NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vox Trump, Vox Populi Why raising the debt ceiling is an especially revealing moment in our democratic politics. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

Donald Trump’s deal with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling for three months and fund $15 billion in disaster relief has delighted the Dems and infuriated Republicans. “Trump got rolled!” was the refrain, said in disgust by one side and exultation by the other, since the Dems gave up nothing for the deal. The president seemed to rub salt in the Republicans’ wounds when he called the Senate minority leader and House minority leader “Chuck and Nancy.” The old NeverTrump claim that Trump is neither a true Conservative nor a Republican appeared prescient.

Leaving all that aside, the move probably will satisfy a majority of voters. The vote in the House before the meeting was 316-90, suggesting that the most democratic branch of government, and hence most accountable to the people, had an idea that such a move is what the people want. Later, the presumably more sober and judicious Senate agreed with an 80-17 vote. The old lesson of democracy is still valid: politicians succeed by giving people what they want. Ignoring vox populi is a surefire way to get tossed from office.

Raising the debt ceiling is an especially revealing moment in our democratic politics. The problem is critical: Common sense and simple mathematics tell us our runaway debt, deficits, and entitlement spending will in a few decades hit our economy like a Cat 5 hurricane. But the electorate’s fondness for these programs makes them nearly untouchable.

Nearly two-thirds of the annual budget goes to “mandatory” spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on $20 trillion of debt, along with some of the 83 social welfare programs. This spending will continue to grow as the population ages and interest costs return to normal levels. Social Security illustrates the problem. Its unfunded liability for the next 75 years is $12.5 trillion, an increase of 166% from just ten years ago. Social Security is losing money every year, $54 billion in 2016. In ten years that deficit will reach $215 billion in real dollars. Today, the “trust fund” financing the program is made up of Treasury debt, which means the feds have to borrow more money or raise taxes when the bonds are cashed in to pay recipients. It’s sort of like using one credit card to make a payment on another.

If left unreformed, programs like Social Security and Medicaid will hit the demographic wall: right behind the 75 million Boomers are nearly 76 million Millennials. Increasing longevity means that benefits for more people will be paid out for more years. We can’t grow ourselves or tax ourselves out of this looming disaster. Programs have to be reformed (higher employee contributions and retirement ages, and means-testing benefits), and more importantly, cut.

This problem is well known, amply documented, often decried, and seldom addressed meaningfully. Deficit and debt hawks blame politicians for pandering to the people, especially Democrats who think the “rich” don’t “pay their fair share,” and have secret vaults of money they’ve unjustly finagled from the people, even though the collective wealth of the country’s some 540 billionaires couldn’t fund the federal government for one year. Weak-kneed Republicans go along, afraid of their constituents and the progressive media that will Scrooge them royally every time a modest reform––such as cutting just the rate of increased spending for a program––is put on the table.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Unknown Girl – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

If the Dardenne brothers were filming in English instead of French, it would be easier for critics to admit that The Unknown Girl is a Christian soap opera in which a young idealistic doctor discovers that everyone harbors a secret which is just another version of sin. Whether it’s jealousy, vanity, pride, lust, theft or murder, we’re all guilty and one sure way of atoning is to choose a life of service to the poor and downtrodden

In an early scene, we see Doctor Jenny tending to the infected foot of an overweight elderly diabetic – no gloves for this saintly woman, nor do we see her wash her hands before sitting down to have a snack with her patient. This is but a preamble to her taking on the role of detective to solve the mystery of a young murdered girl’s unknown identity. Jenny will venture into some rough places on her own; she will stand up to shady characters, she will put herself in harm’s way even when it makes little sense. Questioning a man who has procured a prostitute for oral sex as to whether he got her name would be instantly laughable in American English but gets a pass as a sub-title. Would Carmen have been as desirable or successful if her name had been Ms Sonia Perez?

