Suchergebnisse

 In my last post, I said that Donald Trump's strong position in the race for the Republican nomination is not the result of his personal hold on Republican voters, but of support (or at least lack of opposition) from Republican elites.  A Republican who doesn't pay much attention to politics is likely to recall that things went pretty well while Trump was in office (up until Covid, which wasn't his fault), and therefore will be inclined to give Trump another chance unless he's given a reason not to.  The obvious reasons are Trump's weak performance in general elections and his campaign to overthrow the 2020 results, but leading Republicans haven't emphasized either one.  On the first point, here's a comparison of the 2012-2020 results:                      Rep         Dem        Other2012             47.2%      51%          1.8%2016             45.9%      48%           6.1%2020             46.8%      51.3%        1.9%In 2012, Mitt Romney was running against an incumbent president who was a skilled politician.  In 2016, Trump was running against an opponent who was neither an incumbent nor a skilled politician.  In 2020, Trump was an incumbent himself, and in addition to the normal advantage of incumbency, there's a tendency to rally round the leader in times of national emergency.   Yet both times he fell short of Mitt Romney's share of the vote in 2012.  Usually after a candidate loses an election, people in his party start talking about why he lost, what the party needs to do differently, what kind of leaders it needs moving forward, etc.  That's never really happened with Trump.  On his campaign to overturn the election, for a few weeks after January 6, it seemed like many Republican leaders were ready to turn against him.  But since then, the dominant tendency has been to downplay it by saying that even if the 2020 election wasn't "stolen," there was something wrong with it, or that the Democrats are engaged in "election interference" themselves.  For example, when Maine's Secretary of State ruled that Trump shouldn't appear on the primary ballot, Susan Collins denounced the decision on Twitter.  She didn't have to say anything--she could have waited until a reporter asked and then just said it was up to the courts.  Or she could have said while Trump's conduct might not qualify as insurrection, it was a serious matter, and that was why she had voted to impeach Trump and would not be voting for him in the primary.   Other Republicans went farther, saying that there is or will be a Democratic push to get Trump taken off the ballot.  So why haven't Republican elites made the case against Trump?  I think that some of it is that they thought his support would fade away after he left office and didn't command as much media attention.  A second is that the appearance of disunity usually hurts a party with voters.  Right-wing Republicans have been willing to engage in intra-party fights in order to get what they want.   Rather than fighting back, moderate and mainstream Republicans have tried to placate them in order to maintain as much party unity as they can.  This is partly because of electoral considerations--moderate and mainstream Republicans are more likely to be from swing states or districts where they have to get some support from Democrats and independents.   I think it may also because their long period of being in the minority in Congress gave Republicans a tradition of being concerned with sticking together.  So someone like Collins, who is clearly not a fan of Trump, gives a generic Republican response rather than taking the opportunity to try to weaken him.

In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That's the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.Stamping feet, demanding that everything be done right now, squealing that we're going to Violet Elizabeth Bott ourselves blue in the face unless net zero happens yesterday is going to be a very expensive way of trying to deal with the problem. This will, as Phillip Inman then goes on to point out, lead to a possible rejection of even dealing with climate change at all - facing the vast cost of doing it all right, right, now people might well prefer to do nothing about it. This is - as we've pointed out a number of times - something warned about in the Stern Review of 2006. Humans do more of less expensive things, less of more. So, our method of dealing with any problem - and for the purposes of this argument, right now, we'll assume climate change is one of those - has to be the most efficient one possible. For it's that very efficiency which means that we'll do more solving of the problem given the resources available to be devoted to such a solution. As Stern, again, points out pure and nothing but free markets don't deal with externalities - they're external to market processes, see? But the most efficient method is to crowbar the externalities into market prices - markets are more efficient than planning and bureaucracy.Therefore the correct method of dealing with climate change - again assuming the existence of the problem - is to internalise the externalities into prices through a carbon tax. Because that way more dealing with climate change will be done. None of this is any mystery, it's all in the Ur documentation on the subject, IPCC reports, that Stern Review, the Nobel winning work by Nordhaus. The only possible mystery about it is why the political process doesn't adopt it. But then it's always possible that people go into politics in order to be able to boss people about rather than actually solve problems.

