John Judis is one of America’s smartest liberal thinkers; this isn’t just because he has a Gigantic Brain, which he does.  It’s also because he makes smart choices about what to think about.  In a short piece in The New Republic, he looks at what he calls the ‘anti-statist’ tradition in America, the dislike and […]

One sign of an apocalyptic age like ours is the frequency with which news headlines read like science fiction.  This story from the AP describes a scientific conference held under the auspices of the Vatican Observatory and ending yesterday at which a group of scientists examined the evidence for extra-terrestrial life.The article takes all the […]

John Allen Mohammed was killed by the State of Virginia tonight.  He received a lethal injection at 9:06 and was declared dead at 9:11.I don’t have anything against the death penalty.  I realized that nineteen years ago on a visit to Auschwitz.  In front of a killing chamber where Jews and other victims were gassed […]

How much do crooked politicians and others steal every year?Nobody really knows, of course, but as the BBC reports today, the UN estimates that $1.6 trillion each year is stolen each year and moved across national borders. Tragically, much of this money is stolen from poor countries.  It is bread taken out of the mouths […]

Somali pirates are now firing on ships hundreds of miles from shore, extending their range of operations deep into the Indian Ocean.  Flush with ransom payments from past operations, the pirates are able to buy increasingly sophisticated weapons and ships.It’s likely that we will see more of this.  Al-Qaeda was the first modern NGO to […]

Those worried that they were too young to experience the joys of the Cold War can now wrap themselves in the excitement of the contemporary equivalent of Cold War ‘red scares’: fears that communists were infiltrating the American government and other institutions.Today’s version is the “green scare”; fears that radical religious extremists of the Islamic […]

The BBC reports this morning that Sudan’s odious president Omar al-Bashir has suddenly discovered some pressing business at home that will prevent him from attending this week’s Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) summit in Turkey.Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the ongoing war in Darfur, had earlier been expected to attend.  This […]

Twenty years ago I was in a cafe in Rio de Janeiro, eating breakfast and looking at the morning paper.In those days, you couldn’t get the English language newspapers until much later in the day in Rio; neither was the internet much use as a news source.So I was drinking some strong Brazilian coffee (“hot […]

Thailand used to be the most stable country in Southeast Asia.  That is no longer the case and its long-running, slowly developing political crisis is taking a dramatic turn for the worse.This is important.  Geopolitically and economically, Thailand matters enormously to both China and the United States.  Any serious unrest there could bring American and […]

The “great game” is what nineteenth century British strategists called the contest in Central Asia between Britain and Russia; it usually came down to competition for the shifting allegiances of various warlords and tribes in Afghanistan.That ‘game’ is still being played with a new set of players, but a new and potentially much more explosive […]