Vladimir Putin seized, or received, or something, power from Boris Yeltsin on the last day of the 20th century. The 1990’s had been a dreadful time for Russia, and Putin has seemed hell-bent on restoring power and strength to the Motherland. While it may be overstating matters to claim that his New York Times Op-Ed… Read More The Triumph of Vladimir Putin
Bureaucrats are generally dis-inclined to take the heat for politicians. The blue-on-blue is particuarly encouraging. Is this a function of Obama’s declining coattails, as donkeys seek distance in preparation for 2014? I wonder how long before Obama feels the need to throw Hillary — or some other mucky-mucks at State — under the bus? Jammie-Wearing… Read More I Do Believe Benghazi Just Flipped From “Not Going Away” to “Quite Uncomfortably Here”
I don’t know anything about the UK Independence party, but Russel Taylor casts it in very Tea Partyish terms. The Tories have responded by insisting UKIP has no real policies, to which I would say that this hasn’t held them back. Their ragtag combination of Keynesianism and liberal dogma doesn’t represent a coherent response to the mess… Read More Russell Taylor – In praise of UKIP
That’s a pretty obvious statement, but Michael Totten’s article about the End of Hezbollah (his lips to God’s ears) underlines it wonderfully: Part of Hezbollah’s support used to come from the fact that they were perceived as not being corrupt, but that’s over now, too. “Even my family members who are big Hezbollah supporters are… Read More We Do Not Understand the Middle East
One has to admit, Roger Ebert, Margaret Thatcher and Annette Funnicello make rather an odd threesome (but then, so did John Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley). I don’t have much to say about any of them. Ebert was the guy who told us whether movies were worth the money and hassle to see in… Read More Rest in Peace, Oh Lady of Iron.
A few things to read that other people wrote: Stephen Green points out how Krugman tries to make capitalism pay for the sins of statists. How Richard Nixon forced the North Vietnamese to sign a peace, and why Bob Beckel is mad. RS McCain ponders the ineffable WTF-ness of South Carolina politics. Jeff Goldstein respectfully… Read More Rocking the Links
So sayeth American Infidels. It’s all about deception, and it’s called taqiyya. While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi’ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi’ites, “it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority… Read More “Islam is Alone in having a War Strategy”
Just as any king can abdicate, Popes can vacate the Papal office. And just as with kings, such abdications are rare. How rare? The last time the leader of the Roman Catholic Church resigned his office was almost exactly 600 years ago in 1415, and that was to end the Western Schism and reunify the… Read More Yes, Popes Can Resign
This is the Kind of thing you expect to read about in Dickensian portraits of 19th-century capitalism. Yangji village in the southeastern city of Guangzhou has reportedly existed for some 900 years. As China’s economy exploded and the port city’s population ballooned to more than 12 million, real estate developers moved in and Yangji’s 4,000 residents found… Read More Moats dug round Chinese villagers’ houses to drive them out
It’s not a bad idea. Containment was more than just a military strategy; it was a holistic assessment of the weakness of the Soviet Union, an assessment that turned out, on the whole, to be right. In Kennan’s famous X article he argues that containment meant the “application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical… Read More Rand Paul Suggests the Containment Strategy for Islamic Terror
Content Blues 