Grasping in Glasgow
Now that the Conference of the Parties 26th Summit on climate change (known colloquially as COP26) is over we can see how the world leaders are responding to a threat deemed by the summiteers to be existential. Various pundits pointed…
Executive Order 14036
On July 9th, the Biden Administration issued Executive Order 14036, “Promoting Competition in the American Economy. It takes a “whole of government” approach to improve our free market capitalist system. Citing the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and the New…
The Taxman Returns
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing. – Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s Finance Minister, 1665 The most recent $2 trillion tax…
Crossing the Political-Economic Divide
How do entrepreneurs assess political risk? Other than Mark Zuckerberg, do they even think about it? Are technology companies and social networks on the side of the populists? Division is in the air. Everything I read and everything I hear…
Candidate Intersectional Rankings*
It is common practice in today’s political environment to carefully profile the essential nature, or intersectionality, of the candidates to establish a fundamental sense of their legitimacy. This encompasses not only the legitimacy of their political beliefs, but, more broadly,…
The Internet and the Long Tails of Political Discourse
Nearby is a graph of a standard normal frequency distribution. It was created with a random number generator but these types of distributions are also very common in nature. For example, if you count the kernels on the cobs from…
The Affirmative Action President
I live in Kenya. This weekend President Obama visited with his extended family and government officials. His presence got me thinking about his struggles as President… On October 9, 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee voted to award the Peace Prize…