Who produces vastly more energy than it needs right now? The United States. So who needs Venezuela’s oil? Basically, nobody. That cold fact, writes Ben Cahill in Barron’s, is enabling the Trump Administration to further squeeze dictator Nicolas Maduro by blockading the nation’s oil exports. For decades, other countries used oil as a weapon against the U.S. Today the tables are turned and, Cahill notes, Venezuela’s decrepit industry is the one crying out for reinvestment.
Racial Quotas by Algorithm
Allum Bokhari, writing in The American Conservative, illuminates a Colorado state bill claiming to create “a shield against ‘algorithmic discrimination’” that would force AI companies to generate outputs based on government-imposed racial, and other identity-based, quotas. As with past variants of reverse discrimination, asserts Bokhari, Colorado’s AI bill amounts to thinly disguised leftist ideology aimed at institutionalizing the very harm it claims to ameliorate.