Australian authorities fined 77-year-old New Zealand resident June Armstrong $3,300 (U.S. $2,034) for bringing a chicken sandwich into the country. Armstrong bought the sandwich, which was sealed, at the Christchurch airport and put it into her backpack intending to eat it on her flight. But she forgot about it until a customs official in Australia…

Throughout 2023,I kept being sarcastic about being post-pandemic, knowing that COVID was still a major problem, even as we stopped acting as if it was.  And then, of course, I got it the last week of the year.  The year started with COVID--my wife and her family got it when she went down to help her mother when she was hospitalized--as well, so it was a strange year of acting like it was not a thing while it was very much a thing.  Since I am not going to be productive today due to my current bout, I thought I would post about the year so that I could remember now and down the road the non-covid-y parts to the year. I can't help but start with the longest stretch of single-dom since college.  Mrs. Spew first went to help her hospitalized mother, but that became a three month or so effort to get my MIL moved out of a four floor townhouse and into a senior apartments facility.  What did I do as a single dude for three months?  Mostly plot and scheme about the kitchen renovation.  While Mrs. Spew was back for the demolition and renovation, all of the decisions were made while she was away.  I did consult via texted pics of counter tops and the like, but as she put it, since I do most of the cooking, it was up to me for most of it.  And it worked out great.  I had two great ski trips to Banff, one with a friend's family and an anniversary trip sans my wife.  Instead, my sister and my daughter joined me.  The most notable part of the first trip was that I did a face plant on a relatively flat part of Lake Louise, proving that my new goggles are tough and leading to my first visit to the Ski Patrol hut for a bandaid. It was the first time I skied with my daughter in quite some time.  I had skied with my sister the previous year as she was re-learning the sport.  In 2023, she was much improved and kept up with me nicely.  The Minister of National Defence, Anita Anand, once again visited my Civ-Mil class by zoom.  This was the second, and, alas, last time, she did that as she got shuffled to a different ministry over the summer.  Last year, it was a last minute thing. This year, I had the chance to prompt the students to ask civ-mil questions as opposed to just big IR questions, and it went really well.     A highlight of the year was going to Florida for my cousin's daughter's Bar Mitzvah.  One of the patterns of the year was bad chair dancing--the guys holding up the various victims here and at other events tended to tilt the chairs forward.  They did better with Samantha than with her sister.  We got to spend the next day at my cousin's house, including their gator-proximate pool.  I hadn't had a chance to play with all four of my cousins' kids at the same time in quite a while, and it was my first time using my old kid-pool skills in sometime.  It was probably appropriate that it was in Florida since 2023 was the 40th anniversary of my family living in Miami--just for one year, but I spent a lot of that year in the pool we had.Speaking of blasts from the past, I went to my first rock concert in ... decades?  Journey came to Ottawa, and since their music was a big part of my teen soundtrack, I got a ticket and went.  No Steve Perry although his replacement sounded good and had lots of energy.  But still a good show. It reminded me why I don't go to concerts--I just don't find watching people make music all that interesting.  I have always enjoyed going to conferences, and this year's ISA was far more normal than last year's.  The previous year was underattended and held in a strange resort in Nashville. 2023's was held in Montreal, a very familiar locale, and most of the folks I like to see at these things were there.  Two highlights were the Presidential speech and an award panel.  I always blow off the Presidential speech except when the President is a friend.  Debbi Avant, who started at UCSD a few years before me, has always impressed me with her sharp insights about international relations, and her speech was Debbi at her finest. The other highlight, also UCSD related, was the lifetime achievement panel for Miles Kahler, my supervisor way back when.  He bristled at the attention a bit about all of this fuss, but it was great to see so much appreciation for his work and for his Miles-ness.  He is retiring... for the second time and I think this one will stick.  