Monthly Archive: March 2016

As if that were hard.

A few hours after my doctor told me that my third pregnancy was going to end with a third miscarriage, I was standing in front of a class of college freshman leading a discussion...

Although Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’sterrorist attacks in Brussels, they were also symptoms of a profoundly Belgian failure. The institutions of a well-policed and efficiently governed state have been evaporating for decades.

Belgium has been torn by the demands of its warring Flemish- and French-speaking communities. At the same time it has been squeezed by an ambitious European project that subsidized and empowered the country’s regions at the expense of the state. Belgian institutions were left hollowed out, impotent to address the strains of immigration and incompetent to penetrate a rising extremist threat.

This is at root a story of failed investment in all forms of capital — physical, human and institutional. For election cycle after election cycle, politicians squandered the wealth of the state to buy their way back to power. Investment became superfluous, vote-buying and social spending the priority. Belgian voters, who allowed this state of affairs to persist, share some of the blame.

From: Belgium, My Country, Is in Denial – Bloomberg View

An actor who played a bit part in an independent gangster film is facing 10 years in state prison because he used a prop pellet gun without a state gun permit. Carlo Goias, whose...

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a bill Thursday that will increase educational choice for parents and students in his state. The Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs Act, passed by the state legislature...

What happens when you introduce an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter? Well, it’s kind of predictable – you get an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot. Developers at Microsoft created...

“That’s the dilemma for the press. In any previous election, if the Republican presidential front-runner had threatened a rival’s spouse, journalists wouldn’t have had to think twice about covering the incident. They would have known that highlighting such crass behavior would force the candidate to pay an appropriate price. They would have felt — quite rightly — that they were fulfilling an obligation to inform the electorate, which, being composed of sensible and decent people, would react with disgust.

From: Should a Free Press Ever Be Self-Limiting? Open Thread – Blinded Trials II

Thankfully, the world will not be ending anytime soon.