At one point, I had hopes that the Dardenne boys were about to admit that the doctor’s naivete was more disruptive than helpful in a scene where the police complain that her treading on their turf complicated their own investigations and antagonized their inside stool pigeons. Unfortunately, they quickly reverted to some pat scenes of guilt and atonement and our heroine ends on the high note of helping an elderly patient negotiate some stairs. If you like your whodunnits garnished with piety and unlikely remorse, see The Unknown Girl. If you don’t need moralizing with your murder/mystery, especially in French, skip this one – c’est un dud.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“We need to have a transparency revolution. In as real time as possible, citizens, We The People, need to engage and review that spending, and hold our elected officials accountable for their decisions.” Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

Watch the C-SPAN interview, click here.

Adam Andrzejewski discusses OpenTheBooks, a watchdog organization he founded that tracks government spending at the federal, state, and local levels.Brian Lamb’s inquiries dug into our OpenTheBooks’ mission, vision, data capture and oversight reports. It’s a robust body of work that we are very proud of – there was a lot to discuss over the course of an hour.

In the interview, we had an opportunity to tell our organization’s story from the beginning and explain the vision behind our lifelong commitment to government oversight.

Have you ever wondered how OpenTheBooks conducts its oversight? Adam Andrzejewski explained the process we use to hold government accountable.

Brian Lamb asked hard questions about our federal oversight reports. Here’s a list of our reports covered in the interview:

Ivy League, Inc. – The government’s $42 billion subsidy of the Ivy League schools. Watch the segment. Read the report.

The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities – Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal arts and humanities grants flowing to asset-rich organizations, not the starving artist. Watch the segment. Read the report.

The Veterans Affairs Scandal Two Years Later – Spending $20 million in luxury art while sick veterans die waiting to see a doctor.
Watch the segment. Read the report.

Farm Subsidies & The Big Dogs – Millions of dollars in federal farm subsidies to urban areas where there are no farms.
Watch the segment. Read the report.

Fortune 100 Companies – $1.2 trillion in federal contracts and grants to the Fortune 100. Watch the segment. Read the report.

Lawyered Up 2017 – 36,000 federal lawyers enforcing the regulated states of America. Watch the segment. Read the FY2015 report.

Watch our interview now posted online:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?432472-1/qa-adam-andrzejewski

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S STRANGE OBSESSION : CAROLINE GLICK

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

The decision to follow through with sending Iraqi Jewish archives back to Iraq is part of a disturbing pattern.

The law of Occam’s Razor, refined to common parlance, is that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

If we apply Occam’s Razor to recently reported positions of the US State Department, then we can conclude that the people making decisions at Foggy Bottom have “issues” with Jews and with Israel.

Last Friday, JTA reported that the State Department intends to abide by an agreement it reached in 2014 with the Iraqi government and return the Iraqi Jewish archives to Iraq next year.

The Iraqi Jewish archives were rescued in Baghdad by US forces in 2003 from a flooded basement of the Iraqi secret services headquarters. The tens of thousands of documents include everything from sacred texts from as early as the 16th century to Jewish school records.

The books and documents were looted from the Iraqi Jewish community by successive Iraqi regimes. They were restored by the National Archives in Washington, DC.

The Iraqi Jewish community was one of the oldest exilic Jewish communities.

It began with the Babylonian exile following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago. Until the early 20th century, it was one of the most accomplished Jewish communities in the world. Some of the most important yeshivas in Jewish history were in present-day Iraq. The Babylonian Talmud was written in Iraq. The Jewish community in Iraq predated the current people of Iraq by nearly a thousand years.

It was a huge community. In 1948, Jews were the largest minority in Baghdad.

Jews comprised a third of the population of Basra. The status of the community was imperiled during World War II, when the pro-Nazi junta of generals that seized control of the government in 1940 instigated the Farhud, a weeklong pogrom. 900 Jews were murdered.

Thousands of Jewish homes, schools and businesses were burned to the ground.

With Israel’s establishment, and later with the Baathist seizure of power in Iraq in the 1960s, the once great Jewish community was systematically destroyed.