So, it was great to see him get all of the love and appreciation.  As I get closer to retirement myself, with two of my friends retiring this year (mine is still about eight years away), I am more committed to telling people how much they have meant to me.  Losing a few friends during the pandemic also is compelling me to make clear to folks how much I appreciate them.  There are few people in this business who supported me and shaped my views than these two, so it was great to see them both celebrated.I joke often about the military-industrial-academic complex, and this year, I got to experience it pretty directly.  Well, the first two parts--there were not many academics nor anything academic going on at CANSEC--the annual show for defence contractors.  The big surprise was not so much how much room the biggest contractors took up but the range of stuff being presented there--from artillery and ammo to drones to uniforms to cables to medical stuff and on and on.  Note in this pic that the firm was promoting gear for pregnant soldiers. I have rarely gone to the graduation ceremonies, but with one of my PhDs graduating and having finally purchased a spiffy cap and gown, it was time to go.  Marshall finished his dissertation in record time, and he didn't cut any corners along the way--it was an award-winning project.  Of all the students I supervised, his work required the fewest comments, so much so that I felt guilty.  I am just glad I don't have the action shot of me messing up his hooding since he is so very tall.    June was also a month of much travel.  First, a DND-organized trip to Riga to chat with NATO folks, Canada's contingent, the Latvian defence folks, and the Strategic Communications conference.  I learned a lot, had a fair amount of excellent beer, and even hung out with the kids from the NATO Field School--an effort run by CDSN Co-Director Alex Moens to teach undergrads and newly graduated folks about NATO.  It was my second time to Riga and my second time to the base where the Canadians are operating.  Going with this group meant more high level briefings, more sharp questions asked by my colleagues that I would not have thought to ask, and, yeah, more beer.The highlight of the year was the delayed anniversary trip with my wife to Spain.  I had a conference in Barcelona, so we flew into Madrid and then drove throughout hot southern Spain: Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, and Ronda.  My fave was Toledo despite the scariest extended driving experience of my life--the old city streets were so very narrow the proximity alarms in my rental car were going off--all of them.  Along the way, we learned a lot of history, saw some amazing art and architecture, ate really well, and had a lot of sangria.Did I mention it was hot?  Cordoba was probably our second favorite place although Granada was also pretty amazing.  And Ronda had the best tapas in a random bar.  Oh, and Barcelona is just terrific.Great view of Alhambra in Granada with excellent food. Ronda has a bridge over a beautiful gorge.  It also has an historic bullring. Seville was also pretty terrific.  Just an amazing trip.The summer family vacation was once again in Philly since my mother can't travel much.  We found new and old things to do.  I had not realized my older sister is so sharp at scrabble--a shark!  I dominated the axe throwing until the final throws, where Mrs. Spew took the crown!         My sabbatical started in July, and Dave and Phil and I managed to finish our book and submit it in the fall.  Glossy picture of book cover?  Not yet.  Still need to get the reviews and past the editorial board.  As Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.  Actually, in this case, the writing was the hardest part.The fall was also marked by something I had never experienced before: being the subject of an op-ed. I had written more than a few, but to have someone else dedicate an entire piece to moi?  Oh my.  The background is: in the fall of 2022, a retired general, Michel Maisonneuve was given an award by a veteran's association and used that speech to blast pretty much everyone.  I blogged about it since I found it to be very problematic.  When I heard that he was going to appear at the Conservative Party convention, I wrote an op-ed arguing that this was a dangerous politicization of the Canadian military.  Maisonneuve responded by targeting me, a dual citizen, gasp, in his op-ed.  It was all very strange to be on the other side of an op-ed, especially one filled with ad hominens and straw men.  But I guess this means I am an influencer?The APSA was strange due to a hotel strike, but I had to go as LA is where my daughter lives.  So, I had a good time conferencing and a better time hanging out with her.  