“Do you remember the internet in ’96?” a silent television display asks in Facebook’s quintessential Klavika font during an ad break. The sound of a dial-tone connection shrieks out of the television and captures the attention of the casual viewers who have turned elsewhere or to social media during the intermission. At a blistering 2021…
The disaster that was 2020 is finally over. Now it’s time for the inevitable post-mortems. First and foremost, the COVID-19 pandemic posed enormous challenges to American institutions, and continues to do so. Frankly, we were not prepared. We need to diagnose what went wrong, so that we are never caught unaware like this again. Fortunately,…
On Monday, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley continued his quest to crush Big Tech by releasing a radical plan to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Hawley proposes replacing the FTC’s five-member commission with a single Director, who would report directly to the Associate Attorney General in the Department of Justice (DOJ). His plan would also…
Joakim Book The British science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke gave rise to three iconic laws, where only the third has, as we say in the twenty-first century, gone viral: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This law can be easily illustrated by some early first contacts with isolated human tribes. In several…
Should city governments dictate where you can shop for food? If your neighbors see a need for a store, and happily patronize it, should outsiders shut down that option? These are the battle lines of the emerging movement against dollar stores. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mesquite, Texas, Dekalb County, Georgia, New Orleans, Louisiana, and other municipalities nationwide…
The desire to control other people’s ideas and behaviors, particularly when they challenge widely-held beliefs and customs, is one of human nature’s most nefarious tendencies. Socrates was sentenced to death for stepping out of line; Galileo almost was. But such extreme examples are outnumbered by the many more common, pernicious acts of trying to control…
Liberty is sometimes a tough thing to watch. Like the teenager in a horror movie getting up and going to the kitchen while the audience braces itself for what they know full well is going to happen, it’s hard to stand by and watch our friends and strangers alike exercise their right to make choices…
Chris White Ireland is fast-tracking legislation that will effectively ban all gas-powered vehicles within a decade, leaving customers who are buying cars in January confused about what to do next, local reports show. The country’s Climate Action Minister Richard Bruton plans to publish the Climate Action (Amendment) Bill 2019 enforcing such a ban, the Independent.ie reported Monday….
In April, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, proposed banning the popular video game “Fortnite,” saying it was irresponsible to allow kids to play it. “The game shouldn’t be allowed,” said the former bad boy prince. “It’s created to addict. An addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible….
Conservative Christians on Twitter have flown the coop, displaying a rather disturbing side of themselves with outcries of support for strict regulation of the porn industry by the Trump administration. As previously reported by The Libertarian Republic, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire wrote an op-ed defending why the federal government should regulate pornography. I…