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Policymakers of the time realized that the prosecution of the war had suspended the depression, but few were confident that the war had actually ended the conditions that made the depression possible.

In fact, we are still using Bretton Woods, and while nothing that has been discussed to this point is wrong exactly, it is only part of the story.

Think back to July 1944. The Normandy invasion was in its first month. The United Kingdom served as the staging ground, but with London exhausted, its military commitment to the operation was modest.

The shape of the Cold War was already beginning to unfold. Between the United States and the Soviet Union, the rest of the modern world — namely, Europe — was going to either experience Soviet occupation or become a U.S. protectorate.

The Continental states — and even the United Kingdom — were not simply economically spent and indebted but were, to be perfectly blunt, destitute.

For the United States, the issue was one of seizing a historic opportunity.

The United States entered World War II late and the war did not occur on U.S. soil. So — uniquely among all the world’s major powers of the day — U.S. infrastructure and industrial capacity would emerge from the war larger (far, far larger) than when it entered.

The United States had to have not just the participation of the Western Europeans in holding back the Soviet tide, it needed the Europeans to defer to American political and military demands — and to do so willingly. Considering the desperation and destitution of the Europeans, and the unprecedented and unparalleled U.S. economic strength, economic carrots were the obvious way to go.

The United States would allow Europe near tariff-free access to its markets, and turn a blind eye to Europe’s own tariffs so long as they did not become too egregious — something that at least in part flew in the face of the Great Depression’s lessons.

The “free world” alliance would not consist of a series of equal states. Instead, it would consist of the United States and everyone else.

When loans to fund Western Europe’s redevelopment failed to stimulate growth, those loans became grants, aka the Marshall Plan.

And fast-forwarding to when the world went off of the gold standard and Bretton Woods supposedly died, gold was actually replaced by the U.S. dollar. Far from dying, the political/military understanding that underpinned Bretton Woods had only become more entrenched.

a crisis in the U.S. economy becomes global.

Relying on a currency that is not in the hands of a sovereign taxing power, but dependent on the political will of (so far) 15 countries with very different interests, does not make for a reliable reserve currency.

The French in particular look at the current crisis as the result of a failure in the U.S. regulatory system.

The Bretton Woods institutions — specifically the IMF, which is supposed to serve the role of financial lighthouse and crisis manager — proved irrelevant to the problems the world is currently passing through.

Fundamentally, the Europeans are not simply hoping to modernize Bretton Woods, but instead to Europeanize the American financial markets. This is ultimately not a financial question, but a political one.

it makes sense that people would keep an eye on them just in case they come up with something worthwhile again.

could go from being in the woods one day to being front and center the next

Their freedom makes it more likely that they will generate some good practices if for no other reason than that they will generate more practices total.

Under Rand's conceptual schema, there is (generaly speaking) no way really to distinguish between Romantic and Naturalist literature, beyond recourse to Rand's own statements about a handful of specific authors.

In discussing Byronism, Rand is able to provide only one example -- that of Byron himself. She notes that "the chief exponents of this category were poets," yet refuses to name any of these poets other than the aforementioned Byron. This is a typical failing throughout Rand's philosophical writings: a failure to provide specific examples so that her readers could better evaluate her contentions. This failure suggests one of three possibilities:(1) Rand was not familiar enough with those authors to evaluate them (meaning she hadn't read them)(2) Those authors don't fit into her categories, so she ignored them(3) Combination of one and two

The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America

Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest

East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians.

North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil.

The continent’s final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other’s development.

Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.

The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region’s usefulness and potential economic and political power.

This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river.

First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one).

Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure.

Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports.

First are the severe indentations of North America’s coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports.

Second, there are the Great Lakes.

Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent’s East and Gulf coasts.

There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well

The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.

What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports.

Canada’s maritime transport zones

Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States.

The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers.

The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region’s southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.

In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast.

So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.

On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island.

It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning

Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.

With European attentions diverted elsewhere, the young United States had an opportunity to carve out a future for itself relatively free of European entanglements.

This was not England, an island that forced the early state into the expense of a navy. This was not France, a country with three coasts and two land borders that forced Paris to constantly deal with threats from multiple directions. This was not Russia, a massive country suffering from short growing seasons that was forced to expend inordinate sums of capital on infrastructure simply to attempt to feed itself.

The early nation was particularly vulnerable to its former colonial master.

There are only two ways to protect a coastal community from sea power. The first is to counter with another navy.

The second method of protecting a coastal community is to develop territories that are not utterly dependent upon the sea.

Achieving such strategic depth was both an economic and a military imperative.

The United States was entirely dependent upon the English imperial system not just for finished goods and markets but also for the bulk of its non-agricultural raw materials, in particular coal and iron ore.

