The first premise of Adam Smith’s famous metaphor about an “invisible hand” leading individuals to promote the public interest, although they intend only private gain, was that there is only so much work to go ’round. That is, Smith assumed there was a certain quantity of work to be done — a “lump of labor.” […]
Stranded Assets Rewind There’s a Dangerous Bubble in the Fossil-Fuel Economy, and the Trump Administration Is Making It Worse… “In reversing many of Obama’s keystone climate and environmental policies, Pruitt and Trump are conveniently ignoring these market signals in order to help out the fossil-fuel millionaires and billionaires who put them in office. Their actions […]
United States Code Title 18 § 227 #TakeAKnee
Noah Smith has written a column at BloombergView, “Don’t Believe What Jeff Sessions Said About Jobs,” which scolds Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “terrible economics.” That may be a bit like carping about Charles Manson’s hairstyle or critiquing David Duke’s academic integrity. But there is something far more dangerous going on with Smith’s knee-jerk invocation […]
Now may be a good time to remind people that there can be bad arguments for good causes. There may even be good arguments for bad causes. Sessions is wrong: The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian […]
First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn’t resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn’t have a permit…
Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites? The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the […]
Jeet Heer has posted a timely and excellent essay at New Republic titled “Trump’s Racism and the Cultural Marxism Myth.” In his essay, Heer recounts much of the background to the Higgins memo that I have documented here, here and here. Heer credits William S. Lind as the major popularizer of the myth, as have […]
The word ‘narrative’ appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, “POTUS and Political Warfare.” Guys, it’s time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, […]
Atlantic: An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo Esquire: This Is Pure, Unadulterated American Crazy Foreign Policy: Here’s the Memo that Blew Up the NSC Mother Jones:You Should Read the “Maoist Insurgency” Memo. It’s Bananas Wonkette: Of Course Trump Loves This Fucking Bonkers NSC Memo Calling For Civil War Back in 2011 after mass murderer Anders […]