The WSJ notable and quotable picked a lovely snippet from “On Writing Well” (1976) by William Zinsser, who died May 12 at age 92. "Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."
World Order, Henry Kissinger muses in his eponymous book, requires somebody—a state or an institution—to maintain it. He holds up the Westphalian System, put in place after the murderous Thirty Years’ War, as one institutional pillar. As another instance, he cites the Congress of Vienna (1815), which spawned the Quadruple as well as the Holy Alliance.
The GOP presidential field continues to swell, like Elvis’ waistline in the 1970s. Former New York Gov. George Pataki jumped into the fray on Thursday, a day after former Pennsylvania Sen. and 2012 contender Rick Santorum made his intentions known. Does either candidate stand a chance of making it all the way to the nomination?
The Hoover Institution held its Carmel Valley Conference on Friday, May 8, 2015. The conference featured presentations by Hoover fellows on a wide range of issues, from the Affordable Care Act to ISIS and the Middle East to the political and economic challenges facing the United States and the next president.
Spain has been magnificent at giving birth to painters and poets, impressive at minting novelists, chefs and soccer players, but thoroughly inept at producing good kings. Apart from Ferdinand and Isabella, Philip II, Charles III, and for the sentimental, Alfonso XII (who died at 27 in 1885), no Spanish monarch can indisputably be called “great.”
As regular readers of Econlog probably know, I had a bet with Bob Murphy a few years ago about inflation and I won. Bob is a good sport and he paid up. I follow this part of co-blogger Bryan Caplan's Better's Oath: "When I win a bet, I will not shame my opponent, for a betting loser has far more honor than the mass of men who live by loose and idle talk."
Shane and I were alone for yesterday’s taping of Rational Security, Tamara being away on an overseas trip, so we pulled out the Scotch and had a conversation about two of my recent pieces of work: Jodie Liu and my paper about The “Privacy Paradox: The Privacy Benefits of Privacy Threats” and an idea I floated last week for ameliorating press-intelligence community tensions over classified information. It’s a good conversation—one that also touches this fascinating story about tiny drones that special forces are using.
Acquired through purchases, gifts, collaborations, or filmed in-house, Hoover’s microfilm holdings are many and varied. During a recent survey, mysterious reels of uncataloged publications were identified. What surprising and singular titles did we find?
Hoover fellow Paul Gregory discusses his Forbes piece, “Sanction FIFA And Putin At The Same Time: Take The 2018 World Cup From Russia." Gregory notes that nothing could be worse for Putin than losing the 2018 World Cup; it would be more severe than the economic recession and Russia’s declining living standards. Russians can live without imported foods and Turkish vacations, but they may not tolerate being branded as a rogue nation not deserving a World Cup.
How NATO has survived—and will continue to prosper—in the post–Cold War era. Military historian Peter Mansoor explains the historical trajectory of NATO, how it adjusted after the demise of the Soviet Union, and why it will survive the current threats from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Likewise, economists Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh find in their 2013 paper “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent” that technology has enabled highly talented and educated individuals — including private and public CEOs and hedge fund managers — to perform on a larger scale, “applying their talent to greater pools of resources and reaching larger numbers of people, thus becoming more productive and higher paid.”
She pointed to the rise of groups like ISIS – now in 12 countries, she said – and the gruesome spectacles of their brand of terrorism as proof that the world is more dangerous than ever. "I don't think during my lifetime I've ever seen the degree of evil that is out there in the world today," said Feinstein, noting mass murders and beheadings of innocent civilians, including children. "These [surveillance] programs aim to protect this country, pure and simple. They're not aimed to go after Americans."
Stephen Haber, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, is also a professor of political science who helped make the changes. Haber said he thought there was “tremendous support” within the department for the new approach, which in part reflects a “huge transformation in the analytic tools of the discipline, especially among younger scholars.”
In 2006, California legislators enacted America’s first cap-and-trade program, which forced the state’s biggest polluters to pay into a fund for every ton of CO2 they pump into the atmosphere. Nine years later, it has raised $1.6 billion—and the state has no idea what to do with it. “This has become a Christmas tree of spending,” Bill Whalen, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told the Los Angeles Times recently. “It’s like modern art. You can look at it and interpret it any way you want.”
The discussion will begin at 9 a.m. June 3 Taipei time (6 p.m. June 2 U.S. West coast time) at the Bechtel Conference Room. Ma's speech will focus on the firm Taiwan-U.S. partnership since World War II and Taiwan's role in regional security, the office said in a statement.
“They have mightily influenced instruction in the classroom,” Williamson Evers, now an education policy expert, said of the federal Race to the Top funds during a daylong hearing in a lawsuit that Gov. Bobby Jindal filed last summer against the Department of Education and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
