News Story of the Day: this week, the media made a big deal about two things: Russian dressing isn’t really Russian and United States Vice President Mike Pence respects his wife.
The media dug up a 2002 profile of Karen Pence, the VP’s wife. The profile discovered that Mike Pence is a husband who never eats alone with a woman and will not attend events without his wife if they feature alcohol. Soon after this was reported, the left became outraged and went as far as accusing him of being sexist and promoting rape culture. (What is interesting about the linked accusations is that it cites Mitt Romney’s “binder full of women,” but conveniently leaves out former U.S. President Barack Obama’s binder full of women).
To the wacky left, respecting your wife is now rape culture and sexist! For all of Pence’s faults, like supporting the Iraq War and planning to launch a state-run, taxpayer-funded news service for Indiana, this isn’t something to criticize. You should always respect your wife, and personal relationships are exactly that: personal. Besides, politics is a nasty business so if you’re alone with another person it is easy to be accused of something that never happened.
Chart of the Day: when U.S. President Donald Trump complains about manufacturing companies firing American workers because they want to hire cheap labor, he should look at the real cause of job losses in the manufacturing sector. As the chart below suggests (courtesy of The Economist), it is the growth of industrial robots, and this trend is also happening in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Germany and Sweden.
Illustration of the Day: just how big is the world’s population? This illustration (courtesy of Visual Capitalist) provides a simplified glimpse into how massive each nation’s population really is. To no one’s surprise, China and India take up a huge part of the globe.
Quote of the Day: this week, we learned that Trump’s right-hand man, Steve Bannon, doesn’t like Austrian economics or limited government Republicans (do those exist?). Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, wrote a brilliant piece talking about this. Here is one juicy excerpt:
“Finally, there’s the old “not living in the real world” chestnut. How many times have libertarians heard this one? All around us are the almost unimaginable benefits of markets, cooperation, and technology, yet somehow we’re naïve if we don’t want to funnel human activity through government cattle chutes. The vast material and digital abundance we enjoy every day is provided without any state apparatus, in fact in spite of that apparatus. Is this private world not part of reality? Government is the artifice, and statists are the utopian dreamers who imagine that individuals acting under the magical banner of government can plan, coerce, and coordinate millions of lives. Realpolitik, Bannon’s idea of real-world governance, created a pile of several million bodies in the 20th century. If that’s the real world, perhaps it’s time to give libertarian theory a try.”
Tweet of the Day: if you watch CNN all day long, you would assume that the U.S. is the most innocent nation in the world and that it does nothing wrong. Of course, if you just look back to the last 15 years, the U.S. has launched several wars, interfered in several foreign elections and spied on pretty much everyone (but Russia is the great enemy). This is a great tweet from WikiLeaks that sums it up:
U.S. government spends 90% of its cyber budget attacking people and only 10% on defense. pic.twitter.com/ZPJNOQv43n
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 31, 2017
Video of the Day: a piece of trash is not art. An empty canvas is not art. Someone twerking is not art. Thankfully, Paul Joseph Watson went into great detail about how modern art is absolutely rubbish. Here is the video embedded below:
–AM
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