Between 1948 and 1951, 130,000 Iraqi Jews, three quarters of the community, were forced to flee the country. Those who remained faced massive persecution, imprisonment, torture, execution and expulsion in the succeeding decades.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump, Nixon, and the Media Back to the future. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the media have been grabbing at everything they could come up with to smear him – and have been shameless lemmings in echoing one another’s nonsense. He’s in bed with Putin! He’s got Alzheimer’s! And then there’s this one: good God, he’s the second coming of Richard Nixon!

Just a sampling. In May, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Nate Hopper in Time, and Alyssa Rosenberg in Washington Post wrote articles drawing parallels between Trump and Nixon. In their efforts to yoke the two presidents together, all three journalists seemed desperate to find likenesses. “As Trump does today,” wrote Rosenberg, “Nixon faced questions about his tax dealings and whether he was using the presidency for personal profit.” I don’t remember Nixon facing major questions along those lines, but I do know that Trump, far from using the presidency for personal profit, has waived his salary and took a financial hit for entering politics; it’s the Clintons, of course, who over the last quarter-century have cashed in on their political positions to a degree that has made fellow grifters the world over gasp in wonder.

In a June issue of New York Magazine, Frank Rich joined the Trump = Nixon club, suggesting that The Donald, like Tricky Dick, would end up being brought down by a scandal; on August 1, CNBC’s website ran its own Trump/Nixon story, claiming that “[o]n Russiagate, Trump appears to be taking his playbook directly from Richard Nixon and Watergate.”

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Nothing new here, of course: the news media have been trashing Republican presidents ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960 – since, that is, the Nixon Administration. In order to maximize the impact of the trashing, to be sure, the media invariably argue that most previous GOP commanders-in-chief were actually not that bad, but that the current one is terrible. This has led to a great deal of silent self-revision on the media’s part. While Reagan was in the Oval Office, the media, by and large, depicted him as an out-of-touch Hollywood amateur who would destroy the economy, oppress minorities, and maybe even start a nuclear war with the Soviets. When George W. Bush was in charge, however, the same media contrasted him with Reagan – whom they now professed to consider an accomplished statesman – even as they painted W. as half idiot and half evil incarnate, in some cases even equating him with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Predictably, now that Trump is head of state, Bush Derangement Syndrome has been dropped down the memory hole – in fact, he’s being widely rehabilitated (how wonderful his paintings of wounded soldiers are! How knowledgeable he turns out to be about art! And look, he and the whole Bush clan are chummy with the Clintons!) – and been replaced by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump, it turns out, is the worst GOP president since Nixon – if not worse: in July, Politico trumped the Trump = Nixon line with a piece by Susan B. Glasser headlined: “Don’t Compare Trump to Nixon. It’s Unfair to Nixon.” Glasser, it turned out, had interviewed veteran Washington insider Elizabeth Drew, who argued that Trump is dumber than Nixon and that his abuse of power had already eclipsed that uncovered by the Watergate investigations.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The real Middle East colonialist settlers By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

One of the standard arguments of leftists who want to see Israel destroyed, but won’t admit to hating Jews, is that Israelis are colonists, outsiders who came into the land that rightfully belongs to the indigenous population. You probably know the drill, which pushes many of the buttons of the international left: Racism (the Arab Semites are ‘People of Color” while the Jews are “Europeans”); colonialism (The Jews are outsiders); imperialism (the Jews are more successful and richer than their neighbors, so it is unfair); and Marxism (Israel has a flourishing market economy and is now a hi-tech powerhouse, so it must be at the expense of exploited people).

All of this is looking at history through the wrong end of the telescope. Dr. Alex Joffe of the Begin-Sadat Center refutes this bogus narrative. In fairness I can only briefly excerpt, but read the whole thing, if you want to understand the real history.

The entrance of Caliph Umar (581-644) into Jerusalem, 19th century colored engraving, via Wikipedia

The idea of Jews as “settler-colonialists” is easily disproved. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region. Data showing the cultural and genetic continuity of local and global Jewish communities is equally ample. The evidence was so copious and so incontrovertible, even to historians of antiquity and writers of religious texts, some of whom were Judeophobes, that disconnecting Jews from the Southern Levant was simply not conceived of. Jews are the indigenous population.