The Appalachians may not be the Swiss Alps, but they were sufficiently rugged to put a check on any deep and rapid inland expansion.

The Ohio River faced the additional problem of draining into the Mississippi, the western shore of which was the French territory of Louisiana

At the time, Napoleon was girding for a major series of wars that would bear his name. France not only needed cash but also to be relieved of the security burden of defending a large but lightly populated territory in a different hemisphere.

This single road (known in modern times as Interstate 40 or Interstate 70 for most of its length) allowed American pioneers to directly settle Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri and granted them initial access to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.

The trail was directly responsible for the initial settling of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. A wealth of secondary trails branched off from the main artery — the Mormon, Bozeman, California and Denver trails — and extended the settlement efforts to Montana, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California.

From beginning to end, the entire process required less than 70 years.

The Columbia River Valley and California’s Central Valley are not critical American territories.

among other things, they grant the United States full access to the Pacific trading basin — only that control of them is not imperative to American security.

The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War

the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float

Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada.

Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic.

Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure.

What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round.

Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network.

the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.

Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys

what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.

All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.

The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America.

the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge.

Using a combination of illegal settlements, military pressure and diplomacy, the United States was able to gain control of east and west Florida from Madrid in 1819 in exchange for recognizing Spanish claims to what is now known as Texas

the United States’ efforts to secure its southwestern borders shifted to a blatant attempt to undermine and ultimately carve up the one remaining Western Hemispheric entity that could potentially challenge the United States: Mexico.

the United States quickly transformed itself from a poor coastal nation to a massively capital-rich commodities exporter.

the biggest potential security threat to the United States was newly independent Mexico, the border with which was only 150 kilometers from New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans’ security was even more precarious than such a small distance suggested.

In the United States, the cheap transport system allowed early settlers to quickly obtain their own small tracts of land.

in time the wealth accumulated to the point that portions of the United States had the capital necessary to industrialize.

Mexico, in contrast, suffered from a complete lack of navigable rivers and had only a single good port (Veracruz).

First and most obviously, the lack of navigable waterways and the non-abundance of ports drastically reduced Mexico’s ability to move goods and thereby generate its own capital. Second, the disassociated nature of Mexico’s agricultural regions forced the construction of separate, non-integrated infrastructures for each individual sub-region, drastically raising the costs of even basic development.

Third, the highland nature of the Mexico City core required an even more expensive infrastructure, since everything had to be transported up the mountains from Veracruz.

very different economic and social structure

Instead of small landholdings, Mexican agriculture was dominated by a small number of rich Spaniards

The Mexican landowners had, in essence, created their own company towns and saw little benefit in pooling their efforts to industrialize. Doing so would have undermined their control of their economic and political fiefdoms.

In just two generations — by 1870 — the American population had ballooned to 38.6 million while Mexico’s was only 8.8 million.

The first was Texas, and the primary means was settlement as enabled by the Austin family.

However (and this a very important point) even though Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hardy wrote "fatalistic" narratives, this is hardly proof positive that they were determinists.

Now if we are to rely upon science and experience to guide us in these matters, it must be admitted that "free will," to the extent that exists at all, is hemmed in all sides by the biological limitations of the human brain.

it is not clear that this "agent," whatever it may be, enjoys complete control or even has a will of its own

Ultimately, Rand's claim that volition is applicable to both consciousness and existence is merely an eccentric way of formulating her theory of human nature and the benevolent universe premise.

It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.

Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher.

At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.

I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II.

American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.

The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:

The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.

The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.

The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.

there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.

the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class.

But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation.

Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable.

In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.

Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment.

This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.

As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine.

As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.

American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.

What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).

The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.

In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.

The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon.

If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated.

The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.

The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem.

In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed.

The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates.

The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership.

The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.

The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.

It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened.

And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away.

The character of change now represents a shift, not from labour to capital, but away from the classical capitalist bilateral relationship between the labour class and the capital class (through wages and prices) to a unilateral one (prices).

When the worker retires, the government subsidises his means of sustenance by crediting new deposits to his bank account.  He uses these credits to purchase sustenance from the capitalist class.  The retired worker has already pre-paid for these newly government-created deposits with the massive productivity gains throughout his career.  As long as the retired worker, and the present labour force, are able to increase productivity at a rate faster than the retiree’s new deposits are created by the government, the capitalist gets paid, her worker is employed, and the retired worker is provided sustenance.

Capitalist income has long since maximised consumption, and is now focused on maximising capital accumulation.

Since capitalist’s goal is to accumulate more capital, she is going to re-invest when she sees opportunity, and this free cash-flow is exchanged with new labour for more future production.

But what happens when the capitalist sees her opportunity set decline?  Her expectation that the payment she makes to the new workers she’d hire would materialise into higher revenue later diminishes, and she decides to book her profit as cash.

