Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor, had spent some time before World War II in the United States. After the attack, he allegedly said, with a sense of foreboding, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Well, the giant is sleeping again. What does it take to wake us up? How many times can we be kicked in the belly before we take notice?
Everything that Barack Obama touches seems to turn to dross. Think of it for a minute. He inherited a quiet Iraq (no American combat deaths at all in December 2009). Joe Biden bragged of the calm that it would be the administration’s “greatest achievement.” But by pulling out all U.S. peacekeepers — mostly for a 2012 reelection talking point — Obama ensured an ISIS wasteland. He put his promised eye on Afghanistan at last, and we have lost more soldiers there than during the Bush administration and a Taliban victory seems likely after more than a decade of lost American blood and treasure. The message seems to be that it is better for Obama to have his eye off something than on it.
It has been a tragically spectacular year for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has taken control of numerous towns in Iraq and Syria, seized energy assets, targeted religious minorities, unleashed murderous rampages against those who do not subscribe to its tenets, and declared a caliphate.
Ever since Barack Obama swept his way into the White House, political scribes have talked about Texas — the biggest of Republican states — slowly morphing into a purplish battleground.
Recently, President Obama protested to Vladimir Putin that Russia had been violating the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces in Europe treaty (INF) for the last six years by testing precisely the kind of missile that the treaty prohibits. That protest, as reported by the New York Times, is a textbook lesson in how a government earns the contempt of others.
"In an attempt to memorize poetry," Irving Fisher wrote in 1926, "Professor Vogt of the University of Christiana found that on days when he drank one and one-half to three glasses of beer it took him 18 per cent longer to learn the lines."
As Gadfly readers know—from his “farewell address,” if not before—the irreplaceable Checker Finn stepped down as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s president last week, handing me the reins and the opportunity of a lifetime. As Checker made clear, he’s not retiring, disappearing, or giving up the fight—just letting go of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an increasingly complex organization. He will, as he wrote, have more time than ever for troublemaking. American education will be the better for it.
How prepared were the Great Powers for war in 1914? Too often, this question has been answered by pointing to expectations of a short war, and to muddle and inefficiency in its opening stages. The realities are that most informed people had realistic expectations, and that muddle and inefficiency are intrinsic to war.
Research Fellow Bill Whalen discussed the mid-terms and his Sacramento Bee piece, “Jerry Brown does have a real political rival – Rick Perry,” on the John Batchelor Show.
Barry Weingast, professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of law. Weingast takes issue with some of the standard views of law, and proposes a better way to understand law. The two discuss the fundamental principles of law, how it can emerge in a decentralized way to resolve disputes over property and other commercial and social interactions. Examples include Iceland, Ancient Greece, and California during the gold rush. Also considered are how laws coordinate expectations and the way that social pressure can be used to enforce law in a decentralized fashion.
“(I)f Israel continues on its present course, it will emerge far better off than Hamas and better off than it was before Hamas began its missile barrage. And in the Middle East, that is about as close to victory as one gets. The future for Israel is not bleak, just as it is not bleak for any nation that chooses to defend itself from savage enemies that seek its destruction.”
