Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But it is hard to take such a view of ourselves.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States.  <<<To read more, click here.>>>

Saddam Hussein drained the unique wetlands of southern Iraq as a punishment to the region’s Marsh Arabs who had backed an uprising. Two decades later, one courageous US Iraqi is leading efforts to restore the marshes. Not even exploding bombs can deter him from his dream.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

It’s the mother of all clichés. Almost no one can resist it. It’s wielded by everyone from thoughtful ex-generals to vitriolic bloggers. It crops up everywhere from Russia’s English-language TV channel to scruffy Pakistani newspapers to America’s stately National Public Radio. The Huffington Post can’t seem to live without it, and one recent book even chose it as a title. Afghanistan, we’re told, is “the graveyard of empires.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

A former United States ambassador to Thailand tells of being asked to contribute to a local university in Bangkok that wanted to set up an “America corner” in its library—nothing more than a computer station and a few shelves of informational material. During the Cold War such a project would have been funded by the U.S. Information Agency.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Each week adds a new item to the growing list of grievances between the United States and China. The value of China’s currency, arms to Taiwan, human rights in Tibet, carbon emissions, military spending, sanctions on Iran, cyber attacks, and, of course, North Korea have all made headlines in the past few months. But there are far more profound problems that tend to get covered up by this landslide of daily disagreement.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Sarah Palin’s ongoing struggle with the English language entered a new phase this week, when she called on her Twitter followers to “refudiate” the proposal to build a mosque on the site of the World Trade Center. Mockery followed, and a tweet in which she corrected herself and asked people to “refute” it. Not correct, either. Finally, she put an end to it by saying: “Refudiate, misunderestimate, wee-wee’d up. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin words, too.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The World Health Organization found itself Friday in the strange position of defending North Korea’s health care system from an Amnesty International report, three months after WHO’s director described medicine in the totalitarian state as the envy of the developing world.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>> <<<Amnesty National report, click here.>>>

One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The doctrinal contempt of Islamist regimes for popular festivals such as the Iranian nowrooz (new year) extends to suspicion of every expression of spontaneous life. The result is to conjure the very rituals of resistance they fear, says Asef Bayat.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The oil was everywhere, long black sheets of it, 15 inches thick in some places. Even if you stepped in what looked like a clean patch of sand, it quickly and gooily puddled around your feet. And Wes Tunnell, as he surveyed the mess, had only one bleak thought: “Oh, my God, this is horrible! It’s all gonna die!”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

When I was twenty years old, and a college student, I defaced a portrait of Chairman Mao. For this act, and without a trial, I was declared a political prisoner and sent to a forced labor prison on Taihu Lake, where I served in a labor reform brigade in a stone quarry for seven years: five years in the labor prison and two years as an ex-prisoner laborer.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Intellectual critics of the Tea Party movement most often attack it for its lack of ideas, especially new ideas.  But the point they are making reveals as much about them as it does about the Tea Party. Behind the criticism lies the implicit assumption that comes quite naturally to American intellectuals: Namely, that a political movement ought be motivated by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas. But the Tea Party movement is not about ideas. It is all about attitude.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Despite its blockade, Israel insists Gazans are not starving and there is no humanitarian crisis. The enclave’s poverty is not as bad as the worst parts of Africa but a people struggle to cope amid the rubble left by cross-border strikes.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Muslims have been landing on the shores of Britain and France for decades. And, as these populations arrived and settled in the Republic, Paris pursued a policy it believed would eventually lead immigrants to full cultural integration into French society. Meanwhile, London, facing a similar influx of foreigners, attempted to create a full-fledged multicultural polity.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

For years, from his senior position in Estonia’s Defense Ministry, Herman Simm leaked highly sensitive NATO intelligence and the names of Western spies to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In a classified damage analysis, NATO concludes that the former KGB colonel was one of the “most damaging” spies in the history of the alliance.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

That was the message many people took from the triumphalist pageantry of Beijing’s 2008 Olympics. But the real game-changer was economic. The financial crisis, global recession, and China’s remarkable recovery have produced a big shift in the world’s most important state-to-state relationship.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

As the battle over health-care reform crescendoed last month, President Obama let slip that he was still making time for some side reading. “We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century,” the president told a crowd at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. “I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now. He was talking about it.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

