Angela Merkel: The Forever Chancellor

written by · May 10, 2017 5:56 PM

The Forever Chancellor

It’s time to admit there’s a chance Angela Merkel will be chancellor of Germany forever. Her only real rival in terms of political longevity on the world stage is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who of course isn’t subject to democratic laws of gravity. But Merkel has defied so many such laws over the course of her career that it’s hard to know if there are any that still apply to her, including the most basic — that power plus time equals public fatigue.

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Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization

written by · May 08, 2017 11:25 AM

Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual—as opposed to the collective—in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought—as opposed to mysticism and superstition—as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

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The real reasons why Trump has flipped on his campaign promises

written by · May 08, 2017 11:06 AM

It is important to note that Trump was placed in office as a means to scapegoat all conservatives and the principles of sovereignty and limited government for the disasters that will inevitably follow. This is the premise that I used to successfully predict Trump’s election win, and it is the premise that I used to successfully predict Trump’s behavior and policy shifts up to this point. Trump is in office for one reason — to destroy the name of conservatism for all time.

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HACK JOB: How America Invented Cyberwar

written by · May 05, 2017 11:15 PM

In the future, the United States must use its cyberpower judiciously. Every conflict poses the risk that one party will make a mistake or overreact, causing things to veer out of control. When it comes to cyberwar, however, the stakes are particularly high for the United States, as the country’s technological sophistication makes it uniquely vulnerable to attack.

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WHY THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT MUST LIE IN ORDER TO MANIPULATE THE MASSES AND FURTHER ITS AGENDA

written by · May 04, 2017 8:02 AM

Without ruse, there can be no progressive project — as was true in the past of any illogical and unappealing ideology. In short, you gotta lie.

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The past, present, and future of design in Silicon Valley

written by · May 04, 2017 6:34 AM

Until very recently, success in Silicon Valley required focusing almost single-mindedly on an organization’s technical prowess. It meant having an unimpeachable technical founder, 10X engineers, a relentless devotion to computing dominance. Expending valuable time on anything else — particularly design — was evidence of distraction from the real work of the company. But things have changed dramatically in just a few short years, and increasingly, design has become as indispensable as technology.

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Venezuela Is Heading for a Soviet-Style Collapse: A few lessons from the last time an oil economy crashed catastrophically.

written by · May 04, 2017 6:21 AM

Venezuela is not the first developed country to put itself on track to fall into a catastrophic economic crisis. But it is in the relatively unusual situation of having done so while in possession of enormous oil assets. There aren’t many precedents to help understand how this could have happened and what is likely to happen next.

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The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Automobiles and the Myth of "Green" Electric Vehicles

written by · May 04, 2017 5:45 AM

Electricity is a specialty product. It's not appropriate for transportation. It looks cheap at this time, but that's because it was designed for toasters, not transportation. Increase the amount of wiring and infrastructure by a factor of a thousand, and it's not cheap. Electricity does not scale up properly to the transportation level due to its miniscule nature. Sure, a whole lot can be used for something, but at extraordinary expense and materials.

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North Korea's Despot Kim Jong Un Is a Survivor, Not a Madman

written by · April 28, 2017 6:10 AM

Kim Jong Un Is a Survivor, Not a Madman

North Korea’s system might look bizarre to us from the outside, but the Kims are the ultimate political survivors, hard-edged rationalists whose actions have always had a clear purpose: keeping the family in power. Seeing them as madmen is not only wrong, but also dangerous; any successful policy should be based on understanding the logic of the opposite side, not on discarding it as “irrational”. Seeing the Kim family as lunatics with nukes makes them more threatening, and raises the risk of war, but it can also promote unrealistic expectations of compromise — if only the North “comes to its senses.”

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Germany's Political Culture is a Parody of Blind Self-Regard: How one country’s moral narcissism became the rest of the world’s intolerable smugness.

written by · April 28, 2017 5:53 AM

Germany Has an Arrogance Problem

Whether the field is migration or manufacturing, fiscal policy or renewable energy, Germans increasingly believe that they, and they alone, know best, at least judging from the attitude newly on display everywhere from newspaper columns to parliamentary speeches to barroom chats over beer. In German the phenomenon is summed up in one word: Besserwisserei, a know-it-all attitude, which the Germans themselves admit is somewhat of an engrained cultural trait.

