Jack Werner In a recent piece in Foreign Policy, “No One Talks About Liberating Mosul Anymore,” Michael Knights wrote about the necessity of training better Iraqi forces and unleashing U.S. airpower in Iraq to fight the so-called Islamic State (IS). “It’s time to let the U.S. military get creative with partners on the ground —…
Nile Stanton In a thought-provoking article by Dominic Johnson, Richard Wrangham, and Stephen Rosen of Harvard, the authors observe that “Human decision-making has been shown to violate rational choice theory in a variety of contexts….” “[S]ome of the most intriguing and important examples concern how people perceive and react to risk. Most notably, people appear…
Daniel N. White Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain’s autobiography of the same title, was showing at the arthouse multiplex where I decided to spend the day in the HVAC out of the allergens. For all my complaints about Austin, at least it is a large enough market to have…
Michael Brenner Is Bernie Sanders halfway there? No – not to the nomination, much less the White House. What Sanders has done is to establish himself as a force in the Democratic Party’s selection process. He has done so by demonstrating two qualities that have largely disappeared from America’s political life over the past few…
Intro by Stuart Lyle It is not hard to spot creeping authoritarianism in the US. The Snowden document cache makes clear that the government has a voracious appetite for data, our data: the digital traces we leave whenever we are online. It is no longer an unsubstantiated suspicion. The UN has documented and ranked the…
b. traven Alice may have survived her trip down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, but it is an unseemly place for the president of a powerful but feckless nation to venture. Nor is it likely that Obama will emerge unscathed – or further enlightened. How so? President Obama seems to have cut a deal with…
b. traven I look at the “The Contrary Perspective” as a community of citizens interested in challenging the accepted views of our society, a community interested in seeking different or contrary views. But what if what you see (or think you saw) is so out of your experience of the physical and social world you…
Dan Mason What follows is a subject for open debate. It is a very serious subject, and I have had trouble solving the dilemma to my personal satisfaction. Please feel free to offer other conclusions because this really perplexes me. Here it is: Why does US foreign policy/military interventions appear to be completely inept? I…
Nile Stanton At the reliably up-to-date and highly informative website Breaking Defense, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. reported that on June 16th, Lt Gen James Kowalski, Deputy Commander of the US Strategic Command, told a group, “We have to recognize that there are two authoritarian nuclear-armed regimes [China and Russia] dominating the Eurasian landmass, and they…
Eric Frith (This article originally appeared at Tropics of Meta and is used with the kind permission of the author.) The Greek sovereign debt crisis reached a climax early this week when, in an impromptu popular referendum, Greeks overwhelmingly rejected the terms of the bailout package offered by Eurozone leaders and the troika (the European…
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