The poker game was a bit different as we used a big table in the lobby (my room was way too small).  We were not as rowdy as the table nearby, so it was all good.  I also drove with Mrs. Spew on Mulholland Drive for as far as we could--got lots of great looks at LA and the valley. Jon cleaned up better than I did.Yet more travel as I went to DC with Mrs. Spew for a civ-mil conference and ... the 100th anniversary of the summer camp that was so important to me growing up.  The conference was terrific--I hadn't been to this specific one before--the Inter-university Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.   Definitely going back since it is chock full of smart, sweet folks working on fascinating stuff.  The anniversary gala happened to be the same weekend so I drove up to Baltimore and had a blast seeing old friends and meeting other folks who had similar experiences out in the hinterlands of Maryland.I should note that we had a great CDSN year--each of our events went really well, and we feel we are making a difference. I am so grateful for the team that does all of the heavy lifting.  And at one event, they let us use the patio!  The people, the location, the season all make this one quite special.  The Meeting of the MINDS event, where we brought together the nine networks funded by DND plus DND's Policy group, was a terrific opportunity to learn what the other networks are doing, what has been working for them, and also what DND wants from us. Our Year Ahead event addressed timely issues: how to respond to China's aggression, what the 2024 US election campaign will do to incite extremism, evacuations from conflict zones, and taking a look at the Balkans.  And it was in a funky new location for us.  It even had a slide!The aforementioned conference in DC kicked off a series of trips that is not going to stop until May of 2024.  I went to Seoul to research their civ-mil for the next book--what role do defence agencies think they have?  I learned a lot in those two weeks--still trying to figure that case out--and had a good time seeing more of Korea, including Busan.  Busan had the most beautifully located temple as well as the memorial for UN troops who died in the Korean war.I went directly from Seoul to Copenhagen for a different civ-mil conference.  I had been there a couple of times before, but hadn't seen their war museum, their art museum or their Christmas markets.  The latter showed me that Zurich's smelly gluhwein is not representative of mulled wine, so I had some of that and then made some over winterfest.   Those trips then lead to a quick trip to Toronto for a workshop and then Thanskgiving with the Saideman folks.  Much food was made and consumed.  The highlight of this week was Milo, my niece's dog.  Super sweet.  Oh and seeing my daughter.Since my sister had crashed my anniversary ski trip, I felt it was only fair to crash her ski clinic at Alta.  I had been there about 22 years ago on a Saideman family vacation (my segment, from Lubbock, arrived a day or two late thanks to snow removal challenges in Texas).  I am a much better skier now thanks to all the skiing near Montreal and now my habit of hitting the Canadian rockies on a regular basis.  So, it was fun to see how much more of the place I could do with confidence. The skies each day were so clear and blue.  Just amazing views at all times.  I came home from Alta to deliver cookies near and far.  Each year, I make more (the new kitchen definitely helped), and each year, more people join my nice list.  So, I spent two days driving around Ottawa seeing folks and giving bits of sweet joy.  This started in the first winter of the pandemic when this was the first chance to interact with people in person since the start of the quarantine.  It is a great way to end the year--eating sweets and sharing them.  And meeting a few dogs along the way.We ended the year as usual--in the greater DC area--to celebrate winterfest with my wife's family.  Since my mother-in-law no longer has a townhouse, we had to rent an airbnb near her retirement facility. Which meant we hosted the festivities--first time our family had anything to do with a tree in a couple of decades.  I have been making the big dinner for the past few years, so that was not so different.  It was great to see these folks--twice this year for me as I saw most of them in October when I was in the area for the IUS conference.  A drink mydaughter gotmy spectacular sister-in-law LizI hope you had a great 2023, and you have a happy new year.  I will be on the road for most of the first half of the year, so many more pics of fun places and good food.  Oh, and some research.

