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the real world

Friday,  07/18/14  09:26 PM

I've been happily working away on my new company, watching Le Tour and the World Cup, but meanwhile in the real world, things are not good.  In fact, they're very not good.

Of course this morning's tragedy was not good; pro-Russian militants in Ukraine shot down a passenger jet (or possibly, the Russian military).  Depending on your point of view, this was an isolated disaster, a mistake, or an unfortunate consequence of letting the situation in Ukraine escalate into badness.

But there is a lot more which is not good.  Our President is refusing to enforce our immigration laws, exacerbating an already difficult situation.  I'll have more to say about the need for having borders and restricting immigration, but I'll just note that few of us would let strangers come and live in our homes, no matter how sympathetic we might be to their plight.

Broken US foreign policy is also responsible for another slow motion train crash, the situation in Gaza, which has unfolded with brutal moral clarity.  That anyone thinks the Palestinians can govern themselves after the ongoing disaster there is difficult to imagine, and that anyone blames Israel for defending themselves against senseless aggression is even harder.

This has happened against a backdrop of incredible news about our government: spying on civilians, spying on foreign governments, IRS subversion and lying, and a general disregard for the law.

And the economy?  We pissed away $7B for a stimulus which expanded our government tremendously but did little to actually stimulate anything; unemployment remains high, our economy remains stagnant, and we have an incredible new debt load to service.  The bill for Obamacare has yet to be paid, and the Medicare time bomb will soon explode.

I'm generally optimistic and under-react to things, but it is hard to disagree with Victor Davis Hanson: in Obama's America "scandals now come so fast that each new mess makes us forget the previous one".  Let's hope we all don't forget how this all unfolded the next time we visit the ballot box.