Noam Chomsky's new book, Hopes and Prospects, leads me to a conclusion that will startle his admirers and critics alike: Chomsky is a conservative. It might surprise him as well. After all, he is a socialist and a libertarian. The fundamental precept of his philosophy, which stems from a view of ...
Something happened to British architects after the Second World War. Rugged Howard Roarke-like geniuses and obscure mediocrities alike shared an aesthetic that, for some reason, no one outside the profession understood. Perhaps the architecture schools gave them sets of glasses that made them to ...
While Saddam Hussein was still ruling Iraq, he went to a village to award a new Kalashnikov rifle to a young boy. The boy had come to the tyrant's attention after reporting the private conversations of his mother and father to the secret police. It seemed the parents had criticized the tyrant, whom ...
When you"re losing bad on Afghanistan's plains And the critics dare to question your gains Just roll to your geology and use your brains And go to your gold like I told yer —With apologies to Rudyard Kipling Now that the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey have uncovered $1 trillion ...
Anybody can support Israel when times are good and The Timeses in London and New York write about Israeli entrepreneurs in Herzliya, Nobel prizes for physicians, and the blooming desert. That’s easy. How about now, though, when Israeli forces have blasted a humanitarian convoy at sea and ...
The financial geniuses who caused, yet failed to predict, the world’s financial collapse are not doing much yet to avoid another crash. Given that I didn’t predict it either, I am as qualified as they are to propose “the way out.” Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and many other ...
A few years ago, the French Chamber of Deputies was debating a bill to prohibit the wearing of “ostentatious” religious symbols in state institutions. The proposed law, drafted as the affirmation of a universal secular principle, would ban Jewish boys from wearing kippas, Christians ...
BBC correspondent John Simpson reported on March 4 that the number of defects in newborn babies in the Iraqi town of Fallujah had risen dramatically since the American assault there at the end of 2004. Some people in the town blame the abnormalities in their children on whatever chemicals the US ...
The opposition in Iran, as elsewhere, uses the language of human rights to assert its moral superiority over its enemies in their seats of power. Opposition spokesmen point to government kangaroo courts, rapes, beatings, electric shocks and imposition of the death penalty to convince the world ...
Chicago's most recent claim to singularity is its gift to the nation of Barack Hussein Obama. It seems surprising that no Chicagoan before him had seized the White House, given Chicago's significance in national electoral politics. At his inauguration on January 20th, Obama vowed to "remake ...
