Extreme as Duterte’s provocations may be, they resonate with deep-set anxieties in the Philippines. The rule of law is weak and the police and the courts are widely considered  by citizens to be unreliable and corrupt. Last year, a national pollfound that even while the rate of crime victimization was falling, the sense of insecurity continued. While the Philippines is far from being a narco-state, the trade in methamphetamines is brisk and conducted in the light of day, and the government is seen as helpless to curb it. Across the country, both poor and middle-class families are concerned about drug addiction, yet the traditional political elites have mostly been indifferent to it, failing to address festering problems of law and order. Little wonder that Duterte was cheered on when he vowed to pull out all the stops in the war against drugs.

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

The morality of government is a study of the mindset of the politicians and bureaucrats. It is a study of philosophical and moral character. It is a study of the motives and methods of achieving political power through deception. All we have to do to see cause and effect is to know the morality of government. Conclusions that we reach guarantee that we can know their thoughts and predict their behavior. What greater mental capacity could we have toward the achievement of liberty? What greater asset can we own than to know the character and thought processes of criminal politics?

China has failed to curb excesses in its credit system and faces mounting risks of a full-blown banking crisis, according to early warning indicators released by the world’s top financial watchdog. A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

We don’t really know how big North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is, or will be once the “standardized” warheads are deployed to the missile forces. But its not a small number, and certainly not just a handful. It’s a nuclear force, one that poses a threat to South Korea, Japan, and U.S. forces in the region. And it’s likely to keep growing.

Mr. Rogoff’s theses are best seen not as detached scientific analysis but as a kind of left-wing crotchet. Strip away the technical pretense and what you have is politics. The author wants the government to control your money. It’s as simple as that.

The prime Alinskyite supposition is that "all life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity." One might — in fact, one should — mouth various nostrums about the welfare of children, access to healthcare, etc.; one might rail against inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., but at the end of the day, politics was all about the acquisition of power and life was all about politics. This seems to me to be an accurate epitome of the Clintons' modus operandi.

U.S. policy toward its allies really is “obsolete,” as Trump termed NATO. The United States remains remarkably secure and faces no serious—let alone existential—threat akin to that formerly posed by the Soviet Union, the enemy that most U.S. alliances were formed to oppose. Moreover, Washington’s Asian and European allies are prosperous and industrialized states that are more than capable of protecting themselves.

The arrest of the head of global foreign exchange cash trading at HSBC bank may shed new light on suspicions the Clinton Foundation has been involved in illegal offshore money-laundering operations on a massive scale.

The world has slipped into an economist’s version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: a place where normal rules are turned upside down and nothing can be discounted.

The Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie. The idea that the U.S. is experiencing an epidemic of racially driven police shootings is false, and dangerously so. Several studies released this year show that police officers are less likely to shoot blacks than whites.

What if everything you've heard about income inequality is wrong? What if it's actually a good thing for there to be people who are rich and people who aren't? John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, clarifies one of the big misunderstandings of our time.

Bill Whittle provides shocking evidence that demolishes the central, Big Lie of Black Lives Matter and then goes on to explain why a lie that size needs to be told by people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch.

Apparently, if you object to the alienation of voters, to the stretching to the breaking point of the link between the sovereign citizen and the government—between rulers and ruled—then you are self-pitying milksop, a loser in the meritocratic war for money and status who has brought this upon himself. These critiques of Trump voters, which are arrogant when they’re not merely condescending, offer a good insight into the disconnect between voters and elites.

It is a matter or record. Americans now populate the largest, wealthiest and most powerful banana republic in the world. The differences between Obama’s America and Maduro’s Venezuela are defined only by degree. The defining characteristics of banana republics are a matter of history. First, the law is not enforced against a chosen class in a banana republic, usually the allies of the autocrat in charge. Second, foreign policy is always performed in the autocrat’s interests and often in disregard of the nation’s actual interests. This describes how America functions in the era of President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Everyone has been dinged by the Federal Reserve -- on purpose and by design, I will repeat -- in order to transfer wealth and purchasing power to:

• Big banks

• The government

• Entities with large stock (equity) holdings

• The wealthiest 0.1%

• Speculators

• Borrowers (the heavier the better)

• Well-connected insiders whom the Fed tipped off in advance

Brazil has rarely had it so bad. The country’s economy has col­lapsed: since 2013, its unemployment rate has nearly doubled, to more than 11 percent, and last year its GDP shrank by 3.8 per­cent, the largest contraction in a quarter century. Petrobras, Brazil’s semipublic oil giant, has lost around 85 percent of its value since 2008, thanks to declining commodity prices and its role in a massive corruption scandal. The Zika virus has infected thousands of Brazilians, exposing the frailty of the country’s health system. And despite the billions of dollars Brasília poured into the 2014 World Cup and this year’s Olympic Games, those events have done little to improve the national mood or upgrade the country’s urban infrastructure. Meanwhile, many of Brazil’s long-standing problems have proved stubbornly persistent: half of all Brazilians still lack access to basic sanitation, 35 million of them lack access to clean water, and in 2014, the country suffered nearly 60,000 homicides.

But Brazil’s biggest problems today are political.

China is not a $10 trillion growth miracle with transition challenges; it is a quasi-totalitarian nation gone mad digging, building, borrowing, spending and speculating in a magnitude that has no historical parallel. So doing, It has fashioned itself into an incendiary volcano of unpayable debt and wasteful, crazy-ass overinvestment in everything.  It cannot be slowed, stabilized or transitioned by edicts and new plans from the comrades in Beijing. It is the greatest economic train wreck in human history barreling toward a bridgeless chasm.