But did Beijing need two hundred thousand soldiers and school children to demonstrate its strength or ascendancy? The dominant narrative about China today is that it will, within a few short decades, become the preeminent power in the international system. Its economy, according to the conventional wisdom, was the first to recover from the global downturn and will eventually go on to become the world’s largest. Geopolitical dominance will inevitably follow. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? Just what is this sort of thing below?  We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Would Barack Obama, 20 years from now, be giving that talk if he hadn’t won a quick promotion? Or would Obama be the kindly president of the Senate in Frank Capra’s tale who encourages young Smith to stick to his principles with a smile of solidarity here, a helpful ruling there? Hard to say, just as almost everything connected to the concept of “compromise” threatens philosophical confusion.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In November 9, 2001, George W. Bush created a new public holiday—World Freedom Day. The United States, he explained, would lead the global fight for “liberty, freedom and the universal struggle for human rights”; it would try to help the “more than two billion people” still living under repressive regimes. The idea that America could, or should, do this had informed a certain kind of Washington mind-set throughout the Cold War. But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The Arab world today is ruled by contradiction. Turmoil and stagnation prevail, as colossal wealth and hyper­modern cities collide with mass illiteracy and rage-filled imams. In this new diversity may lie disaster, or the makings of a better Arab ­future. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

I was shocked by General John Sheehan’s remarks about “open homosexuality” in the Dutch Army being to blame for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. (He was testifying in the Senate against President Obama’s plans to end the ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the US military.) Not shocked by his bigotry, but by his ignorance of his own profession. Isn’t the General aware that some of the finest soldiers in the history of warfare have been “openly homosexual”? As Churchill himself said, the three time-honored traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, buggery and the lash.  <<<To read more, click here.>>>

The euro is under attack like never before, as the promises on which it was based turn out to be lies. Hedge funds are speculating against Greek debt, while euro-zone politicians work behind the scenes to cobble together rescue packages. But fundamental flaws in the monetary union need to be fixed if Europe’s common currency is to survive.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

After the Berlin wall fell and the remaining occupation force departed in the early 1990s, a motley crew of house squatters and hippies moved into the former French barracks. But within a few years, the local city council converted the space into a gleaming town for the middle class called Vauban. When you visit this eco-town, it quickly becomes apparent that Vauban resembles nothing so much as a tarted-up socialist paradise. It leaves you with the feeling of having seen a small replica of East Germany—except that it actually works.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Traffic had slowed to a crawl in Baghdad’s Azamiyah district as drivers stopped to ogle the president. It was April 2003, and Saddam Hussein cheerily greeted his subjects as a few bodyguards tried to keep the crowd at bay. Someone handed Saddam a bewildered baby, which he hoisted up in the air a few times and handed back. When he reached a white sedan, Saddam climbed onto the hood to survey the sea of loyalists.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The high-profile military campaign by International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) forces against Taliban militias in Afghansitan’s southern province of Helmand involves the deployment of some 15,000 heavily armed troops, who are supported by strike-aircraft, helicopter-gunships, artillery and armed drones – all ranged against perhaps 1,000 lightly armed insurgents. Despite this imbalance of power, Operation Moshtarak is already facing unanticipated difficulties. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Last month, the Supreme Court tossed out the case Alvarez v. Smith , a challenge to a portion of the asset forfeiture in Illinois that allows the government to keep seized property for up to six months before giving its owner a day in court. The Court declined to rule on the case after determining it to be moot—all of the parties had settled with the government by the time the case made it to Washington. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

As religious violence deepens in his home country, Nobel laureate and Nigerian political activist Wole Soyinka shares his unbridled thoughts on Islamic terrorism and why England is a “cesspit” with The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Anyone searching for the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficulty: the key terms of political theory now have a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings. Take the word “liberal”. In the US a liberal is usually someone with an overriding belief in state intervention as a cure for social problems and market inefficiencies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Jihad can sound boring at first.  That’s what Flagg Miller has discovered. For the past seven years, Mr. Miller, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California at Davis, has been poring over hundreds of audio tapes that were part of Osama bin Laden’s personal collection. Some of the tapes feature jihadis making small talk, cooking breakfast, laughing at each other’s lame jokes—not exactly riveting material.   But listen closely and they start to get interesting. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Last week I was a juror in the trial of a man accused of selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. At the end of the two days of testimony, I concluded that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I also concluded that he should be acquitted.  In my mind, it came down to a simple, unsettling question: Is it worse to let a drug dealer go free, or to reward the police for lying under oath?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Who shall guide us in the art of the tweet? Not, as has been suggested, Ernest Hemingway: His style should be measured in the overall effect of his paragraphs, not in the length of his sentences. Still, the common view that Hemingway wrote sentences that were short and simple has received a more general fillip by those who elevate Anglo-Saxon as a model for clarity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Until recently, the United States had become complacent about terrorism. The general view was that al Qaeda was on the run and Islamic terrorism was a receding threat. We now know better. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under frequent assault. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Contemporary international relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In 1945, the United States faced a dire threat. The rising power of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism in Eastern Europe — and, soon enough, worldwide — represented a new enemy that imperiled postwar hopes for a peaceful and prosperous world. The United States was poorly equipped to comprehend, let alone respond to, this emerging global danger.  How should the creation of Sovietology guide today’s threats?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it.  Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages.  Ten years later, in August of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev lifted his nation’s 50-year-old prohibition against private farming, offering 50-year leases to farm families who would subsequently work off of contracts with the state. The results in each country could not have been more different.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The Mumbai attacks: sixty harrowing hours. Jason Motlagh’s minute-by-minute account shows us scenes of great heroism and horrifying cruelty. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

