I’m normally a big fan of John Stewart, and I also generally have a lot of respect for Ted Koppel. But I was bothered by something that the two of them said yesterday during Koppel’s appearance on The Daily Show. Koppel was promoting a Discovery Channel special that has yet to air on [...]

I love the Olympic Games. I love seeing great athletes compete in obscure sports. I love the chance to watch Bob Costas every day. I love that the competitors compete not for money, but for the chance to bring attention to their sports and pride to their countries. And I love [...]

Hey Silence, how about an analysis of what’s going on in Japan right now with Abe’s party losing the elections…

President Bush is struggling to find an acceptable compromise position on global warming. For years, he has said that the time wasn’t right to act on global warming. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol, dismissed setting benchmarks for carbon dioxide emissions, and repeatedly claimed that the issue needed further study. Lately, he’s been [...]

This article chronicles how children in war torn countries are kidnapped, brainwashed, and turned into professional soldiers. Its horrifying. If Americans really understood the realities of war, I think there would have been a lot less support for Bush’s policies.

“All politics is local.”  It’s a classic political dictum, but one that we often choose to ignore, especially with regards to autocratic regimes.  The idea is simple: politicians want, more than anything, to stay in power, and virtually everything that they do while in office is geared toward that end.  Makes perfect sense–except that, when [...]

The Vietnam War was a debacle for military strategists and planners. The Pentagon entered that war thinking along the lines of most World War II era strategists: the guy with the biggest guns and the most men at the point of contact will win most fights. But in Vietnam, we out-manned and out-gunned [...]

The glorious logic of international diplomacy:
1) North Korea imports materials to make a nuclear warhead, violating international law.
2) North Korea builds nuclear warheads.
3) North Korea detonates nuclear warhead.
4) US/UN push nations to inspect cargo entering North Korea for illicit materials.
If searching cargo was going to work (which I doubt it will), shouldn’t we have done [...]

Apparently, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon over the weekend. (I’d recommend that you check out the Washington Post’s history of our dispute with North Korea over their nuclear program, if you need a refresher. Good stuff.) And, of course, the United States and the United Nations are scrambling to do something [...]

Some essential reading and a few thoughts on the War on Terror:
The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind.
Suskind is a former Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Washington Post. This is a phenomenally well-written account of the war on terror, as told by the CIA and FBI agents who fought the post-9/11 intelligence, counter-intelligence, [...]