As for imperial support, the Zionist movement began during the Ottoman Empire, which was at best diffident towards Jews and uncomfortable with the idea of Jewish sovereignty. For its part, the British Empire initially offered support in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but during its Mandatory rule (1920-48) support for Zionism vacillated. The construction of infrastructure aided the Yishuv immensely, but political support for Jewish immigration and development, as stipulated by the League of Nations mandate, waxed and waned until, as is well known, it was withdrawn on the eve of World War II. This is hardly “settler-colonialism.”

Ironically, the same cannot be said for the Palestinian Arabs. A recent analysis by Pinhas Inbari reviewed the history of Palestine (derived from the Roman term Palaestina, applied in 135 CE as a punishment to a Jewish revolt). Most notably, he examines the origin traditions of Palestinian tribes, which continue even today to see themselves as immigrants from other countries. Inbari’s review, along with many additional sources of information he did not address, demonstrates that modern Palestinians are, in fact, derived from two primary streams: converts from indigenous pre-modern Jews and Christians who submitted to Islam, and Arab tribes originating across the Middle East who migrated to the Southern Levant between late antiquity and the 1940s. The best documented episodes were the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and its aftermath, and the periods of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Call It On—Or Call It Off? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

Will America, nine months into Donald Trump’s unexpected presidency, continue to chase its tail while a nuclear Korea looms, tax and immigration reform are pending, and the country is torn apart by identity politics—or will it return to sanity?

Presumably, special investigator Robert Mueller is focused mainly on whether former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, or ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, or members of the Trump family, or Trump himself colluded with agents of the Russian government.

Allegedly, either individually or in combination, they racketeered for money or business opportunities or for inflated honoraria—in exchange for abetting Russia’s efforts to hack information from the Clinton campaign affiliates that would vault Donald Trump to the White House.

Ostensibly, Mueller would be looking for suspicious bank deposits, sudden increases in cash spending, or any of the other tell-tale signs of quid pro quo profiteering. By extension, he would be pursuing leads that might show how such efforts actually altered the election, in a way that Barack Obama on the eve of the election—and a purportedly assured Clinton victory—suggested was impossible.

So far little seems to have turned up in nearly a year of intensive press and political probing—other perhaps than the lurid Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS file accusing Trump of criminal conspiracies along with a host of sexual perversions. But that dossier apparently was paid for by opposition candidates and even may have been purchased by the FBI. Its preposterousness and weird origins have turned attention back to the authors and financiers of this calibrated smear document.

As Mueller continues this inquiries (if the history of special counsels and investigators is any indication, the time, money, and effort expended is inversely related to the number of successful convictions), several investigations are underway on the other side of the aisle.

Unmasking the Unmaskers
The House Intelligence Committee at some point may turn over its findings to the attorney general to ascertain whether John Brennan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and other high Obama intelligence, cabinet, and diplomatic officials were requesting covert intelligence findings on American citizens, having their names unmasked, and then leaking them to pet reporters. The Obama team’s activity apparently spiked during the 2015-2016 campaign season and may well have been directed at perceived political opponents. If ­­so, the leaking likely constituted criminal activity—and would represent a violation of government trust not seen in decades. The committee may also finally take a careful look at the Steele file to ask what exactly was the relationship between this political hit job and James Comey’s FBI—and those implications are every bit as serious as the unmasking mess.

Meanwhile, the FBI and Capitol police are scrutinizing former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her former information technology team, headed by Imran Awan and various members of his family. Imran, et. al., allegedly engaged in bank and procurement fraud, and may have been peddling classified government information.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: The Rise of Islam by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on September 12th, 2017

Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany and feels free to say that a “liberal mosque” in Germany is “incompatible” with Islam.