For the past seven years, David Guttenfelder has witnessed and documented the changing landscape of Afghanistan. Although mostly embedded with coalition troops, he has also covered the presidential elections, bodybuilders in Kabul, the state of Afghan prisons and daily life in the country. Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press and over the past seven years has offered the general public a close-up, intimate look at the lives of troops fighting in the mountains and remote regions of Afghanistan. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

My taxi driver was an Indian or Pakistani with the look of one who had few friends. I spent a long minute arguing with him, trying, at some length, to give him the address of my destination. Finally he turned his whole body toward me and sharply corrected me, but then, looking me over a second longer and ascertaining that there was no great malice in me but only a newcomer’s ineptitude, he pondered my accent and asked, to sweeten my mood, “What country you come from?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument—and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt’s death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Who are smarter, liberals or conservatives? This is the kind of question that could spark fierce and endless debates between political opponents, but what if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year. Such jokes were whispered in communist East Germany — and West German spies recorded them diligently to gain insights into the public mood, according to recently released intelligence files.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The United States can still be the most prominent—although not dominant—of the great powers, and it can still offer the most attractive way of life. But to do this, America will have to become more American than it has been in recent years. This means it will have to renovate or reinvent certain pillars that raised the United States to the heights of global power and prosperity in the second half of the 20th century. These pillars remain the only solid and enduring supports for a prominent American role in the 21st century, so we need to be clear about what they are.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War, said it all could have been different if McGeorge Bundy, President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, had not resigned from the White House in early 1966.  As Obama grapples with Afghanistan, the final interviews of McNamara and Bundy.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, counterinsurgency theory was about as popular in American military circles as tank warfare is today. An early study by the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division during its first deployment to Iraq reported “a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people’s war, even when they were fighting it.” There was a reason for this. Eager to forget the most painful experience in its history, the army had all but banished counterinsurgency from the lexicon of American military affairs after Vietnam. As a result, the army relied on a flawed strategy in Iraq for a period that lasted, according to author Thomas Ricks, at least “twenty months or more.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

To anyone who, like me, has lived in a Muslim nation, none of this behavior is either singular or surprising. It is the way men in most Islamic nations prefer things to be. We can talk forever about the nature of culture versus faith: how ancient rites and practices like the circumcision of girls (85 percent of all Egyptian girls have endured this procedure), or the tradition of keeping women ignorant and housebound, can corrupt a religion that never intended for these things to happen.  But it is no coincidence that women who must submit to Sharia law find themselves in a very bad place, wherever those women and those places happen to be.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In Stand Up and Cheer!, a bizarre 1934 Hollywood movie remembered today mostly for the sensational performance of the five-year-old Shirley Temple, President Roosevelt appoints a Broadway impresario to his cabinet as Secretary of Amusement. His mission is to distract the public and get them to laugh, which presumably would bring the Great Depression to an end.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Khieu Samphan and Jacques Vergès, two old men with thin-rimmed glasses and thickened waists, were sitting on a floor mat, shoeless, having tea. It was late August 2006, in a room at the Renakse hotel, a converted colonial mansion in central Phnom Penh. Khieu, the former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and a Pol Pot loyalist to the end, was still free. But he was growing nervous as a UN-backed tribunal was ramping up its efforts to indict the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. So he had called on his old friend Vergès, defender of terrorists and tyrants. Khieu wore brown polyester pants, Vergès a beige linen suit. They called each other “Maître” and “Président” and reminisced about the time when they had no titles – their student days in Paris in the 1950s. And they strategised.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

A legal conflict between the daughters of former Egyptian presidents is a sad commentary on the condition of the Arab world.  For what is on display here is only an exaggerated form of the conspiracy theories that are reaching unprecedented levels in Egypt and the Arab world. The leading Palestinian politician Farouk Qaddumi has accused the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas of killing Abbas’s own predecessor Yasser Arafat. It is surely time to ask: can the “natural” death of any Arab leader be taken as a fact? Is it possible for an Arab leader to die without being murdered?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife’s belly, a burden of grief. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated, and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. But the doctors recommended abortion. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialized in late abortions.  But when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. Her father was on the line. “There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions,” he said.  They turned on CNN. Dr. Tiller had just been killed, shot in the head as he passed out church leaflets. In their shock, they mixed up the clinic and the church: We were supposed to be there. What if it had happened while we were there? What if he couldn’t complete the procedure? Now there is only one doctor left.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly “severe, evil, and aggressive.  “This is absolute poppycock,” says Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University.  “History is all about argument.  There is no absolute historical truth about anything big in history.”  But what exactly is worrying Russia?  Why is the country convinced that it is the victim of a campaign to make it look bad?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Sarah Palin’s history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>

