His intransigent fight against surveillance will define his legacy.

Jeff Tucker on the identical fascism peddled by both Democratic and Republican candidates.

From the article, writing on Sanders and Trump:

“…they agree on the need to protect and enlarge state power. Neither accepts any principled limits on what the state may rightfully do to the individual. Even on big issues where one might think they disagree — healthcare, immigration, and control of lands by the federal government — their positions are largely indistinguishable.

And yet, they and their supporters loathe each other. Each considers the other an enemy to be destroyed. This is not a fight about power as such but about in whose service it will be used.

Most of their supporters don’t see it that way, of course. They imagine themselves to be rebels fighting power itself, however they want to define it: Wall Street, the party establishment, the paid-off politicians, the bureaucracy, the billionaires, the foreigners, the special interests, and so on.

But notice that neither attacks government authority as such. Both aspire to use it and grow it for their purposes.”

From FEE: “The U.S. Postal Service lost nearly $5 billion this past year, according to its just-released year-end financial results. As in recent years, the agency did not make the legally required $5.7 billion payment to its Retiree Health Benefits Fund. The agency is $15 billion in debt and legally prohibited from borrowing additional funds. The unfunded portion of its retiree-health-benefits obligation is $54 billion…

…to date, Congress has proven wholly incapable of thinking big about what sort of USPS we need for the 21st century and beyond. For the past five years, lawmakers have feuded among themselves about what to do. Neither the House nor Senate has voted on any of the postal-reform bills that have been introduced.

Much of this paralysis is driven by the forces of the status quo. Postal unions (one of which has endorsed a socialist for president) and liberal romantics deny an existential problem exists. These same individuals often propagate the myth that the USPS would be doing just fine were it not for the mandate that it prefund its health-care benefits.”

USPS has been dying for awhile now, and a public sector union only hastened its demise.  Time to abolish it and allow UPS and FedEx to profitably deliver everything.

And the rise in prosperity that will follow.

They’re voting for Sanders instead.

FEE’s B.K. Marcus exposes it.

A few days old, but interesting.  Sumitomo Chemical, associated with Monsanto, created a larvicide to combat mosquito eggs in the public drinking water tanks.  An outbreak of microcephaly ensues, so a story that Zika, a mosquito-borne illness, is the culprit is circulated in the mainstream media.  Almost a win-win, had those irritating Argentine doctors not searched for the truth.

Interesting write-up at RealClearPolicy.  Why is anyone opposed to the vaping revolution?  This technology is becoming by far the most effective means for smokers to finally quit, when gum, patches, and shaming on the part of their family, friends, and the public failed.  Former smokers sound like born-again Christians when evangelizing the virtues of vaping.  They can breath again, smell again, and their family isn’t forced to tolerate the stench of combustible tobacco.  Federally-subsidized shame campaigns, paranoia over Big Tobacco, the specter of breathing out of a neck tube and sounding like a robot, all these tactics have failed.  But where they have failed, vaping is succeeding.  But, as with any free market-innovation that has benefited public health to any measurable degree, its become the object of a ludicrous witch hunt.

From the New York Times.  What Bernie is proposing would require at least a 50% increase in the federal government, or a larger government buildup than what happened just before World War 2.  So try to imagine a Deluxe version of what we currently have to put up with.  Does that sound as enticing as all the free stuff Bernie is promising?  Not so much.

From the article:

“By the reckoning of the left-of-center economists, none of whom are working for Mrs. Clinton, the proposals would add $2 trillion to $3 trillion a year on average to federal spending; by comparison, total federal spending is projected to be above $4 trillion in the next president’s first year. “The numbers don’t remotely add up,” said Austan Goolsbee, formerly chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, now at the University of Chicago.

Alluding to one progressive analyst’s criticism of the Sanders agenda as “puppies and rainbows,” Mr. Goolsbee said that after his and others’ further study, “they’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.””

But hey, free stuff!

From the Washington Post comes this article: “A mini world war rages in the fields of Aleppo”

A slice: “Syria’s civil war long ago mutated into a proxy conflict, with competing world powers backing the rival Syrian factions almost since the earliest days of the armed rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad.”

A better question would be: why is the United States arming murderous rebels against Assad?  The political class is begging for a wider World War, it seems.