Jeff Bezos driven by Star Trek but is driven to go through Washington. When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
As China becomes less derivative its incentive to protect its own patents will grow
Chinese telecoms giant is stepping up pursuit of royalties and licensing fees as US restricts access to American markets and suppliers Huawei is currently engaged in negotiations or disputes with Verizon, Qualcomm and defence firm Harris Corp. South China Morning Post
The Kurdish problem becomes a NATO crisis
The cans can no longer be kicked down the road as the realities of the 21st century overwhelm the politics of the 20th. New at the Belmont Club
The Turkish offensive
The Kurds aren’t doomed to lose. New at the Belmont Club
Should the US midwife Kurdistan?
Do the right thing, but do it in a bipartisan manner. New at the Belmont Club
The fate of the Kurds
It’s not clear how far Turkey will go. See map provided by NYT. But the lack of clarity is the problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/us/politics/trump-turkey-syria.html#click=https://t.co/A6JY7viPn4
Man does not live by 5 year plans alone
My opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal on what lights up the soul. It’s a surprise.
How “By Any Means Necessary” created its mirror image.
Do you want to know why so many GOP candidates who looked good on paper fell so quickly during the 2016 primary? I'll tell you why: it's because primary voters could readily imagine the lovely, principled, dignified concession speeches they would give. — John Hayward (@Cobretata) October 1, 2019
The march of folly
Political leaders can miscalculate. At some point in the current American power struggle events can take on a life of their own. New At the Belmont Club
The long cold civil war
No one can afford to lose. New at the Belmont Club
The day the 21st century began
September 11 is not an event in the past but a warning for the future New at the Belmont Club
How we lost the future
Because we “know it already”. New at the Belmont Club
US vs China
The Communist Party of China vs the Western elites. New at the Belmont Club
Simulated reality
“I would never lie to you.” We’ll know the truth in the future. New at the Belmont Club
Who would fardels bear
The “shock of confinement” makes the newly arrested more likely to commit suicide than the convicted. One reason why jails have a higher suicide rate (46 per 100,000 in 2013) than prisons (15 PER 100,0001) is that people who enter a jail often face a first-time “shock of confinement”; they are stripped of their job, …
Terror without trust
In a society without external reference the question is not what is right or wrong but who has the most powerful social network. New at the Belmont Club
The 10 ships revisited
In 2010 I argued in The Ten Ships that al-Qaeda was not rooted in a place but in a transnational agenda with a system of support. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence …
The China Challenge
Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events. Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American …
Arms and the man
What drives mass killings outside of war — besides weapons? New at the Belmont Club I will describe how to extract data from online HTML tables on wretchard.com in some future post.
The Scandal of Money
I am reading George Gilder’s The Scandal of Money which has so far proved tremendously interesting not in the least because it coincides at many points with my own earlier thinking as set forth in the pamphlet War of the Words. Gilder examines money as information and asks, correctly, whether it conveys truth about the …