Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Maureen Dowd, like many on the left, isn't really happy with the outcome of the DNC: In his renomination acceptance speech here on Thursday night, he told us that America’s problems were tougher to solve than he had originally thought. And that’s why he has kindly agreed to give us more time. Because, after all, …
Continue reading "Voting for Ourselves: The Reality of the 2012 Election"
That, basically, is what the Hondurans are doing: The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of three privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems. The memorandum of agreement signed Tuesday is part of a controversial experiment meant to bring badly needed economic growth to this …
Continue reading "No Dogs or…: Honduras Brings Back the Concession Areas"
Janet Daley in the Telegraph lays out the stark choices we face: What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth …
Continue reading "Affordability and Morality in our Social Welfare System"
So we now have Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. It's an odd thing in many ways, not because the party grandees threw their lot in with him--that's par for the course. It's odd because they were able to get it past the people who supposedly dominate the party--the "Religious Right", those dreadful …
Continue reading "Mitt Romney and the Religion of the Middle Class"
The famous (if unlikely) team of Boies and Olsen are backpedaling on their case to overturn Proposition 8--and establish same-sex civil marriage by national default: The two high-profile lawyers who started the nation’s most significant lawsuit attempting to gain marriage rights for same-sex couples told the Supreme Court on Friday that it might find it very interesting …
Continue reading "Same-Sex Civil Marriage: Not Quite Ready to Go for Broke"
On a recent edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, he discusses with Tawfik Hamid the difference between the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (That discussion starts at about 13:30 into the video below). http://dl2.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/Archive/News/Stakelbeck_Terror_082112_WS Five years ago, I got into an extended email debate with an Indonesian Salafi. One of the points he tried …
Continue reading "The Difference Between Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood"
Students in China are caught between two systems, one Marxist-Leninist and one capitalist. The result is this: The curious collision of ideological coercion and material opportunity births a conformity-breeding exhaustion. To resist the constant current of ideological homogeneity requires relentless energy and vigilance: to remember that no matter how compelling the words of the anchor …
Continue reading "The U.S. and China: Passing Each Other in the Night on Academic Freedom?"
Federal agencies such as NOAA and the Social Security administration are trying to contain the excitement over their substantial ammunition purchases: Obscure federal agencies triggered a firestorm of conspiracy theories this week after they put out orders for thousands of rounds of deadly hollow-point bullets. But the agencies, most recently the Social Security Administration, are …
Continue reading "Federal Agencies and Ammo: Make Sure You Don't Overlook the Important Thing"
Some once part of the U.S. military are, to put it mildly, delusional about a possible internal rebellion: At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A ‘Vision’ of the Future.” It was written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army's University of …
Continue reading "Ending the Next Civil War Won't Be That Easy"
One of the most ill-starred love stories of the last century was that of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Tsarina Alexandra. Neither was equipped by temperament or upbringing to lead an absolute monarchy into World War I. Nicholas was a weak-willed heir thrust into his role prematurely and unwillingly by the death of his …
