Social Insecurity: It’s Not Wrong to be Concerned about Facts

2024-02-13

Recently, South Africa evoked opposition in some quarters by bringing a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice on the account that the latter is perpetuating genocide against Palestinians. Israel’s response to the terror of Hamas has been widely denounced by the mainstream press, but irrespective of the legitimacy of South Africa’s claims, this matter has brought South Africa to the forefront of public discourse, and as such, an examination of the country is necessary.
South Africa is a country mired in social and economic turmoil. After the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994, many thought that the nation would embark on an era of sustained prosperity, but this ambition failed to materialize. Instead, the African National Congress became so enmeshed in corruption

2024-02-10

A Michigan jury this past week convicted Jennifer Crumbley of “involuntary manslaughter” after her then-fifteen-year-old son Ethan shot and killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School in 2021, using a gun that his parents had given to him as a present. Ethan had suffered from depression and other mental health issues before his deadly actions, and hindsight obviously tells us that he should not have been given a gun in the first place, but the issues this trial and verdict create go well beyond any discussion of parenting.
Most media accounts of the verdict concentrate on the shooting itself, Jennifer Crumbley’s actions or inactions, and the reactions of the jurors and one of the parents whose daughter Ethan had gunned down. None asks a more important question: Did Jennifer

2023-11-14

The TSA has been promising to end its boneheaded ways for more than 20 years. Flying out of Dallas International Airport last week, I ruefully recognized that all TSA reform promises are malarkey.
As I neared the end of a TSA checkpoint line, I saw two women loitering behind a roped off section for CLEAR, a new biometric surveillance program that works with 35 airports and coordinates with TSA. CLEAR involves travelers standing in photo kiosks that compare their faces with a federal database of photos from passport applications, driver’s licenses, and other sources. The Washington Post warned that airport facial recognition systems are “America’s biggest step yet to normalize treating our faces as data that can be stored, tracked and, inevitably, stolen.”
Though the CLEAR program is

2023-11-11

My grandfather used to sing to me, “Good, better, best / never let them rest / till the good is better / and the better is best.” I appreciated that lesson and have been applying it to try to make sense of a recent bill signed by California governor Gavin Newsom. While the bill may be the result of Newsom’s grandfather singing to him about “bad, worse, and worst,” I have determined it is more likely a case of bad/worse/worst economic thinking. It exposes a level of bad that most economic teachers likely never bother to discuss.
AB 1228 is an unusually precise and dramatic bill related to the minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage in California is $15.50 per hour. This bill raises the minimum wage to twenty dollars per hour for employees who specifically work in fast-food restaurants

2023-11-09

The impending decline of the dollar is apparently imposing a real Halloween scare on the American foreign policy establishment. An August 22, 2023, article on the Council on Foreign Relations website entitled “The Future of Dollar Hegemony” explained that 
the dollar’s global hegemony gives the U.S. government power to impose crippling sanctions and wage other forms of financial welfare against adversaries. . . . In 2022, more than twelve thousand entities were under sanction by the Treasury Department, a more than twelve-fold increase since the turn of the century. U.S. sanctions . . . do ensure that targeted adversaries pay a significant price for continuing to engage in actions the United States opposes (emphasis added).
This reminds yours truly of a very memorable bumper sticker that