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Trump's decision to ignore his military advisors and withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan is a disastrous proposal. ISIS will regroup and come back in full force, Christians and Kurds in the Middle East will be slaughtered, and Islamic extremism will rule the Middle East perpetually. Trump bowed to Erdogan's will and agreed to withdraw troops. Erdogan is a supporter of Islamic terrorism and racist Arab nationalism. The only reason he wants America to withdraw from the region is so that Turkey can resume its genocide against the Kurds, which was halted when the U.S.

In the 1990s, Norway set up the equivalent of what would have been "the mining tax", the public accumulation of a wealth fund to capture resource-based superprofits.

This is a good read. This is a more traditional conservative take on healthcare. I don't know to what extent we can turn back the clock and go back to guild and concierge approaches, although it would be best if we could do so. I sympathize with single-payer because it seems the simplest and most feasible solution...but then again, maybe something more conservative/libertarian would be easier to get support for in America.

On the night of the 2018 US mid-term elections there were many saying that the expected Democrat 'blue wave' over the Republicans did not eventuate. Nicholas Kristof at New York Times offered the advice "Don’t listen to Democrats who portray these midterms as an important triumph".

It's striking that conservatism has a philosophy of history that is almost dialectical materialism, but dialectical materialism with some supernatural guiding light—although, the supernatural element is inconsistent here. Conservatism is rooted in Platonism, and therefore sees all "progress" as degradation and decay. Burke's philosophy of history, Santayana's, Henry Adam's—they're all basically dialectical materialist. And they seem to agree with Marx, liberalism (capitalism) is inevitably leading us towards socialism. Of course, unlike Marx, they view this as a bad thing.

Trump has laid the foundation for conservative politicians to start talking about scrapping Social Security and Medicare. Billionaires were bailed out during the Bush and Obama eras, when government borrowed from Social Security to subsidize and bail out rich folks. Trump has permanently cut taxes on the wealthy so that his rich friends don't have to pay back the money they took from Social Security.

Since 2002 the Reclaim the Radical Spirit of the Eureka Rebellion Celebrations Committee have organised these celebrations on Eureka Day - 3rd December, in Ballarat.

Since 2005 the Committee has awarded six Eureka Australia Medals at Bakery Hill, Ballarat (the site where the Eureka Oath was taken in 1854) at 10:00am on Eureka Day, 3rd December.

The EAM is awarded to people whose political or community activities reflect the principles embodied in the Eureka Oath which was sworn by miners and their supporters at Bakery Hill, Ballarat on the 29th November 1854 –

I'm very irritated with basically everyone who had anything to do with the current mess at the border.

The Trump administration spent millions of dollars preparing for the arrival of the caravan. The fact that it's only been able to process 60-100 applicants per day is embarrassing. For a small fraction of the amount we spent deploying the military, we could have hired a bunch of temp workers, given them some basic training, and had the infrastructure in place to process the large number of asylum applications we knew were on their way.

Ayn Rand sucked at life. Her books were garbage and no one loved her, not even Rothbard. Also, "If there's one thing that will not be tolerated here, it's imprecision of language."

Harvey Beardman (Atlas in the metaphor) is the businessman with the world on his shoulders, so he decides to shrug off moral obligations and pursue "the virtue of selfishness." Atlas shrugs, ignoring the ecological impact of his actions and engages in selfish profit-seeking at the expense of the environment and the community.