EU – Bumbling Bees

And now: Libertommunists!

25 May 2018 by Darien Sumner

I trust you’ve heard about the new "GDPR" edict recently pronounced by the savages in Brussels. In case you haven’t, here’s the skinny: it stands for "General Data Protection Regulation," which means that it’s exactly as communist as the acronym "GDPR" makes you think it is. The long and short is that the European Union — read: a bunch of feckless bureaucrats in Brussels — now asserts that it has the authority to control exactly what data literally every entity in the world collects and what is done with it. Because, you know, safety and that.

Apparently, the level of monstrous totalitarianism on display here just isn’t sufficiently obvious to disabuse fashionable libertarians of the notion that arrogating huge amounts of power to a tiny cabal of criminals will be just aces for freedom and liberty.

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Last Week in Weird

24 April 2017 by Darien Sumner

Vive la France!

The ongoing comedramedary that is electoral politics has entered its next season, as the French presidential elections have completed their first round of combat. As expected, right-wing hate fear fascist nazi Hitler Trump white privilege patriarch poopyhead Marine Le Pen has made it to the second round, as has "centrist" Emmanuel Macron, an international banker and former member of the Socialist Party. No points for guessing which one George Soros is paying college students to riot for. Further research: what does "antifascistes" mean in French? It is a mystery!

Macron is expected to mop the floor with Le Pen in the runoff, and this is not predicted to be anything like the way Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with Donald Trump, nor the way "remain" mopped the floor with "leave" in the British EU vote I still refuse to call "Brexit" because honestly that’s hideous. We all know that the two things that are always and everywhere honest and correct are elections and electoral polls, so I’m sure that will remain the case.

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Last Week in Weird

6 March 2017 by Darien Sumner

Public service

It’s been only a few short weeks since the eight-year horror that was the Obama administration gave way to the new and exciting horror of the Trump administration, but I bet you’d already forgotten about Joe Biden. No, admit it, you forgot. Well, uncle Joe’s been a busy man, starting a new career for himself at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’s been named the "Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor," a gigantic mouthful of syntax stew with no clear meaning. What does it mean to be a professor of "presidential practice?" Does the University of Pennsylvania have a "Being the President" major? Was Benjamin Franklin ever president? These questions, and many more, are in need of answer.

Don’t ask the university, though; they’re as clueless as we are.

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Secession and the Political Elite

25 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to use the awful word-ish "Brexit." It’s not that I’m opposed to portmanteaux just in general, mind you; it’s just that "Brexit" is positively hideous. It’s neither clever nor funny, it certainly isn’t the least little bit mellifluous, and the two words don’t even join together properly. At least when everybody was saying "Grexit," ugly as it was, the two words actually did have a letter in common — "Brexit" is bits of two utterly dissimilar words artlessly smooshed into each other to no good effect whatsoever. The worst thing about it is that it’s completely soured me on "Texit," which on its own would be sort of clever and cute.

That’s not what I came to talk to you about today, though. I came to talk about prediction markets. Michael Rozeff had been watching the prediction markets on the British secession question for some time, and only a few days ago, they had "leave" at only 36 cents, to 64 cents for "stay" — in other words, the markets had stay nearly 2:1 over leave. This was directly in contrast to the opinion polls, which were reporting an expected leave victory.

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Last Week in Weird

6 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

Trash talk

Former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson won the Libertarian Party presidential nomination last week, beating out John McAfee, Austin Petersen, and a host of other people, most of whom were vastly more libertarian and all of whom were vastly more entertaining than Gary Johnson. I’ve had unkind words for Austin Petersen in the past — and no doubt will again in the future — but in the aftermath of Johnson’s victory, he was all class, pledging to support the nominee anyhow, and presenting him with a fine gift: a replica of George Washington’s personal flintlock. A clearly emotional Petersen informed Johnson that "you have my sword, and you have my gun" as he delivered the gift, in a touching moment no doubt intended to unify a Libertarian Party fractured by an unusually acrimonious primary season.

Gary Johnson then threw the flintlock in the trash.

Apparently, Johnson was "frustrated" that Petersen only pledged him unconditional support and also gave him a valuable and symbolically-charged keepsake and also clearly attempted to unite the party behind the nominee. This, in Johnson’s eyes, was insufficient penance for Petersen’s great sin: he is skeptical of Johnson’s hilariously unlibertarian running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld.

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