Interesting: By a razor-thin margin of less than half a percentage point, Colombian voters narrowly rejected a proposed peace plan that would have formally ended the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere. Almost everyone thought the referendum would pass… For … Continue reading →
Listening to many commentators on the cable news stations last night talking about the terrorist attack in Nice, I kept hearing the phrases: “We’re at war.” “This is World War III.” “This is war.” My reaction was, “Where’ve you been … Continue reading →
Every now and then I’ve offered excerpts from the fascinating WWII-era memoirs of Victor Klemperer (see this for one of them, as well as an explanation of who Klemperer was). The following quotes are from his I Will Bear Witness: … Continue reading →
ISIL (ISIS) is seeking nuclear material in order to use it against you-know-who: Isil terrorists are planning to use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities in a horrific “dirty bomb” attack, [British Prime Minister] David Cameron has warned. … Continue reading →
I think there’s something to this theory about Hitler, as described in an interview with Timothy Snyder, author of a recent book on Hitler, the Holocaust, and WWII (I haven’t read the book, by the way). I don’t completely buy … Continue reading →
Maybe yes, maybe no; North Korea’s claims of testing an H-bomb are doubted, but might be true. “We have consistently made clear that we will not accept [North Korea] as a nuclear state,” said a spokesman for the National Security … Continue reading →
Donald Trump dominates the news cycle again. Of all the outrageous statements he’s made in the past, his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is … Continue reading →
In ancient history and the sack of Rome, lessons for today: Writing from the vantage point of the eighteenth century, Gibbon did not go into extensive detail of the Vandal assault, except to note that the Romans willingly opened their … Continue reading →
Check this out [hat tip: commenter “sdferr”]: President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not “legally binding,” his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative … Continue reading →
Well worth reading, and containing some surprising and little-known facts: Yet most of the Syrian refugees have been taken in not by Western countries but by Syria’s neighboring states: Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, whose capacity has been overwhelmed. Lebanon, with … Continue reading →
This story is still breaking, and it’s hard to sort out all the facts. But one fact that seems clear is that it has great potential to lead to a serious conflagration: Turkish warplanes have shot down a Russian military … Continue reading →
The best approach to ISIS would have been prevention, an ounce of it worth far more than a pound of cure. An obvious move would have been to have kept a small residual force in Iraq, back when even Obama … Continue reading →