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Germany’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismark didn’t pass the world’s first modern Social Security system out of the kindness of his heart. The year was 1889, and Bismark was fighting hard against the rising tide of socialism; the second volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital had been published just a

On August 24 in the year 410 AD, a large army of Visigoths entered the city of Rome and rampaged through the streets for three full days. They ransacked public buildings. They destroyed monuments. They looted wealthy homes. And they stole just about anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Last week I wrote an article about the bizarre US tax liabilities of Leo XIV, the new American Pope. The basic idea that, as a US citizen, the Pope is required to file and pay US taxes on his worldwide income… even though he is a head of state, and

Well, that was fast. It only took five days after Moody’s downgrade of the US government’s sovereign credit rating for investors to throw a fit. The result was yesterday’s meltdown trifecta in which ALL three major markets– US stocks, US bonds, and the US dollar– lost significant value. I wrote

In the year 1980, a young computer science grad student from the University of Washington named Burrell “Bud” Tribble accepted a job at a hot tech startup you might have heard of: it’s called Apple. Tribble went to work directly for Steve Jobs on Apple’s most ambitious project at the

Nearly 2,000 years ago around the year 75 AD, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch sat down to write his most ambitious work yet– a collection of biographies of the 48 most famous and influential figures of antiquity. It was called Parallel Lives, and this two-volume series covered everyone from the mythical

I still can’t get over the fact that there’s an American pope… and that his friends refer to him as ‘Bob’. Bob. It just makes him seem like a regular dude who’d be drinking a beer and shouting at the umpire at a Cubs game. Something else that makes the

In the year 428 BC, ancient Athenians imposed a special tax called the eisphora that targeted local business investments in the city-state. It was expensive and highly unpopular among investors. And wealthy Athenians simply stopped investing in local businesses to avoid the tax. This is almost an iron-clad lesson of

One of the most mysterious villains in the history of cinema was the fictitious character ‘Keyser Söze’ from the movie The Usual Suspects. No spoilers here, but there’s a scene where they describe his rise in the criminal underworld. According to the story, Keyser Söze realized that “to be in

Happy Friday. Here are a few stories that caught our eye this week: UN Judge Prosecuting Crimes Against Humanity Kept a Slave Lydia Mugambe had quite the résumé: High Court judge in Uganda. PhD candidate at Oxford. UN judicial appointee to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals—a body tasked

In the early 1300s, the county of Toulouse in southern France was locked in an epic struggle with the Catholic Church over religious freedom. A large group of individuals who called themselves “Good Christians” were sort of proto-Protestants in that they still believed in the basic tenets of Christianity, but

Here are a few stories from the week that caught our eye, all of which highlight the bizarre ways that Western Civilization is sabotaging itself. Canadians screw themselves to spite Trump Canadians are celebrating that Donald Trump is not their new Prime Minister. Of course, he wasn’t on the ballot.
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