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Although these pro-Kremlin groups are not officially part of the government, they all receive a great deal of funding from the government. According to STRATFOR sources, the Russian government spent approximately $250 million on Nashi in the organization’s first year.

Nashi’s activities typically are nonviolent, but the group does have a government-trained paramilitary branch that has been used to ensure security and to incite riots. Nashi also took part in protests in Finland and riots in Estonia and is thought to have been responsible for the 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia.

Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy.

The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.

A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him.

For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.

This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power.

For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.

The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.

There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.

the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.

In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.

Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power.

There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways.

In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges.

The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.

The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara.

The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.

The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance.

It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue.

U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed.

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.

this could complicate the transfer of power, which would be affected by a lack of unity among the rebels. It could also lead extremist elements of each major sect to retreat to territorial enclaves and would likely lead civil war to engulf the northern Levant.

the United States would likely need to position at least one fleet aircraft carrier in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility in order to support the need for constant aircraft in the air space.

Such a campaign would be reminiscent of Operation Desert Fox (the bombing of Iraq in 1998) and would be designed to send a clear message to Syria without exposing U.S. forces to a sustained operation like a no-fly zone would.

Another strategy would be to target the chemical weapons in an oblique manner by focusing on potential delivery systems, such as Scuds and artillery batteries, but this, too, could not be done comprehensively.

The main constraints of this option are that the plan still requires direct involvement and has the potential for mission creep, while any action that influences the direction of this fight could have disastrous consequences.

The plan, however, also begs the question of whether rebels can really be vetted, armed and shaped in a way that will achieve a desirable outcome in Syria after the regime collapses.

The Syrian civil war is complicated and offers no easy solution to the United States. Currently, the situation is being managed as indirectly as possible, but this strategy might become untenable for Obama.

Wuhan, the flagship of new port investment on the Yangtze as well as nationally, actually saw declines in both the number of berths and freight throughput during that period.

Going forward, the question for Beijing will be whether and to what extent it is able to realize its ambitious plans for the Yangtze River corridor and inland China as a whole. Even then, it is not clear that expanding and industrializing a handful of inland cities will reduce mounting economic imbalances or social tensions unless combined with significant changes to a range of other policies, including the hukou (or household registration) system and the fiscal and financial relationship between city, provincial and national governments. Significant changes to these policies will, in turn, meet steep resistance from entrenched bureaucratic interests. More fundamentally, such changes would likely unleash the social unrest that Beijing's entire political economic system is intended to manage.

port development in Wuhan is similar to projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the ongoing South-North Water Transfer Project, which seeks to divert up to 10 percent of the Yangtze River's flow to water-starved provinces in northern China. All three are attempts to reconcile immense geographic and environmental constraints with the ballooning demands (both consumer and industrial) of an enormous population and an ever-expanding economy -- all while providing enough jobs to maintain a degree of stability.

The problem, then, is not simply that the Chinese government's approach to economic development is inconsistent with the needs of the economy and population as a whole

In the first case, Japan does not acknowledge China's claim to the islands, and thus it does not recognize a dispute, instead characterizing Beijing's moves as Chinese aggression.

In the second instance, China sees its increased presence as a way to either cow the other claimant or to help China build a stronger case should the dispute ever go to international arbitration.

Japan has already recognized several shortcomings in its own defense capabilities

But most Japanese plans are slated for implementation no sooner than 2015. This leaves Tokyo unable to effectively counter Chinese activity for two more years.

Washington has said it does not recognize any sovereignty over the islands, but it does recognize Japanese administrative control, meaning that by default, Washington supports Japan. But the United States does not want a violent clash between Japan and China. By increasing its direct involvement, Washington can reassure Tokyo of its support, softening the pressure for Japan to take more aggressive action, and it can serve notice to China that more aggressive action would involve not only Japan but also the United States. 


But this approach assumes China is willing to step back. In China's view, the United States is trying to contain Beijing and encroach on its sphere of influence. Beijing sees the evidence of this in Washington's pivot to Asia, in the expansion of its political and defense relations with Southeast Asian states and in its strengthened military posture throughout the region, particularly in Australia and the Philippines.

In 2001, after a collision between a Chinese Jian-8 and a U.S. EP-3E, China held the plane on Hainan Island and demanded a U.S. apology. But more than just seeking an apology or trying to pry secrets from the plane's airframe, China used the opportunity to try to show other Asian states that the United States and its military could be countered in Asia.

This is a problem for both the Brotherhood and its opponents, as neither wants jihadists to exploit their enmity.

it is unlikely that transnational jihadists will be able to steer Egypt toward a civil war like Algeria's during the 1990s or post-Arab Spring Syria's. That said, Egypt is likely to see its share of violence (in many cases in the form of militant attacks) as a result of many other factors.

