In Federalist Paper #30, Alexander Hamilton argues that the new American government must possess unrestrained power to impose taxes to support all the basic functions of that government – particularly the power to raise and supply an army or militia. He mentions building fleets and paying debts, but most of his examples deal with the […]
Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” John Stuart Mill: “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally conservative.” H.L. Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” The fact that a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent cretin […]
H.L. Mencken wrote, “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen […]
Historians have argued that New Journalism “degenerated” into Yellow Journalism because the lofty, idealistic goals of New Journalism were quickly subsumed into sensationalistic pabulum as newspapers tried to out-do each other for advertising revenue. With so much competition between the newspapers, stories were over-dramatized and altered to correspond to ideas that publishers and editors thought […]
Donald Trump believes only HE can solve America’s many problems. At least he believes in something, right? Come to think of it, Adolf Hitler believed in something, too. Quite fervently, if memory serves. It was something really fucking awful, but he sure as hell believed in it. So did enough other people… But this is […]
The USA was one of the world’s greatest mass social experiments; the only country to come into existence as a fully-fledged democracy, “By the People, for the People.” America was the land of the free, home of the brave; a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah… Sadly, America isn’t […]
The US century of American economic and political hegemony is collapsing right before our very eyes. Like so many of history’s past empires, petty idiocies and hubris appear to be accelerating this inevitable decline. The real winner in all this chaos is China. Xi Jinping only has to follow Napoleon’s famous advice: “Never interfere with […]
Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is appointing himself chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adding that he is immediately terminating multiple people from the board of trustees as well as the current chair. Since President Trump made the announcement, his minions have been busy creating an exciting calendar […]
It’s a pattern historians have seen many times before: It starts with the quiet dismantling of oversight and the abolition of regulations, and it ends with institutions that serve only those in power. The US used to have strong institutions and a vigorous vocal opposition; but seeing these government watchdogs being summarily dismissed should make […]
No doubt 2025 will be another banner year of record profits for the US weapons makers and multinational oil companies. Even though US troops aren’t currently engaged [officially] anywhere, the war machine still raked in trillions of dollars in profits supplying military operations in Israel and Ukraine. Apparently there is no power in heaven or […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 