Can you imagine Germany offering Iraq, Syria and Egypt to build “200 new churches” to reconstruct the derelict and dispossessed Christian communities there? No, because in the Middle East, Christians have been eradicated in a forced de-Christianization.

Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt.

We risk losing not only our churches, but more importantly, our cultural strength and even confidence in the values of our own civilization.

Jan Fleischhauer, a journalist of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, coined an expression to define the free fall of German Christianity: Selbstsäkularisierung (“self-secularization”). It is the Church being liquidated?

The German Bishops’ Conference just released the data on the decline of Catholicism in Germany for 2016. In one year, the German Catholic Church lost 162,093,000 faithful and closed 537 parishes. From 1996 to today, one quarter of the Catholic communities have been closed. “The faith has evaporated,” said Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1982 to 2007.

Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt. Around 60% of the country is currently Christian, with 24 million Catholics and 23 million Protestants. But that number is falling by 500,000 a year through deaths alone. “Those statistics are embodied by what visitors observe in German cities on Sunday: largely empty churches”, the Catholic theologian George Weigel wrote.

German Protestantism is facing the same crisis. Die Zeit revealed that in 2016, 340,000 Protestants passed away, and there were just 180,000 baptisms. Some 190,000 people left the church and just 25,000 people chose to join it.

In his most famous lecture, Pope Benedict XVI famously said that the West, including those who do not accept transcendence, should act “etsi Deus daretur”, as if God does exist. The old-fashioned Christian society will never come back, but it is critical for even a secular West to stay based on — and profoundly inspired by — its Judeo-Christian values.

The next stage seems to be a German cultural and religious landscape dominated by atheists and two minority religions: Islam and Christianity. If the secularists do not take Western Christian heritage — or at least the Judeo-Christian values from which it sprang — more seriously and start defending it, both atheists and Christians will soon be dominated by the rising political and supremacist religion, Islam. A prominent Muslim fundamentalist organization in Germany, banned by the federal government, calls itself “The True Religion” (“Die Wahre Religion”). They apparently think they are overtaking Judeo-Christian values.

There are dramatic instances of Christian decay in Germany. In the diocese of Trier, for example, site of the oldest Catholic community and the birthplace of Karl Marx, the number of parishes will drop from 903 to 35 by 2020, according to bishop Stephan Ackermann — a decrease of more than 90%. In the diocese of Essen, more than 200 parishes have been closed; their number has fallen from 259 to 43.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Prof Tweets That He’d ‘Be OK if #BetsyDevos Was Sexually Assaulted’ The now-deleted tweet was a response to Devos’s plans to rein in Title IX on college campuses. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on September 11th, 2017

A professor at Austin Community College tweeted that he would “be OK if #BetsyDevos was sexually assaulted” because of her intentions to change the guidelines for how colleges handle sexual assault.

Rob Ranco, who is an adjunct professor of paralegal studies, posted the tweet on Friday. It has since been deleted, but not before a screenshot was obtained by Campus Reform. It stated, in full:

“I’m not wishing for it… but I’d be ok if #BetsyDevos was sexually assaulted. #SexualAssault #TitleIX”

Ranco then followed it with what seems to be some attempts at explanation:

“Perhaps Betsy doesn’t understand how horrible rape is. She’s made the world more dangerous for my daughters. I need her to understand.”

“Yes, @twitter. My words were harsh. I don’t wish harm on anyone. I wish there’s some way #BetsyDevos would understand and care about others.”

He also jokingly tweeted that “Twitter trolls are now due process experts! Priceless. #TitleIX”.

Ranco’s tweets, of course, have faced a lot of criticism. His account (@RancoLaw) is not on Twitter anymore and a spokesperson from the school issued a statement to Campus Reform saying that the school “does not condone these comments and their sentiment.” I’ve got to say, I’m really wondering just what in the hell this guy could have been thinking.

