture... Read More...
Planet Hunters 23 April 2009 Humans love to hunt. We've hunted creatures far bigger, faster, and sharper nailed than ourselves. We didn't stop there either. Twisters and hurricanes, guilty people and innocent ones, shadows and dust; you name it, we've hunted it (and them). And now a new kind of hunter has risen to rule. One who... Read More...
A Silent Revolution 6 March 2009 Yesterday CNN had their weekly interview with somebody called 'The Data Doctor' but who looked more like a date doctor. When visualizing a data doctor (and isn't image everything?) I see a bearded or badly shaven man who looks like 40 but is in fact not yet 30. He wears glasses, because even though... Read More...
Welcome to the Financial Interbellum 12 October 2009 A couple of months ago, an old and dusty word turned young and hip in a matter of days. Traditionally, this word would mostly conjure up images of coupon shopping, of wives who save pennies in jars and of putting on an extra sweater because the house is so cold. In short, the kind of word you wouldn't want... Read More...
Controlling The Beast 24 September 2009 With the G20 gathering in Pittsburgh today, every man and dog is putting in his or her two cents on how to "get to those banks" (as one -less subtle- liberal radio host put it). How to "cap those bonuses" "eliminate the bonuses", or, my personal favorite, how to "claw back the bonuses" (note to self: idea... Read More...
The New Magic Word 19 March 2009 WHEN THINKING OF THE MIRACLE of the Industrial Revolution, I think of great steam engines with ovens hotter than hell, stoked by the kind of men that would have today's soft ass guys for breakfast. I think of Grey-black smoke, vomiting out of the pipe of a shiny black locomotive in a continuous stream. I... Read More...