Month: July 2002

If you want to see the face of pure evil, cast your eyes on a recent column in National Review Online by resident financial guru Larry Kudlow, "Taking Back the Market – By Force." The market is down, he moans, and it isn’t really about corporate corruption and the Bush administration’s anti-free market policies: these, … Continue reading “PURE EVIL”

One of the salutary lessons from the scary India-Pakistan standoff (which has still not ended) is that the political and military leadership of neither country can be trusted to desist from nuclear brinkmanship, even downright nuclear adventurism. More than a billion people in South Asia once again came close to the brink of a nuclear … Continue reading “Reducing the Nuclear Danger”

I‘m not sure I was quite prepared for the question from Leslie Dutton, host of a Los Angeles-area public-affairs program called “Full Disclosure” that taped last week. (The program, which is independently produced on a shoestring and distributed to cable networks on public access, just won a Local Emmy for Informational/Public Affairs Series for a … Continue reading “Assessing the War”

The latest scare stories – the terrorists are going to give us a display of nuclear fireworks on July 4, commandeer dams, electrical grids, and traffic lights via the Internet, and launch suicide attacks in shopping malls – don’t phase me. I guess we’re all so used to the hysterics of our demagogic leaders that … Continue reading “LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE”

A few years ago Niall Ferguson made the unexceptionable observation in The Pity of War that Great War soldiers as much as anything fought on, and fought to win, because they enjoyed fighting. This caused some of the more po-faced reviewers of his book to tut-tut – and murmur about, ‘what can a civilian academic … Continue reading “Fighting Is Fun”