Since the beginning of this millennium, I've been writing critiques of the "generation game", the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here ) Much […]

Harvard alumni should not cede this special place to ideologues who seek to gut our school's core values, history, and ideals. The real fight for Harvard and truth has just begun. I am not quite ready to say that Harvard is lost.
The post I'm Not Done with Harvard Quite Yet appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

I read with interest Mauricio Karchmer's Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT, published Tuesday in The Free Press; but its perspective struck me as rather alien to the very nature of a modern secular American university. The author begins by pointing to what he sees as MIT's inadequate condemnation of the Hamas attack;…

Jonathan Reynolds, Labour's shadow business secretary, said the UK should be willing to apply "trade remedies" - tariffs - if it is found that Chinese brands have gained an unfair advantage over their European peers.Asked about the issue at the MakeUK manufacturers conference on Tuesday, he said: "There are some sectors where I look at just the sheer overcapacity that's coming out of China and I worry that is inconsistent with how a healthy, global market economy should operate."Where there is a concern that we're not facing free and fair and healthy competition, we're right to use trade remedies as an answer to that."This is not just to dunk on the Shadow Secretary, we expect the current one to make much the same sorts of points. And all likely contenders too. Simply because politics just hasn't - 248 years after it was first properly pointed out in Wealth of Nations - caught up with how trade works. Nor, even, the most basic point about who the economy is supposed to work for. The claim here is that the Chinese government has been taking money off Chinese citizens and giving it to Chinese car making companies. As a result those Chinese cars are subsidised and thus cheap to us Britons. That is the claim. The next step is where the lunacy comes in, in the reaction. For now the claim is that we must tax ourselves for buying these cheap, subsidised, Chinese cars. That's what a trade tariff is. So too would be any system of quotas or other restrictions upon those cheap cars being imported. It's a tax upon us Britons.Or, just to point up the lunacy, China is taxing its citizens so we must tax ourselves in response.The entire point of trade is that we get to put our hands on the things made by Johnny Foreigner - those things that we desire of course, those which are cheaper, or better, or simply more desirable than we can make them ourselves. That's not an aberration, that's the point. Even more basic, the point of an economy is consumption, not production. So, if someone's offering cheap electric vehicles - however produced, however financed - the correct answer is "Please send a second shipload. Pretty Please".The Chinese government is, as a result of its actions, getting Chinese car companies to ship us cars. Each coming with a cheque attached signed by the Chinese taxpayer. We get the car and we get the free money. The political response is that this is dreadful and cannot be allowed.Foreigners sending us free money is a bad idea that must be stopped. Now do you see why politics is such a lousy way to run the place?

Critics are misreading the movie. The wealthy are not the villains in this story.

"The job of academia is the discovery of truth. Universities should not be in the bullshit business."

From Livesay Law Office v. Ricartea, decided Thursday by the Texas Court of Appeals (Corpus Christi-Edinburg), in an opinion by Chief Justice Dori Contreras, joined by Justices Gina Benavides and Nora Longoria, reversing an order by Judge Fernando Mancias: The underlying case is a divorce proceeding in which appellant … filed a motion for sanctions…

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen deleted his official Facebook account after Meta's Oversight Board recommended his account be suspended for six months after he shared a video inciting violence.

