One of the most famous thought-experiments in economics is Bastiat’s story of the broken window, which the French economist used to argue against the common belief that destruction stimulates economic activity. In Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt uses the broken window to argue against the belief that war stimulates economic activity. What follows is [...]
The original version of my article on neocon bloviator-in-chief Richard Perle appeared last week on Antiwar.com.
We reprint the text here — and also add a postscript on Perle’s abrupt resignation from the Defense Policy Board, and his simultaneous threat to sue anyone and everyone who so much as looks at him the wrong way.
In the [...]
Following my article reporting the death of Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski on Antiwar.com yesterday, new aspects of the story are surfacing, some of which I have linked to near the end of this post.
The charred bodies of all those killed have finally been found, notwithstanding the fact that the plane crashed in high mountains and [...]
Abuse of death is nothing new in the Balkans or, indeed, the Empire. It was perhaps too much to expect that Boris Trajkovski’s tragic end in the Herzegovina mountains would be spared the same fate.
Antiwar.com’s resident Macedonia expert Chris Deliso has a great piece on his site Balkanalysis, examining the misleading and manipulative eulogizing [...]
You do understand that Albright did lie, innocent people did (and continue to) die, the Clinton administration and NATO did sex-up intelligence about Yugoslavia and did misrepresent Milosevic as the new Hitler, and that our Balkan adventure is indeed a quagmire, don’t you? You fail at sarcasm but succeed wildly at irony.
Another delightful article on NRO today from Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime Communist thug in charge of Romania’s DIE, current neoconservative flak. The typical Pacepa essay, I’ve noticed, opens with a brief “trust me, I’ve hung with some bad mofos” hook to reel the Tom Clancy devotees in. It then proceeds to explain how Pacepa, under [...]
So the case against Katherine Gun, whistleblower in the UN spying case, has fizzled out.
But why? “…There is no longer sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction,” prosecutor Mark Ellison told the judge at the Old Bailey criminal court. “It would not be appropriate for me to go into the reasons behind that.”
He said [...]
They Marched into Sunlight is worth reading, especially for people like me who are interested in the Vietnam War but too young to remember it. Maraniss tells two main stories, based on interviews: an ambush of US soldiers in Vietnam and an antiwar demonstration gone wrong on the U. of Wisconsin campus, both of which [...]
Nestled inside another Economist article is this little tidbit about the Iraqi governing council’s take on freedom of the press:
Though appointed and not elected, the council is reasonably representative of Iraq’s various groups. But it also has its flaws, one of which is a growing allergy to criticism. Its members say they believe in a [...]
The current count of Americans killed in Iraq is 548. According to The Economist, the number would be much higher if the military was not outsourcing the more dangerous jobs:
What the figures suggest is that the number of attacks is going up even more sharply, though the number of potential American targets is going [...]
Back in 2000, Justin Raimondo wrote an article called “An Electronic Pearl Harbor?” about curious Kosovo war-related hacker attacks and the role of Network Solutions, the then-monopolist of Internet domain names. Interested readers can revisit this story in Sold Short: Uncovering Deception in the Markets by famed short-seller Manuel Asensio.
Short-sellers are, essentially, people who [...]
