There’s no world in which Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president. Republican elites don’t want him, Republican donors don’t want him, and if—through some cosmic fluke—he managed to win a major primary, every strategist and activist in the Republican Party would turn their aim toward him and his candidacy.
But just because Trump is an unqualified vanity candidate doesn’t mean he’s unimportant in the story of the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Unlike Chris Christie or Mike Huckabee—two vastly more legitimate candidates—Trump is popular with Republican voters. A new CNN national poll puts him in second place in the GOP field at 12 percent support—seven points behind the leader, Jeb Bush—while recent polls from Iowa and New Hampshire also show him with a second place spot in those crucial early contests. If Trump holds his position, he’ll be on stage with Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio when official debates start in August (he could even lose some support and still make the cut).
The obvious question is “Why?”—why does Trump have a hold on this thick slice of the members of the Republican base? The answer is, unlike the professional politicians in the race, Trump is—from his views on immigration to the “issue” of Obama's citizenship—one of them.
The World Food Programme (WFP) will halve the value of food vouchers given to Syrian refugees in Lebanon this month and may cut all help for the 440,000 Syrians in Jordan in August, the cash-strapped UN agency has said.
Islamic State-linked militants struck Egyptian army outposts in the Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday in a coordinated wave of suicide bombings and battles that underlined the government's failure to stem an insurgency despite a two-year crackdown. Security officials said dozens of troops were killed, along with nearly 100 attackers.
It has been a consistent thesis of mine that the Internet Revolution, which I believe has only just begun, will prove to be in the long run just as transformative as the Industrial Revolution. In other words, it’s not only that we would become more productive; it’s that society as we know it would be fundamentally changed. How, though, hasn’t been entirely clear: if the industrial revolution moved us from subsistence farming in the countryside to factories in cities, where might we go next?
I increasingly believe that it is the sharing economy that is beginning to reveal the answer: a world of commodified trust has significantly less need for much of the infrastructure of modern society, including inefficient sectors like hotels whose primary differentiator is trust, along with the regulatory state dedicated to enforcing that trust. On the other hand, this brave new world has brand new holes through which people can fall: those who have lost trust, or do not have the means to build it. I’m no crazy libertarian; quite the opposite in fact: we need a significantly stronger safety net and a judicial system predicated on arbitration.
The nature of assets changes as well, and not just hotels: as more houses — and rooms — are offered as a service, the definition of ownership begins to shift. This will clearly first play out in automobiles: the long-run promise of Uber is a world where few own cars and few cars sit idle. This will impact not just auto-makers but insurers, dealers, repair shops, and more. More profoundly, it will affect people. We will be less tied down, more willing to move, especially if our work becomes just as transactional as our possessions. And that, ultimately, will change the way we relate to each other, just as the shift from the small knit community in the countryside to the chaos of the city upended everything we thought we knew about how individuals, communities, and governments interacted.
Just because the future is coming into focus, though, doesn’t mean the road there will be smooth. Once again it is Paris giving us a glimpse of the convulsions along the way: taxi drivers upending cars, setting them on fire, terrifying passengers, all in the pursuit of a world as it was. And for now it seems they have won the battle: the French government is taking action to curtail UberPop. The war, though, is only just beginning, and one desperately hopes said reference to war — in contrast to the climax of the Industrial Revolution — remains figurative.
The outage began at 5:00am in Iraq and lasted until 8:00am, based on data from Dyn Research. According to the Egypt-based Arabic news service El Hadas, the outage corresponded to "the start of the sixth ministerial preparatory exams"—the national tests for entry into junior high school. In Iraq, education is only required for all students up to the sixth-grade level; those who fail to score well enough on exams at the end of the sixth year generally don't continue their education.
With that kind of high-pressure testing, the motivation for cheating is high as well—so high that the government decided to shut down Internet access to prevent parents or others from remotely assisting students during the exams. It's not clear whether the brief outage today (which lasted about an hour, starting at 5:00am again) was also connected to testing.
Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation, California on Tuesday barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization.
The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.
Of course, the economics behind the programme that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.
Let’s talk about weddings first. As a lover of freedom and equal rights, I am delighted that the Supreme Court rewrote the Constitution (essentially) to give all adults the contractual and legal rights of marriage.
But I couldn’t find a way to celebrate. For starters, as an old boss once said, “You don’t get a prize for doing what you’re supposed to do.” What actually happened here is that the country stopped being awful in one particular way. So, what is the right way to celebrate the cessation of being awful? As a member of the oppressor class in this situation (albeit not personally) I choose to recognize this great advance for humankind with fewer rainbows and more humility. My people (the straight majority) created a problem that should not have existed in the first place. And it took five non-elected people to fix that situation. Our government failed hard on this issue, even though I like the end result. I can’t be proud of the system in this case. But I do like the fact that when it came down to respecting the Constitution – a document made by slave-owners hundreds of years ago – the majority of the Supreme Court decided to ignore it and make up whatever argument got them to a more-equal world.