The latest addition to PBS's American Masters series — "The Incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr." — makes for engrossing viewing, which isn't surprising since Buckley himself was compulsively watchable (and readable).The story of Buckley's life and career has been well and often told, not least by the protagonist himself. A much anticipated biography two decades in the making by Sam Tanenhaus is expected early next year. A globe-trotting journalist, editor, author, television personality, friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan (among many others), and founder of the conservative magazine National Review, Buckley was, in the estimation of the late Dartmouth professor and longtime National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, "the most important journalist since Walter Lippmann." "In fact," continued Hart, "Buckley's career was more impressive."Maybe so — after all, what started in 1955 as a niche magazine with 16,000 subscribers, transformed over the ensuing decades into a big business, which came to be known colloquially as Conservative Inc., replete with multi-million dollar think tanks, obscenely well compensated radio and TV personalities, and presidential candidates seeking its imprimatur. There is of course no question that Lippmann and Buckley's respective audiences were immense. But the comparison to Lippmann has its limits. Of the two, Lippmann had an embarrassingly better track record on U.S. foreign policy, for example, particularly when it came to the Vietnam War and the Cold War.National Review's coverage of the Cold War was colored, and not for the better, by a roster of ex-Communists and intellectuals with ties and sympathies that extended beyond the Iron Curtain, to what became known as the Captive Nations. The philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the postwar brand of anti-Communism "was originally the brainchild of former Communists who needed a new ideology by which to explain and reliably foretell the course of history."One of the things the documentary does well is demonstrate why the Vietnam War was the principal reason the now-infamous televised "debate" between Buckley and the novelist and critic Gore Vidal turned so ugly so quickly. After all, as the documentary notes, "Buckley was absolutely convinced that Vietnam was a crucial battle in the Cold War against Communism."And within Conservative Inc., no myth has been as unassailable as the idea that the Cold War was not only "won" by the United States but that it was "won" by Buckley's hearty band of conservatives. The columnist (and former Washington editor of NR) George Will summed up the prevailing view this way:"…Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War."But Will's reasoning suffers, as Buckley himself might have put it, from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.The triumphant reaction by NR to the end of the Cold War was noted with distaste by the great Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs in a letter to the man generally recognized as the "father" of containment, George F. Kennan, in September 1991,"Buckley gloats in the last number of his magazine: 'We won!" "We won!' He repeats that all over again, etc. etc."The idea that "We won, we won," was no doubt sincerely believed by Buckley and his followers, but it is, alas, an idea that is both ahistorical and dangerous — as we have come to see in the more than three decades since the end of the Cold War.***Once the Cold War ended, Buckley and his movement might have done well to reconsider the utility of continuing their alliance with the neoconservatives — after all, the rationale for so doing pretty much evaporated with the Soviet menace. By 1992, it was clear that a conservative alternative to the Cold War policy of global hegemony was emerging thanks to the insurgent candidacy of Patrick Buchanan. From the vantage point of 2024, it seems clear that for many conservatives, Buchanan's was the path not taken — tragically so. Instead of tending to our own garden after 1989, Washington, with the enthusiastic support of Conservative Inc., embarked on a frenetic campaign of ruinous overseas misadventures from which we have yet to disengage. For the conservative movement, the first post-Cold War decade saw fusionists continue their stranglehold on domestic policy, while the neocons grabbed the initiative on foreign policy. All the while, Buchanan became a prophet without honor in his own country.The American Conservative magazine co-founder Scott McConnell noted in a talk given in 2014 that as the Cold War was reaching its denouement, Buckley decided, thanks to the influence of the neocon power couple Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, "To allow neoconservatives to regulate the terms of Mideast discussion in his own magazine, National Review." The consequences for the magazine and the movement were profound. Thereafter, noted McConnell, "…The neoconservatives essentially won the right to supervise Israel-related discussions in National Review…Thereafter, any young Conservative knew the rules - you'd best be sufficiently pro-Israel to satisfy Midge and Norman if you wanted to advance."PBS ignores this history, making it seem as though the most interesting thing about Buckley in his final decade was his admission, made on the Charlie Rose Show, that he wanted to die. Whatever the (questionable) novelty of such sentiments by someone who had a) just lost his wife of 57 years and b) an advanced case of emphysema, Buckley's politics toward the end of his life became far more interesting than one might come to understand if they relied solely on PBS.Writing shortly after his death in 2008, Buckley biographer John Judis observed that, "Buckley chided conservatives or neoconservatives who refused to recognize that circumstances had changed — who invoked the old bogeymen or invented new ones." After visiting Cuba in 1998, Buckley even praised that great hero of foreign policy restrainers, John Quincy Adams, who, according to Buckley, "[r]eminded us that though we are friends of liberty everywhere, we are custodians only of our own."Indeed, thanks to the Iraq War and the mendacity of his old allies, the neocons who promoted it so ardently, the scales appeared to have fallen from Buckley's eyes. As Jeffrey Hart wrote in the American Conservative, "Buckley had expressed doubts about the Iraq War from the beginning ... During the last two years of his life, Bill Buckley understood the facts about Iraq and their implications." An exchange with with George Will on ABC in 2005 offered a sense of Buckley's thinking post-Iraq:Will: Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It's called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?Buckley: It's not at all conservative. It's anything but conservative. It's not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn't invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is…The story of Buckley's tenacious engagement with the war and his break with the neocons is a fascinating one, though one that PBS either missed or left on the cutting room floor.As Tanenhaus recounted in The New Republic in 2007:"Buckley has faulted Bush for trying to go it alone in Iraq and chided neoconservatives who"simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."….When I asked him recently if Iraq is the Republicans' Vietnam, he said, 'Absolutely.'"It is arguable that on matters of war and peace Buckley ended up holding positions closer to those held by his nemesis Gore Vidal than the Republican standard bearers in 2008 and 2012. Which is to say that by the end of his life, with regard to U.S. foreign policy, Buckley was getting it right.

Poker player Annie Duke says grit is overrated and walking away from bad choices is an underappreciated virtue.

The fact that Trinidad and Tobago lies 10° north of the equator, coupled with the warming of the planet caused by climate change, has made the heat that much more unbearable.