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Chelsea Clinton: The Clinton Machine Pushes the Vapid Daughter Onto the American Public

written by · April 28, 2017 5:35 AM

Hasn't Bill Clinton been fellated enough? Chelsea Clinton, most recently lionized on the cover of Variety, is a 37-year-old multi-millionaire who has never uttered an interesting word about any subject at any time during the course of her life. Judging from the evidence of her public statements, she has never had an original thought — it isn’t clear that she has had a thought at all. In tribute to her parents, she was given a series of lucrative sinecures, producing a smattering of sophomoric videos for NBC at a salary of $600,000 a year. She later went more formally into the family business, leaving her fake job at NBC for a fake job in her parents’ fake charity. She gave interviews about how she just couldn’t get interested in money and bought a $10 million Manhattan apartment that stretches for the better part of a city block.

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What a war with North Korea would probably look like

written by · April 22, 2017 11:56 AM

North Korean working men

Why is an aimless quagmire war with massive potential global financial repercussions more likely under Trump? Because Trump ran under a nationalist conservative banner, and he will forever be labeled a nationalist conservative even if his behavior appears to be more globalist in nature. Rhetoric is often more psychologically powerful in the minds of the masses than action. Therefore, everything Trump does from now on will also be labeled a product of the “nationalist conservative” ideology; including all of his screw-ups. And, with Trump in office the establishment is perfectly happy to pursue actions once considered taboo, because demonizing conservatives and liberty proponents is one of their primary objectives.

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India is a Disaster – Is Kashmir Gone?

written by · April 22, 2017 11:41 AM

After 70 years of so-called independence, one has to be a professional victim not to look within oneself for the reasons for starvation, unnatural deaths, utter backwardness, drudgery, disease, and misery in India.

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Crimintern: How the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks in Europe

written by · April 20, 2017 10:41 PM

The Russian state is highly criminalized, and the interpenetration of the criminal ‘underworld’ and the political ‘upperworld’ has led the regime to use criminals from time to time as instruments of its rule. Over the past 20 years, the role of Russian organised crime in Europe has shifted considerably. Today, Russian criminals operate less on the street and more in the shadows: as allies, facilitators and suppliers for local European gangs and continent-wide criminal networks.

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FACEBOOK AND THE COST OF MONOPOLY

written by · April 20, 2017 10:28 PM

Content providers are an obvious example: Facebook passed Google as the top traffic driver back in 2015, and as of last fall drove over 40% of traffic for the average news site, even after an algorithm change that reduced publisher reach. So is that a monopoly when it comes to the content provider market?

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Alien Knowledge: How machines are advancing to the point that they can think in advanced ways that we cannot comprehend

written by · April 20, 2017 10:17 PM

We are increasingly relying on machines that derive conclusions from models that they themselves have created, models that are often beyond human comprehension, models that “think” about the world differently than we do.

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Donald Trump: The unlikeliest populist

written by · April 19, 2017 10:27 PM

Despite his wealth and privilege, Trump perhaps was able to channel his own past frustrations with bureaucrats, condescending Palm Beach country clubs, corrupt New York City officials, and liberal community activists into sympathy for those often neglected in Middle America. Trump, for all his glitzy lifestyle, exuded an empathy for his own workers, and, by speech and comportment, he seemed more at ease with his carpenters and electricians than with his bankers. And for those who accused Trump of being precisely what he was railing against, he often countered that all the better he knew how to fight such corruption firsthand.

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THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT'S SECRET PLAN FOR SURVIVING THE END OF THE WORLD

written by · April 16, 2017 12:22 AM

Newly declassified CIA files offer a glimpse of the playbook the Trump administration will reach for if it stumbles into a nuclear war.

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SMARTPHONES ARE THE NEW CIGARETTES

written by · April 16, 2017 12:09 AM

The same way second-hand smoke harms the lungs of people around the smoker, smartphones harm the attention and focus of people around the smartphone user. It hijacks our senses. It forces us to pause our conversations and redouble our thoughts unnecessarily. It causes us to lose our train of thought and forget that important point we were constructing in our head. It erodes at our ability to connect and simply be present with one another, destroying intimacy in the process.

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WAR, TERRORISM, AND THE CHRISTIAN EXODUS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST

written by · April 16, 2017 12:01 AM

The West’s War on Middle East Christians | New Eastern Outlook

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

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Without ruse, there can be no progressive project — as was true in the past of any illogical and unappealing ideology. In short, you gotta lie.

After 70 years of so-called independence, one has to be a professional victim not to look within oneself for the reasons for starvation, unnatural deaths, utter backwardness, drudgery, disease, and misery in India.

We are increasingly relying on machines that derive conclusions from models that they themselves have created, models that are often beyond human comprehension, models that “think” about the world differently than we do.

Newly declassified CIA files offer a glimpse of the playbook the Trump administration will reach for if it stumbles into a nuclear war.