Good Friday and Easter Sunday, also known as Resurrection Sunday or  Pascha, are celebrated throughout the Christian world.  For followers of non-Christian faiths and the areligious, Easter is often embraced as a time for family, Easter egg hunts, and lots of candy.  In essence, it is more or less a Springtime hybrid of Halloween and Thanksgiving.  For faithful Christians, however, Easter is the single most important occasion of the year.  Good Friday and Easter commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who Christians believe sacrificed his physical body for the salvation of mankind.  To the outsider, it is rather peculiar that Christians joyfully celebrate the horrific murder of their religion’s founder, but the very practice offers the world important insights into the natural state of the world and mankind.

Regulating the internet has always been a challenge.  Aside from the technological and technical hurdles of regulating a platform that operates on a global scale and under the jurisdiction of nearly every government on the planet, almost every effort to provide regulatory oversight has resulted in fierce opposition.  Regulation of the internet could, after all, easily squash the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas on a world wide scale.  When it comes to empowering law enforcement against sex traffickers, as well as others who use free speech to promote criminal activity and victimize others, the free speech argument is, however, quickly exhausted.  Opposition to the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, also known as FOSTA, should have, therefore, melted away,  but that is not what happened thanks to the way people glorify the sexual objectification of men and women.

Facebook began life as a simple student directory called “Facemash.”  Based on the ideas of then-Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, the fledgling social media platform was quickly shutdown by school officials.  The Sophomore minds of Facebook’s founders had failed to consider issues like security, copyright infringement, and privacy.  The business model and technology driving Facebook has grown more sophisticated with the exponential growth of users, but it would seem Zuckerberg has never actually managed to master the implications of social media.  Throughout the years, Facebook has largely been able to dodge the social implications of its business model by avoiding the legal consequences for thoughtlessly violating the privacy of users, but that might be changing with the so-called Cambridge Analytica Scandal and revelations that Facebook logged text and phone data from millions of users without their explicit consent.

​Volatility appears to be returning to Wall Street as investors react to a government injection of uncertainty.  With the Trump Administration imposing sweeping tariffs and China responding with retaliatory measures, both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones have experienced some of their wildest swings in years.  For those who experienced the trauma of the Great Recession and the 2008 Wall Street Meltdown, the performance of the stock markets is both a product of troubling news, a self-proclaimed pro-business President implementing seemingly anti-business policies, and pure fear.  If fear and volatility continue to spiral out of control, global recession could be a reality based solely on fear driven by politics.  To calm fears amid a seismic policy shift away from the decades-long liberalization of trade, the economy needs clarity, the hand of steady leadership, and gradual rebalancing of trade relations.   

​US foreign policy under the Trump Administration, much like the Obama Administration, has centered on the Middle East and Asia.  Where the Obama Administration struggled to pivot away from the Middle East, as well as the Ukraine Crisis, to focus on trade with Asia, the Trump Administration has attempted to tackle a number of ambitious issues.  Although the foreign policy agenda of the Trump Administration has yet to bear any fruit, it is clear the US continues to lack any significant control over the events or geopolitics unfolding in the Middle East.  The US is, of course, present in the Middle East, but the US is largely being used as a pawn in pursuit of other agendas.  The Trump Administration has, however, been able to exert an odd form of control over the geopolitics of Asia.