“Power Is Shifting from West to East.” Not really. Dine on a steady diet of books like The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East or When China Rules the World, and it’s easy to think that the future belongs to Asia. As one prominent herald of the region’s rise put it, “We are entering a new era of world history: the end of Western domination and the arrival of the Asian century.”  Don’t believe the hype about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age.  It will be many decades before China, India, and the rest of the region take over the world, if they ever do.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Women in sunglasses and head scarves speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs. When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. They were uplifting, they featured women of many ages, and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: the photographs and video taken last weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In 1995, John Gallin, the head of the clinical center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), decided the nation’s premier medical research facility should have a vibrant bioethics program. He embarked on a lengthy search, soliciting dozens of resumes and interviewing several candidates, before settling on a Harvard-trained M.D./Ph.D. named Ezekiel Emanuel to lead it. Emanuel, who goes by Zeke, was young (not yet 40) and relatively unknown outside the field of medical ethics. But, with his energy and a combination of clinical and scholarly credentials, he seemed uniquely suited to the task Gallin had set: Building the country’s top bioethics department on a shoestring budget.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

There is something bizarre and twisted about pro-Western Russian liberals attacking the recommendations of the Hart-Hagel Commission or statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and James Baker.  Their criticism serves as a mouthpiece for the agendas of the most bitterly anti-Russian and geopolitically aggressive liberal interventionists and neocons who help maintain tensions between Russia and the West—and actually between the United States and the rest of the world. Most Russians would like to see more democracy in Russia , including a rule of law and a freer media. But the West tends to misinterpret this longing, says Anatol Lieven.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Gaining control of Cuba fulfilled a long-sought strategic aim. But equally important for the United States was how the invasion of Cuba came to shape its foreign policy and self-image at large. The Spanish-American War–the Union’s first large-scale military campaign since Reconstruction–bolstered American unity and inaugurated America’s self-conception as a “universal nation” endowed with the moral mission of projecting its power abroad.   Is the American embargo against Cuba the “dumbest policy on the face of the earth”? Maybe not. But that does not mean it is working. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

I assume that readers do not believe that the CIA, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex or some other manifestation of the System ordered the murder of JFK. Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, once everywhere, are now confined to the diminishing audience for Oliver Stone’s movies. I am not sure, however, that you can say, hand on heart, that you have not thought for a fleeting moment that maybe there just might be something true about a conspiracy theory. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

State budget crises abound these days. California lawmakers earlier this year agreed on a package of huge tax hikes and modest spending cuts to plug a $42 billion budget deficit. Facing a budget gap approaching $20 billion in New York, politicians in Albany were hoping that a constrictive tourniquet of tax increases would stop the bleeding in the Empire State. All told, the Tax Foundation projects that 45 states will confront budget shortfalls through fiscal year 2010, leading politicians to push schemes that raise the most revenue from the smallest number of constituents. Among their favorite instruments of destruction are “sin” tax increases.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

If you like the way President Goodwrench is running the automobile industry and the way Congress gave out millions in staff bonuses last year while lambasting Wall Street, you’ll love what their supporters are up to right now: ditching the Electoral College.  That not-large-but-highly-vocal cohort of people who can never forgive George W. Bush for being president has hatched the idea of turning the entire nation blue by making the Electoral College irrelevant — and they are making headway.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.  For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law — a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>> |  <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>

Most political groups in modern history have wanted to build and control a state.  Many of today’s nonstate groups do not aspire to have a state. In fact, they are considerably more capable of achieving their objectives and maintaining their social cohesion without a state apparatus. The state is a burden for them, while statelessness is not only very feasible but also a source of enormous power. Modern technologies allow these groups to organize themselves, seek financing, and plan and implement actions against their targets — almost always other states — without ever establishing a state of their own. They seek power without the responsibility of governing. The result is the opposite of what we came to know over the past two or three centuries: Instead of groups seeking statehood through a variety of means, they now pursue a range of objectives while actively avoiding statehood. Statelessness is no longer eschewed as a source of weakness but embraced as an asset.  <<<To read article, click here.>>> |  <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>

It’s universally recognized that some people benefit hugely from recessions. But no one really expects those beneficiaries to be philosophers. John Gray, thus far, has had a fabulous recession, not least because he was one of the few people who forcefully predicted it. As he says, all he had to do is figure out the tipping point of our current state of Prozac politics. <<<To read article, click here.>>>