The Real Steve Bannon Revealed!

A marvelous interview with Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon has suddenly appeared in, no less, The Hollywood Reporter: “Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement” (Exclusive).” It is a perfect antidote to the McCarthyite insults being heaped on Bannon by the elitist left and its handmaiden, the mainstream media. Bannon is a provocateur. No sin in that; the left has a plethora of provocateurs. By every account he is an open-minded, generous (albeit demanding) soul. The media’s efforts to smear him are the most shameful application of “Tailgunner Joe,”

The Gold Standard: Copernicus, Newton, Priestley… and Trump?

Sam Kriss, in The Atlantic, has a wonderful new story, “Flat-Earthers Have A Wild New Theory About Forests,” in which I find an oblique allusion to… myself. Still, among all the bizarre, self-enclosed universes the internet has to offer — gold-standard bores, UFO chasers, people who believe that cartoons are real in a nearby dimension or that the secret rulers of the world are betraying their existence by leaving little clues on the currency — the flat-earthers are special. No, I’m not a UFO chaser, nor a believer in cartoon dimensions, or a proponent of the theory of secret rulers of

The Anti-Science of William Jennings Bryan and Paul Krugman

From Forbes.com: July 9th was the anniversary of the most famous speech of any presidential campaign.  William Jennings Bryan, in a speech to the 1896 Democratic convention, declaimed “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Although Bryan lost the general election to pro-gold William McKinley (and lost two other presidential races) that line still rings in the popular imagination.  It represents a handy epithet against the gold standard by those who are unfamiliar with its history or superior track record. As, in 1896, noted by The Nation and reprised there last week, rather surprisingly but for Karl Marx’s recognition that “money is by