Future Surface Combatant and Other Myths

This is the second part in a series of reports on the current state of the Royal Navy. The first entry focused on the expeditionary tool of the Royal Navy’s future force; the aircraft carrier. This article discusses the Future Surface Combatant and the effectiveness of modular versus “hardwired” vessels. Earlier this week, the blog […]

Haiti’s Avoidable Death Toll

Some expect Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake death toll to reach over 200,000 lives. Why the high death toll? Northern California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was more violent, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, resulting in 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, about eight times more violent […]

The Impossible Joy of Sacrifice

The recent disaster in Haiti has sparked a renewed wave of commentators to demand that men “sacrifice” for the sake of others’ needs. There is little mention of the injustice suffered by the Haitian people at the hands of their own government and, recently, at the hands of nature — which would be legitimate reasons […]

Krugman Says: Spend More!

Since the early days of the Obama Administration, economist Paul Krugman has been more than eager to defend every spending measure enacted by the Democrat.

The Kremlin Two-Step

“Westerners often see Russian politics in terms of a high-level struggle between liberals and conservatives,” observes Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writing for The Moscow Times. For instance, under President Boris Yeltsin, reformers fought nationalists while under Vladimir Putin, economic liberals opposed the siloviki — a class of politicians that originally served […]

The Government of Whim

“We want our money back,” cried President Obama yesterday, “and we’re going to get it!” Announcing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee — a tax perfectly named for an era in which banks are held responsible for a recession that was beyond their control — the president promised American taxpayers that they would get “every single […]

Chávez Shuts Down Shops

Until a few years ago, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez was sometimes described as the benevolent kind but in recent years, his reign has grown ever more authoritarian. He abolished presidential term limits, withdrew Venezuela from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 2007, nationalized the oil industry and built relations with countries […]

The Palin Brief

She overwhelmed the country as vice presidential candidate in 2008. The Left found plenty of reason to resent her and while initially hailed by Republicans as the hockey-mom voice of folksy America, conservatives soon found that underneath the no-nonsense layer of toughness that Palin exhaled, the then-governor of Alaska really had no intellectual depth at […]