With the Brotherhood's senior leadership in jail, the mainstream Islamist movement may not be able to control the unrest it is currently fomenting. Jihadist forces, realizing that the window of opportunity for them is narrow, would like to prevent any compromise between the military and the Brotherhood in the short term. Therefore, the duration and intensity of the crisis in Egypt will depend upon the Brotherhood and the military's ability (or lack thereof) to reach a political compromise.

Russia’s defining geographic characteristic is its indefensibility, which means its main strategy is to secure itself.

In short, for Russia to be secure it must create some kind of empire.

Russian empires have faced difficulties providing for vast numbers of people and suppressing those who did not conform

This leads to an inherently weak economy

Russian power must be measured in terms of the strength of the state and its ability to rule the people. This is not the same as the Russian government’s popularity (though former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s popularity is undeniable)

It is when the Russian leadership loses control over the security apparatus that Russian regimes collapse. For example, when the czar lost control of the army during World War I, he lost power and the Russian empire fell apart.

Under Josef Stalin, there was massive economic dysfunction and widespread discontent, but Stalin maintained firm control over both the security apparatuses and the army, which he used to deal with any hint of dissent.

Moscow is using the same logic and strategies today.

Putin had just seen the United States encroach on the territory Russia deemed imperative to its survival: Washington helped usher most Central European states and the former Soviet Baltic states into NATO and the European Union; supported pro-Western “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; set up military bases in Central Asia; and announced plans to place ballistic missile defense installations in Central Europe. To Russia, it seemed the United States was devouring its periphery to ensure that Moscow would forever remain vulnerable.

Over the past six years, Russia has pushed back to some degree

Washington has held the misconception that Russia will not formally attempt to re-create a kind of empire. But, as has been seen throughout history, it must.

Putin announced in September that he would seek to return to the Russian presidency in 2012, and he has started laying out his goals for his new reign.

Russia will begin this new iteration of a Russian empire by creating a union with former Soviet states based on Moscow’s current associations, such as the Customs Union, the Union State and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. This will allow the EuU to strategically encompass both the economic and security spheres.

Putin is creating a union in which Moscow would influence foreign policy and security but would not be responsible for most of the inner workings of each country.

It is the creation of a new version of the Russian empire, combined with the U.S. consolidation of influence on that empire’s periphery, that most likely will spark new hostilities between Moscow and Washington.

The country’s demographics are among some of the world’s worst, having declined steadily since World War I. Its birth rates are well below death rates, and it already has more citizens in their 50s than in their teens. Russia could be a major power without a solid economy, but no country can be a global power without people. This is why Putin is attempting to strengthen and secure Russia now, before demographics weaken it. However, even taking its demographics into account, Russia will be able to sustain its current growth in power for at least another generation. This means that the next few years likely are Russia’s last great moment — one that will be marked by the country’s return as a regional empire and a new confrontation with its previous adversary, the United States.

they came as merchants rather than conquerors, creating a city, Kiev, at the point where the extraordinarily wide Dnieper River narrows.

The flat country is made for internal conflict and dissension, and the hunger for a foreigner to come and stabilize a rich land is not always far from Ukrainians' thoughts.

Consider the way they are said to have chosen their religion. Volodymyr, a pagan ruler, decided that he needed a modern religion. He considered Islam and rejected it because he wanted to drink. He considered Catholicism and rejected it because he had lots of concubines he didn't want to give up. He finally decided on Orthodox Christianity, which struck him as both beautiful and flexible.

I suspect that while Volodymyr liked his drink and his women, he was most concerned with finding a balance between powers and chose Byzantium to create space for Ukraine.

What makes this position unique is that Ukraine is independent and has been so for 18 years. This is the longest period of Ukrainian independence in centuries.

People in the west want to be part of the European Union. People in the east want to be closer to the Russians. The Ukrainians want to remain independent but not simply independent.

In the hands of an enemy, these places would pose an existential threat to all three countries. Therefore, rumors to the contrary, neither Scotland nor Texas is going anywhere. Nor is Ukraine, if Russia has anything to do with it.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Ukraine is Russia's soft underbelly.

Ukraine anchors Russian power in the Carpathians.

If Ukraine is under the influence or control of a Western power, Russia's (and Belarus') southern flank is wide open along an arc running from the Polish border east almost to Volgograd then south to the Sea of Azov, a distance of more than 1,000 miles, more than 700 of which lie along Russia proper. There are few natural barriers.