Now, I do understand that there are a lot of problems with the way that we treat victims of rape and sexual assault in this culture. It’s disgusting, but it’s true: There are far too many people who would rather just write off all accusers as being opportunistic liars than actually try to understand what it must feel like to be in a rape victim’s position — to understand, for example, how issues like shame and/or power dynamics might prevent a woman from reporting her assault to the police. It’s very, very important to educate people on this issue. It’s also important, however, to acknowledge the plain and simple fact that current Title IX guidelines have created a few problems of their own.
As Reason’s Robby Soave points out, people who are critical of Betsy DeVos for wanting to alter the guidelines should stop and think about the fact “that every crazy Title IX case she referenced actually happened.” Rape is a serious issue, which is exactly why it should be handled in a serious manner — for the sake of everyone involved. After all, as Soave explains, campus kangaroo courts not only force the accused to act as their own defense attorneys, but they also can force victims to have to act as their own prosecutors. It allows for situations such as what happened at Stony Brook in New York, where an accuser had to face and question her alleged rapist herself, without the assistance of a lawyer or even her own therapist.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

9/11 Ended a Golden Age We were so impressed by our victory over the Soviet Union that we failed to appreciate that 19 Islamic fanatics with box-cutters had a sense of History, too. By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on September 11th, 2017

The golden age lasted about ten years.

In November of 1989, the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened. Soon after, the people themselves took to it with sledgehammers, and people who did not know that they could cry from joy learned to. The Wall was a product of that original Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascists of the East German police state, who called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “antifascist rampart.” They told the subjects of their totalitarian rule that the Wall was built to protect socialism from the evils without, but of course it was designed to stem migration out of East Germany, where people with direct experience of life under socialism went to great lengths to remove themselves and their families from that workers’ paradise.

By 1991, the demolition of the Wall was complete — and so was the demolition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was dissolved in November of that year. On the radio, pop stars sang about strolling through Gorky Park and “watching the world wake up from History.” The capital H was implicit, denoting History in the Hegelian sense, the force against which National Review proposed to stand athwart yelling “Stop,” the History of “dialectical and historical materialism,” the process which Francis Fukuyama would declare concluded, with liberal democracy having emerged as the unchallenged victor in History’s great contest.

The United States declared victory and then turned its attention to domestic matters. That happens in the wake of every great conflict in which the United States is involved: The people grow weary of it, even in victory, and someone, usually a presidential candidate, comes along and demands: “Why are we spending all that money in Berlin (Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus) when we could be using it to fix potholes in Sheboygan?” Barack Obama would later talk about “nation-building at home,” but he hardly invented that sort of thing, and in 1992 it was Bill Clinton making the case for investing the so-called peace dividend in a larger welfare state at home. President Clinton put his wife, a middling lawyer, in charge of reforming the nation’s health-care system, and the project failed, but not before establishing the Clintons as a kind of ersatz royal house cum crime syndicate.

(The “penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics,” as I called them, a line I would thank Roger Stone to stop plagiarizing.)

It was a heck of a party. The economy had gone from stagflation and gas lines in the Carter years to booming in the Reagan era, and that continued through the Clinton presidency, turbocharged by the emergence of the Internet and the high-tech economy associated with it. My last year in college, 1996, may have been the best year in American history to have been entering the work force with a halfway respectable bachelor’s degree and a little bit of technological knowhow. But things were pretty good all over: My own personal Austin Economic Indicator — the help-wanted sign at the Taco Bell across from the University of Texas campus — was advertising $10 an hour plus a $1,000 longevity bonus after 90 days, and they couldn’t hire people. My experience at my college newspaper and knowledge of desktop-publishing software was enough to take me around the world as a newspaper editor, but I was something of a slacker: The real go-getters weren’t going to work for anybody but starting their own companies and doing their own thing. The startup ethic wasn’t limited to software bosses like Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen: Robert Rodriguez didn’t sit around waiting for Miramax to make his movie — he took $7,000 to Mexico and made El Mariachi himself. There was a sense not that anybody could do anything, but that the possibilities had become much larger than they once were. The combination of technology, freedom, entrepreneurship, and ready investment capital amplified the individual, and made him if not quite the equal of a Fortune 500 corporation then at least a potential rival to it.