Новости за 26.11.2018

Beyond any reasonable doubt, in substance if not in appearance, Donald Trump is a thoroughly conventional American politician. It’s a wonder that anyone requires proof at this late date. This couldn’t be clearer than in foreign policy. Some of us who understand the links among freedom, free trade, durable prosperity, and a noninterventionist foreign policy More

In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a former State Department employee and Director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was convicted of perjury after being charged with spying for the Russians. He was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary of which he served three and a half. The sentencing was the culmination of a frenzied political trial which catapulted Richard Nixon to fame and undergirded the advent of a period of domestic political repression known as McCarthyism. More

Harken! Good news (maybe) “encouraging news” is a better description, as Negative Emissions Technology (“NET”) starts coming into focus. Conceptually, carbon removal or direct air capture removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which would be great for suppressing climate change. In that regard, Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed (Yale Environment 360) Stephen Pacala (Princeton professor) chairman of More

Last Tuesday, within about an hour of his announcement on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi announcement, in the heat of the moment, I commented on the president’s acceptance of the Riyadh royals’ explanation of the Istanbul consulate incident. I called his statement “crude” and “buttheadedly amoral.” I should have stated the obvious broader point: It was wrong. Marxists More

Given that people who espouse neo-Nazi ideology are attracted to the military, it is disappointing to learn what a poor job the generals do to uncover and expel them. Or perhaps the inaction reflects a deeper problem. A recent stream of stories about right wing extremists in the Canadian military prompted the leadership to scramble More

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair On my last day of teaching Environmental Studies, I posed a question to my students. I explained that for some time in my childhood, my father worked in the airline industry. “What does More

The NYT reported that the Trump administration is considering replacing the tariffs is imposed on aluminum and steel imports from Mexico and Canada with a system of quotas. There is an important economic dimension to such a shift that was left out of the piece. If the U.S. imposes a tariff on an import then More

It’s just another one of those amazing coincidences and a harbinger of things to come in the United States.  It was the news that Democracy’s greatest champion in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Trump wannabe, was presiding over a parliament last June that was drafting anti-immigrant legislation. The parliament’s efforts were preceded by More