I have been unable to find video or audio of FBI Director James Comey’s remarks today adding to his prior attribution of the Sony hack to North Korea. Nor has the FBI itself released the text. That said, Fortune magazine has published the following, describing it as “Comey’s remarks in full”:
Once upon a time (OK, it was 2007), we D.C. policy wonks were gearing up for a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education act (a.k.a. No Child Left Behind), and all the buzz was about the new federal requirements that would be added. Checker and I dubbed it “No Idea Left Behind.”
California is in the midst of a four-year drought. Despite the several days of heavy rain in mid-December 2014, rainfall and snow pack water content are way below normal. As of January 6, 2015 (with no rain in the forecast for the next 10 days), the water content of the Sierra snow pack is at 43% of normal for this time of the year, and only 17% of the average for April 1.
The cyber threat is part of a transnational game, with low barriers of entry, increasing sophistication, increasing cost, and no prospect that any state will be victorious. The U.S. needs to manage the risk by focusing on those aspects of cyber insecurity that relate to commerce and critical infrastructure, leaving traditional forms of intelligence and military activities unregulated; and by allowing private companies and individuals to use strong encryption or open source software without built-in vulnerabilities.
Organic agriculture is the most expensive, expansive hoax perpetrated on consumers during the past half-century. An affront to the environment because its low yields are wasteful of water and farmland, organic agriculture confers no advantages except for the feel-good factor for true believers. It only survives because of massive government subsidies and promotion, and “black marketing” that dishonestly disparages the competition .
An important first step in rebooting U.S. Middle East policy and more effectively addressing the roots of the problems that have manifested into threats to U.S. and international security demands that we more holistically embrace Sun Tzu’s maxim of the importance of knowing one’s enemy.
A “trick question” often contains the answer to itself, and the best trick questions start a cascade of other consequential questions and their answers. The question imposing itself on us today is this: “How and why is it that political Islam appears to have failed wherever it has been tried in the modern world? Is there a basic incompatibility with modernity?”
The three Muslim gunmen who killed 12 journalists in Paris targeted not just those people and their satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, but a core ideal and human right of the West––the right to free speech in the public square defined by tolerance for different opinions. That’s why the killers, after they had called out the names of their individual victims before they shot them, bragged as they made their escape that they had “killed” Charlie Hebdo.
The godfather of the All-Volunteer military, Martin Anderson, died a few days ago at the age of 78. Anderson was a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution, but he was working to end the draft before most of us were born.
This year will be a tough one for Vladimir Putin as the Russian people come to better understand the huge social and economic costs of his Ukraine venture. Putin has violated his pledge of growth and prosperity.
Ideas are dangerous things. Allow them to spread uncontrollably and they can infect the thinking and behavior of a people. Some ideas can lead to revolutionary acts, as with democracy and the concept that power can accrue to the people instead of deities or despots.
For most of his six years in office, President Barack Obama utilized virtually every means a Keynesian imagination can cook up to give us the worst economic recovery since World War II. First came a waddling, often misdirected, utterly confused, obese stimulus that cost as much as the war in Iraq. It seems to have accomplished precious little, maybe less than relatively small sequester budget cuts Obama believed could be baleful.
Charles Hill is a diplomat-in-residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale University. In the past he served as ambassador and as adviser to presidents. Last week, he published an article on the Politico website titled "Why Political Islam is Winning." In the article, Hill quotes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as saying, of the Islamic State group, that "there is literally no place for their barbarity in the modern world."
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has been encouraged by his allies to consider another run for the White House, will meet with several of his former political advisers Wednesday in Menlo Park, Calif., for a private dinner.
