September 11 is not an event in the past but a warning for the future New at the Belmont Club
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How we lost the future
Because we “know it already”. New at the Belmont Club
US vs China
The Communist Party of China vs the Western elites. New at the Belmont Club
Simulated reality
“I would never lie to you.” We’ll know the truth in the future. New at the Belmont Club
Who would fardels bear
The “shock of confinement” makes the newly arrested more likely to commit suicide than the convicted. One reason why jails have a higher suicide rate (46 per 100,000 in 2013) than prisons (15 PER 100,0001) is that people who enter a jail often face a first-time “shock of confinement”; they are stripped of their job, …
Terror without trust
In a society without external reference the question is not what is right or wrong but who has the most powerful social network. New at the Belmont Club
The 10 ships revisited
In 2010 I argued in The Ten Ships that al-Qaeda was not rooted in a place but in a transnational agenda with a system of support. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence …
The China Challenge
Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events. Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American …
Arms and the man
What drives mass killings outside of war — besides weapons? New at the Belmont Club I will describe how to extract data from online HTML tables on wretchard.com in some future post.
The Scandal of Money
I am reading George Gilder’s The Scandal of Money which has so far proved tremendously interesting not in the least because it coincides at many points with my own earlier thinking as set forth in the pamphlet War of the Words. Gilder examines money as information and asks, correctly, whether it conveys truth about the …
No way back
Anne Applebaum warns things aren’t going back to normal and that’s good news. New at the Belmont Club
Mein Kampf and Mao’s Red Book are morally the same
Ukraine’s Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow. In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the “communist and Nazi regimes” used similar methods of “implementing repressive state policies.” “The communist …
Continue reading “Mein Kampf and Mao’s Red Book are morally the same”
Driving ourselves nuts
How the death of privacy and the ideology of taking offense is creating a feedback loop of pure noise. New at the Belmont Club
Belonging
The space we inhabit is already delimited by many boundaries described by membership. Private airline lounges are closed to economy travelers at airports. The doors to restaurants, hotels and shops are effectively shut to illegal aliens and poor people who go to San Francisco. The deceptive absence of physical walls belies the fact there are …
When politicians accidentally tell the truth
Hard choices emerge New at the Belmont Club
Our fragile world
Megacities are immensely fragile because complexity is only prevented from descending into chaos by the order provided by massive quantities of energy. The power outage in Manhattan is a reminder that civilization cannot function for more than a few hours without electricity. What will happen in a 5G, Internet of Things world if the whole …
The Empty Earth
Green energy like any other form of power generation will require large installations to produce. The land devoted to windfarms, solar energy arrays and biofuel cultivation, not to mention tidal generators will grow as the population increases. Since “Green” Satanic Mills must ultimately replace the old Satanic Mills with facilities of comparable or even more …
The travails of a virtuous elite
When you can’t trust the self-advertised only adults in the room. New at the Belmont Club
They Were Expendable Part 2
What would happen to the Philippines if a naval conflict broke out with China? A blockade of China would be conducted from the Indian ocean and the final line would be at the Malay barrier bounded by the Lombok, Sunda and Malacca Straits. That would be outside the range of Chinese area denial systems. The …
To end fatphobia, we need to dismantle Western civilization
“sizeism is affected by racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, and she counsels people against intentional weight loss.” Philadelphia Inquirer