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Hacking at the Twigs of Evil
Post #1839 • July 25, 2019, 9:52 AM • 2 Comments
I have come to feel that all politicians are buffoons. At issue is only the quality and degree of buffoonery.
One of my state senators aspires to be president. She professes economic nationalism, one with a family resemblance to the current president's, though filtered through her progressive sensibilities. She has thus coughed up economic hairball after economic hairball during the course of her political career. Recently she put out a proposal to break up something called "Big Tech." The parts that aren't wholly misinformed are patently bonkers, and I say so at The Federalist.
The current president's economic thinking is not much better. Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux makes regular and well-informed arguments to that effect. But my senator's rationale is a greater order of error, a hubristic presumption of detailed knowledge regarding how to tweak the economy to perfection. This is an ancient conceit. Her very case for interventions makes it clear that she possesses no such knowledge.
If this is not the sort of thing that you come here for, please have a look at this recent painting.
2.
July 25, 2019, 2:54 PM
...how about some art that responds to the subjects you bring up?
Sketches have been made. I typically end up walking away from them. I may finally be too much of an aesthete.
I'd like to know where you (or Warren) are on Apple in all of this.
I'm a Linux user and I stay out of Apple's walled garden. I would also like to know where Warren is on Apple. Or Wal-Mart. Or, especially, Boeing.
I have participated in one and only one public protest, and it was on behalf of the Fourth Amendment. The new attorney general all but read the riot act to the encryptors. These are dire times. In the meantime, get off of Facebook, yesterday. Their business model is to give you a bad social media environment and in return you agree to let them harvest your brain.
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Doug Bowker
July 25, 2019, 1:22 PM
Well, it probably wasn't the "sort of thing" I expected, but how about some art that responds to the subjects you bring up? Plenty of history for "that sort of thing," no? Nice portrait though. I like that despite the image being an almost a flat illustration in terms of color and shading (like printing almost), it has enough three-dimensional texture as to be its own landscape of sorts.
You make some interesting points in your Federalist essay. I'd like to know where you (or Warren) are on Apple in all of this.
Before we even get to anti-competitive issues we need to address with "Big Tech," we should deal with the myriad ways that each and every consumer/citizen is now being tracked and his data sold. State and local police are keeping car location data indefinitely. Of course pretty much all of it is still getting collected and stored by the NSA. If I recall there was something about unlawful search and seizure not being okay in the US Constitution.