[Subscription Required] We live in a small world. There are in fact just two degrees of separation between you and someone who attended the concert in Las Vegas last Sunday at which Stephen Paddock killed 58 people. That is because you are reading my column and my son’s nanny was there with a group of her friends. (Luckily, she left before the shooting began, and none of her friends was hit. Spattered with the blood of others, but physically unscathed.)
Maritime Southeast Asia, the area circumscribed by the Malaysian peninsula, the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines, is vital to US strategic concerns for two primary reasons. First, this region includes the South China Sea where American and Chinese ambitions may be heading toward direct conflict as China continues to press forward with its agenda of extending its reach.
Campuses and Western critics in the last half-century have turned a once risk-taking and heroic Christopher Columbus into an evil emissary of disease and destruction. History is now seen as one-dimensional melodrama in which our contemporary duty is to pick sinners and saints of the past based on our own modern (quite imperfect) perceptions of morality and then judge them worthy of either hagiography or banishment from memory — rather than history as tragedy in which various agendas are often far more complex than just evil versus good.
My piece on Richard Thaler appeared in the Wall Street Journal, electronic edition Monday evening and print edition on Tuesday. The Journal titled it "This Year's Nobel Economist Makes Sense of Irrationality."
The Hoover Institution hosted "Scalia Speaks: Collecting the Wit and Wisdom of Justice Antonin Scalia" on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 from 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST.
featuring Alice Hillvia Harvard Risk and Resilience
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Please join us for a lecture by Hoover Institution fellow Alice Hill (in conversation with Jesse M. Keenan) about resilience as policy in the United States of America.