We have previously observed that these variations in investment horizon — and consequently rate of investment — are responsible for most of the economic cyclical variations.

The second is a glut of capital relative to the population.  There appear to be two chief reasons for this:  a rapid expansion in technology-driven productivity and demographically-driven declining final sales growth.

The way to mitigate the transition pain from capitalism to rentierism is to have the government pay retired workers for years of uncompensated productivity gains.

We have been shifting at the margins away from bilateral capitalist relationships for decades.  What replaced it has successfully navigated the needs and demands of each class – accumulation to capital for enterprise value, sustenance to workers for labour and sustenance to the retiree for decades of productivity growth.

The Prince may be less a work of cynicism than an instructional guide to overcome fate -- the fatalism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time. Thus, Machiavelli, more than Michelangelo perhaps, was the true inventor of the Renaissance.

But it is with Machiavelli, more than with Hobbes, where the principles of Western modernity truly begin.

Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Mansfield knows that it is more important to tell hard truths than it is to be liked and to get good reviews.

For by setting the terms for political reality, Machiavelli helps lay the foundation for geopolitics.

necessity frees people from religious faith. People may pray to God and go to church or synagogue or the mosque, but they must also acquire food and possessions for the sake of their loved ones, and thus they must enter into competition with their fellow human beings

Self-interest informs compromise with other human beings, and thus a state governed by self-interest is likely to compromise with other states: whereas a person or state governed solely by religious or moral virtue will tend to delegitimize as immoral those with whom he or it disagrees -- and therein lies conflict.

Yes, politicians may announce their intention to strive for truth and justice, but their unspoken concerns and desires, even in a democracy -- especially in a democracy -- are really about satisfying the selfish needs of their constituents.

A leader may be honest, unselfish and moral, but if he starts a war that later proved unnecessary and killed many people, he lacks virtue -- despite being on a personal level very sympathetic.

Conversely, a leader may be cynical, selfish and excessively ambitious, but if he keeps his countrymen away from danger he can still be said to have virtue -- despite being personally unappealing.

Machiavelli has his limits. For example, he could not have foreseen 20th century totalitarianism that mirrored the self-righteousness of the medieval Church with which he was in conflict, but on a much larger scale.

Because the stakes are arguably higher now because of weapons of mass destruction, there is a danger of taking Machiavelli too far and using his philosophy to justify all sorts of risky subterfuges.

When it comes to the confidence we have in our beliefs — what can be expressed in terms of probability — we can’t just make up any number we want. There’s only one consistent way to handle those degrees in beliefs.

In the strictest sense, of course, this requires a bit of mathematical knowledge. But Greenberg says there’s still an easy way to use this principle in daily life — and one that can be converted to plain English.

“It’s important to note that the idea here is not to answer the question in a precise way — like saying that it’s 3.2 times more likely — rather, it’s to get a rough sense. Is it a high number, a modest number, or a small number?”

“Much of the time people will automatically try to shoot down evidence, but you can get evidence for things that are not true. Just because you have evidence doesn’t mean you should change your mind. But it does mean that you should change your degree of belief.”

Greenberg also describes Representativeness Heuristic in which people tend to look at how similar things are.

Greenberg also says that we should shy away from phrases like, “I believe,” or “I don’t believe.” “That’s the wrong way to frame it,” he says. “We should think about things in terms of how probable they are. You almost never have anything close to perfect certainty.”

“Let’s say you believe that your nutrition supplement works,” he told us, “Then you get a small amount of evidence against it working, and you completely write that evidence off because you say, ‘well, I still believe it works because it’s just a small amount of evidence.’ But then you get more evidence that it doesn’t work. If you were an ideal reasoner, you’d see that accumulation of evidence, and every time you get that evidence, you should believe less and less that the nutritional supplements are actually working.” Eventually, says Greenberg, you end up tipping things so that you no longer believe. But instead, we end up never changing our mind.

Lastly, he also says that probabilities can depend on the observer — what is a kind of probability relativity. We all have access to different information, so different people should assign different rates of probability to different things based on different sets of evidence.

a conservative view about the efficiency of markets impels rejection of climate science because if climate science were true, markets would very clearly have failed in an very important instance.

"If a person believes in one conspiracy theory, they're likely to believe in others as well," explained Lewandowsky on the podcast. "There's a statistical association. So people who think that MI5 killed Princess Diana, they probably also think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act by himself when he killed JFK."

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's profile on VKontakte, a Russian social media website, said he attended school at the School No. 1 of Makhachkala, spoke English, Russian and Chechen and listed his worldview as Islam. A school administrator from the School No. 1 said the two suspects and their family had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan before moving to Dagestan.

Moreover, given what we have learned about the suspects and the nature of the improvised explosive devices they constructed, it is very likely that the authorities will find that the brothers had read and studied al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire Magazine.

This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in recent years -- a trend we expect to continue.

There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even by untrained operatives. In this case the brothers conducted an attack that was within their capabilities rather than attempting something more grandiose that would require outside assistance - and which could therefore have put them in jeopardy of running into a government informant as they sought help.  It is thus important for citizens to practice good situational awareness and to serve as grassroots defenders against the grassroots threat.

For a U.S. State Department Arabist, a posting to Syria was, in a thematic sense, fundamental to a successful career.

Given the fact of almost two dozen Arabic-speaking countries and only one Hebrew-speaking country to which one could be posted, an American diplomat's professional lifetime might be spent among Arabs much more easily than among Israelis. Not to develop sympathies would be inhuman.

The Arabists knew that it was a myth that Syria did not experiment with democracy like Israel. Syria had held three relatively free elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954, and all broke down more or less along ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regional lines, with military rule resulting after each failure.

It is tempting to deride the old-time Arabists of the Cold War era from the vantage point of 20/20 hindsight. After all, they dutifully communicated the diplomatic positions of one Syrian dictator after another to Washington, and especially so during the three-decade-long rule of Hafez al Assad.

the Arabists dealt with the political reality as they found it.

The tragedy of al Assad family rule in Syria is not that it produced tyranny: That tyranny, remember, produced sustained domestic peace after 21 changes of government in the 24 years preceding the elder al Assad's coup.

The Arabists were in Syria and other countries not to plan American grand strategy or to tell dictators how to behave in the midst of a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union (in which America, perforce, supported many dictatorships) but to report perceptively on what was going on in their parcel of the world.

The Middle East, wracked by clan, tribal, ethnic and sectarian unrest, will always require area specialists with years of experience living in the region to help Washington make sense of it all.

Supporters of the Iraq War lauded Crocker's efforts to help stabilize Iraq, even as Crocker himself had warned in a 2002 memo that an American invasion of Iraq would unleash internal and regional chaos.

The historical record is quite clear. Upon taking office, the Bush administration de-emphasized the Clinton team's almost-obsessive search for Osama bin Laden. That's why Richard Clarke got shoved aside. That's why John Ashcroft changed the FBI's focus from the pursuit of international terrorists to the pursuit of Tommy Chong. That's why presidential daily press briefings didn't get read while the president was clearing brush the month before the attacks.

as the members of the administration tried to prevaricate their way out of their abject failure to keep anyone safe. It was nine months of misfeasance in office, and inexcusable neglect of duty, that ended in the deaths of more than 3000 Americans.

You cannot argue that you kept us safe after your obvious negligence played a role in getting 3000 of us killed.

Then, they responded by lying the country into a war of aggression that failed to keep thousands of American soldiers safe, that failed to keep hundreds of thousands of Iraqis safe, failed to keep the rule of law safe, and failed to keep the national economy, and the people who depend on it, which is pretty much all of us, safe.

Thanks again, Condi. — they could not be expected to understand. Everything that came afterwards, everything that makes the new library a monument to everything libraries are not supposed to be about, proceeds from our granting to these people The Great Mulligan.

Instead, they must cast one vote that covers all the various programs and issues -- domestic and foreign -- before them. In doing so, they do not build some kind of index where they award five points for promoting Social Security, four for Medicare, three for parks, minus two for farm subsidies, and so on.

And when it comes to general philosophical leanings, the overwhelming majority of the population lean conservative, as these graphs show.

On the philosophical level, the liberal approach does not play for many because it is too abstruse.

Thus, President Obama stated in the 2013 State of the Union, "It's not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth."

Previously he told Americans, "I believe government should be lean; government should be efficient. I believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don't hurt others."

One reads on Monday that Congress voted 394 to 1 to extend a subsidy program started in 1925 to ensure there would be enough helium for zeppelins, but now serves only a few private interests.

On Tuesday, that casino and private prison corporations who declare themselves real-estate investment trusts (REITs) although they have nothing to do with the real-estate business have gained IRS approval not to pay taxes on their profits.

On Wednesday, that a hospital chain requires its physicians to hospitalize 50 percent of the seniors who set foot into its ERs and automatically orders a battery of tests for them whether they need it or not, all charged to Medicare.

On Thursday, that when 19 of the largest Wall Street firms violated anti-fraud laws, rather than face criminal prosecution, they were made to promise not to break the law in the future. When they broke it anyway, in 51 different cases, no charges were filed and the offenders were simply made to repeat their promise to behave.

And on Friday one is reminded that not one of the fine people who brought us the finical crisis that lost millions their homes, jobs, and life savings have been jailed, including those who hired people to systematically commit massive fraud. And that that the banks we bailed out are still too big to fail, while their executives got big bonuses and are carry on brewing the next financial bubble.