For Russia, Ukraine is a matter of fundamental national security. For a Western power, Ukraine is of value only if that power is planning to engage and defeat Russia

Ukraine controls Russia's access to the Black Sea and therefore to the Mediterranean. The ports of Odessa and Sevastopol provide both military and commercial access for exports, particularly from southern Russia. It is also a critical pipeline route for sending energy to Europe, a commercial and a strategic requirement for Russia, since energy has become a primary lever for influencing and controlling other countries, including Ukraine.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had a series of governments that remained aligned with Russia. In the 2004 presidential election, the seemingly pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, emerged the winner in an election that many claimed was fraudulent. Crowds took to the streets and forced Yanukovich's resignation, and he was replaced by a pro-Western coalition.

Whether this was an intelligence operation or a fairly open activity, there is no question that American and European money poured into Ukraine. And whether it came from warm-hearted reformers or steely eyed CIA operatives didn't matter in the least to Vladimir Putin.

Putin spent the next six years working to reverse the outcome, operating both openly and covertly to split the coalition and to create a pro-Russian government.

First there were demonstrations under way protesting government tax policy. Second, Yanukovich was in Belgium for a summit with the European Union.

The demonstrations were linked to a shift in tax law that increased taxes on small-business owners.

I have not been to other Ukrainian demonstrations but have been present at various other demonstrations around the world, and most of those were what some people in Texas call a "goat rodeo." I have never seen one of those, either, but I gather they aren't well-organized. This demonstration did not strike me as a goat rodeo.

It just didn't seem that way to me. There were ample police in the side streets, but they were relaxed and not in riot gear. I was told that the police with riot gear were hidden in courtyards and elsewhere. I couldn't prove otherwise. But the demonstration struck me as too well-organized.

Another inland route would start in Chengdu and pass through Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi and Fujian's Xiamen, and cross the Taipei-administered Kinmen archipelago before eventually ending at Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan.

Besides the massive economic costs associated with building a bridge or tunnel across the Taiwan Strait, security concerns, geologic vulnerabilities (due to earthquakes) and the sheer width of the strait present technical challenges to its construction. Even if the infrastructure were built, it is not clear that they would be economically justifiable given that airliners and ships are now allowed to travel across the strait frequently.

Combined with logistical challenges, the absence of direct relations between the two makes it extremely unlikely that the infrastructure will built any time soon.

Compared to the much more ambitious proposal to link the mainland to Taiwan via bridge or tunnel, the pipeline with Kinmen is not in itself very significant. However, it does offer an example of Beijing sacrificing what is superficially pragmatic for the sake of its strategic goals. In particular, Kinmen had once been the leading military frontier until the end of cross-strait military standoff in 1992, and Beijing believes that assisting the island can offer an example of cross-strait integration. Beijing also believes it could allow more Taiwanese residents to benefit from growing economic interaction with China without undermining Taipei's political independence.

Instead, Beijing is focusing on a more conciliatory approach to reinforce the concept of interdependence and prevent Taiwan from distancing itself from the mainland economically and politically.

A less hostile government in Taipei has also been important for Beijing's political legitimacy internationally. Moreover, China allowed a much more open market and more preferential trade and investment policies to Taiwan than the island nation would find elsewhere.

On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.

Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.

The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.

Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.

Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.

“We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”

But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”

Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”

Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”

When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.

Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.

Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.

His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”

But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.

Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.

Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.

Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.

“I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”

Will subsisting on ridiculously low amounts of calories for days on end “boost” weight loss?  Very likely, yes.  Your likelihood of keeping it off, however… almost zero.  Prolonged periods of sizeable caloric deficits will force your body to slow down and conserve energy. 

I don’t care what supplements/herbs/juices you are taking, there is no substitute for getting adequate calories from good old-fashioned food.

Along with our aforementioned “instant/quick fix” mentality, we as a westernized culture are poster children for all-or-nothing thinking.  We think we can atone for dietary sins by going on strict plans.  The problem is that it simply doesn’t work.

these feelings are both short-lived and deceptive.  I would first contend that people who feel “energized” and “happy” are falling victim to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect.

Psychology aside, there may be some short-lived physiological effects of cleansing.  If we think about how most people eat on a day-to-day basis (read: highly processed, empty calorie), ANY half-way drastic eating changes could trigger warm-and-fuzzy, high energy feelings.  The reality, however is that consuming very low calories and/or protein for any extended period will sooner or later bring your energy levels to a grinding halt.

That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war.

After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States.

The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent. 

It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars.

Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars.

A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important.

Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.

The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises. 

At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done.

And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.

The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.

If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia.

The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians.

And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.

It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power.

In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia.

In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against.

In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over.

The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States.

Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment.

There need to be layers of options between threat and war. 

Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered.

The Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria.

Kosovo did not have a complex of chemical weapons facilities scattered throughout its territory

The Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia, which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule.

The Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has.

The Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes, but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two years now

The goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster.

If he chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry.

If he chooses regime change -- while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare.

Keep another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were not weary of war.

Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable power in the region at the same time.

Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world.

You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing.

So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives