Last week I visited an island and stood among a crowd of puffins. If I turned my head I could see the lighthouse. If I looked up, the arctic terns were above my head. Yet I never left my living room.  How come? I was wearing a virtual-reality mask.

I have tried this “Oculus” technology once before, when visiting Facebook in California (which owns Oculus) and it is truly extraordinary to have an all-round, up-and-down view of the world depending on how you turn your head. All it involves is a special (Samsung) smartphone jammed into a pair of goggles.

Is it the next wave of tech? I have no idea. Apart from games, virtual visits to inaccessible nature reserves and maybe estate agents, it may not have many practical applications. But I may be wrong. Does the next wave lie in big data? Or robotics? Or the internet of things? Or something else entirely?

Nobody knows. The one thing that the history of technology shows above all else is our complete inability to see what comes next.

Yet something will come next, of that we can be confident. By 2025 there will be a vast new firm, valued at an astronomical sum and run by people who look like teenagers from a futuristic building in . . . well, where will it be? Can you imagine it being in Europe? Me neither.  Here’s why.

With sadness and tortured by doubts, next week (6/23) I will cast my vote as an ordinary citizen for withdrawal from the European Union.

Let there be no illusion about the trauma of Brexit. Anybody who claims that Britain can lightly disengage after 43 years enmeshed in EU affairs is a charlatan or a dreamer, or has little contact with the realities of global finance and geopolitics.

Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.

We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court of Justice (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.

The EU Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.

[TTPer Mike Ryan recently posted on the Forum a remarkable argument for what could be called the Trumpean Synthesis.  Skye suggested it be a featured article – even though he has a critical objection (which is the same as mine).  I can only agree – thanks, Mike! –JW]

This is what the political situation looks like to me, where we are now, how we got here, and where we are going.

To nutshell it, a synthesis of the Conservatism of Edmund Burke and John Locke created and sustained America until it was wrecked by Progressives over 100 years ago, and subsequently revived by Ronald Reagan.  This synthesis is despised by the Republican Elite which are all Burke and no Locke.  Thus we need a new synthesis which Trump may represent.

France has turned even more viscerally eurosceptic than Britain over recent months, profoundly altering the political geography of Europe and making it impossible to judge how Paris might respond to Brexit, the referendum on which is two weeks away (6/23).

An intractable economic crisis has been eating away at the legitimacy of the French governing elites for much of this decade. This has now combined with a collapse in the credibility of the government, and mounting anger over immigration.  Remind you of what’s happening in the US?

A pan-European survey by the Pew Research Center released today found that 61% of French voters have an “unfavorable” view of the European Union, compared to 48% in the UK.

A clear majority is opposed to “ever closer union” and wants powers returned to the French parliament, a finding that sits badly with the insistence by President Francois Hollande that “more Europe” is the answer to the EU’s woes.

“It is a protest against the elites,” said Professor Brigitte Granville, a French economist at Queen Mary University of London. “There are 5000 people in charge of everything in France. They are all linked by school and marriage, and they are tight.”

Allow me to introduce myself.  For over 25 years, from 1981 to 2007, I was the Founding Director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy.

As such, I handled information-disclosure policy issues on the dozens of Clinton Administration scandals that arose within public view, as well as two that did not.  Since retiring, I have taught government secrecy law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

This past week has been a milestone of sorts for those who closely follow the continuing saga of Hillary Clinton’s wrongful use of email systems during her tenure as Secretary of State.  But the kind of milestone it was depends on where you stood when the week began.

If you’re for Trump, you’re rejoicing; for Sanders, you have regrets; die-hard for Hillary, you’re rationalizing.  But if you’re a more mainstream member of the Democrat Party?

You, my friend, are simply scared to death, terrified even, for reasons that are truly unprecedented.  

In his best-selling book The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain described his 1867 visit to Ottoman Palestine as it was known then as a land of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness,” of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities (chapter 48).

The Palestine of Mohammedans (as he called Moslems) is a “waste of a limitless desolation,” he concluded, “desolate and unlovely” (chapter 56).

The same is true today of the Palestinian Museum which opened in Ramallah on May 18 with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free, there’s nothing inside for any of the visitors to see except the bare walls.

The Palestinian Museum had been in the works since 1998, but has no exhibits. The museum cost $24 million. All it has to show for it are a few low sloping sandy buildings indistinguishable from the dirt and a “garden” of scraggly bushes and shrubs.  It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for Palestine. 

Palestine is an empty building with nothing in it. It’s a political Potemkin village. There’s a flag, an anthem, a museum and all the trappings of a country. But if you look closer, there’s nothing inside.