Lawrence Freedman—or “Sir Lawrence” as they call him at Kings College in London, where he is Emeritus Professor of War Studies—has an interesting blog, “Comment Is Freed”, and an interesting post at that blog, Assessing the Assessors What did analysts get wrong about the Russian invasion?, which considers a recent paper, The Russia-Ukraine War: A…
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Socio-political notes from all over: The Ivies go down, Haas keeps covering aass, and Ryan Grim covers, and covers up for, “The Squad”.
The Ivies took a pounding, and New York Representative Elise Stefanik received a publicity boost more valuable than gold, and it couldn’t have come to a less deserving person.1 The supposedly brilliant scholars heading Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and M.I.T. came across as scripted robots, not responding actively to Stefanik’s leading questions—that “intifada”, which…
Israel versus Palestine: When Dreams Collide
“What a dreary compromise is life!” exclaimed the hero of Norman Mailer’s abortive magnum opus, The Man Who Studied Yoga.1 And so life is a dreary compromise for most of us, which is why we go to films to see people who do all the things we don’t do in real life, like punch out…
Ross Douthat, devout Catholic or lying sack of sh*t? I report, you decide.
Writes Ross in his recent column re 9/11 versus present times, regarding our disastrously unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, In each of these case [the two invasions], the achievement of something relatively basic — preventing terrorist groups from existing in the kind of comfort required to pull off another Sept….
Stop the world. I want to get off. Immediately.
If you think the news from the Middle East couldn’t get any worse, well, wait ten minutes. This once inconceivable sequence of horrifying events seems destined to rumble on until, well, until it stops. I am generally a fan of finger pointing, but this constant barrage of disasters is, naturally, spawning an orgy of outrage…
OMG! I’m turning into Larry Summers! But not all the time!
The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…
Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?
As a matter of fact, I I didn’t flunk Econ 101, because I never took it! So what? To quote Mel Brooks, I’m an old man and I’ve got a right to talk. And, to quote another old man, Richard Nixon, “I am not an intellectual, but I do read books!” Well, I do and…
David Brooks confesses his sins; just not the right ones
Frequent breast beater and all-around intellectual marshmallow David Brooks has touched off a real foofaraw, if not an outright hullabaloo, around the internet with his recent post for the New York Times, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?, arguing that the rule of “us”, that horde of Ivy League educated sissy britches who hold…
Noah Smith is an idiot! But not all the time!
No, Noah, the “Noahopinion” guy, is not always an idiot. Take, for example, this recent post, If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look like, expressing a bit of amazement at how well things have worked out under Uncle Joe’s genially geriatric hand. In fact, Noah says he…
Get your misinformation here! Get your red hot misinformation here! Courtesy of the New York Times!
How many times am I going to write this story? Well, damfino, but if the Times won’t quit, neither will I. The latest provocation from the Gray Lady of West 35th St. or wherever the fuck the Times hangs its hat these days is David Quammen’s The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin. Here’s how Dave…