Long Game

The recent debate over the stimulus bill has lead some observers to think that economists are hopelessly divided on issues of public policy. That is true regarding business cycle theory and, specifically, the virtues or defects of Keynesian economics. But it is not true more broadly.

Russia’s long-term survival depends on such modernization, but the process will require changes and compromise within the Kremlin.

But this trip has a different focus for the Russians. Russia is launching a massive modernization program that involves seriously upgrading — if not building from scratch — many key economic sectors, including space, energy, telecommunications, transportation, nanotechnology, military industry and information technology.

Moscow has seen incredible success at home and in its near abroad. Now the plan is to make it last as long as possible.

The commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has resigned his command. His resignation is a direct result of his controversial remarks in a Rolling Stone interview broken late June 21, and not a reflection or indictment of the campaign he has led in Afghanistan. But that campaign and the strategy behind it are have significant issues of their own.

the heart of the strategy ultimately comes down to “Vietnamization“.

Meanwhile, a U.S. program to farm out more than 70 percent of logistics to Afghan trucking companies appears to be funding both warlord militias independent of the Afghan security forces and the Taliban itself.

It is facts, not opinions, results, not premises, that are of most importance to the conservative. Conservatives favor a type of freedom, a form of capitalism that works in the real world, not merely one that works according to the speculative “logic” of this or that intellectual.

The notion that trade can define most human relationships rests on the tacit assumption that the individual is a kind atomistic unit without any bonds or ties to the community at large which will profoundly influence his behavior.

Social organization through free contract implies that the contracting units know what they want and are guided by their desires, that is, that they are “perfectly rational,” which would be equivalent to saying that they are accurate mechanisms of desire-satisfaction.

If people judged war purely on the basis of its obvious, immediate consequences, then, pacifism would be almost universal.

My best explanation is that Bastiat's seen/unseen fallacy is not a general psychological tendency.  Instead, it's an expression of anti-market bias: Since people dislike markets, they're quick to dismiss claims about their hidden benefits. 

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced June 16 that Iran remains interested in talking to the United States but that the conditions for such talks have changed. After a sanctions move against Iran that effectively exposed the weaknesses in the Russian-Iranian relationship, Washington announced a day earlier that it is ready to talk when Iran is. Both Tehran and Washington have a strategic interest in pursuing these negotiations, but Tehran is now looking for new ways to regain the upper hand in these talks. All indications point to Iraq as Iran’s battlefield of choice.

And second, a warning to anyone who believes in an iron law that the more protein-coding genes in a species, the more sophisticated/complex/cool/human that species is: I for one welcome our grapey overlords.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said June 13 that without fiscal restructuring, Japan could face a Greek-style economic crisis.

A senior military counterintelligence official from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reportedly was killed in Kaspiysk in the Northern Caucasus district of Dagestan at approximately 12:45 a.m. local time June 18, Itar-Tass reported.

The central government is more concerned about grassroots movements spreading out of control. As for the wage increases, the government just wants foreign-owned companies to foot the bill first, and it is happy to have a tool like the All China Federation of Trade Unions to exert this pressure.

In a secret bunker known as the Swiss Fort Knox deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers recently deposited a “digital genome” that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.

The capsule is the culmination of the four-year “Planets” project, an 15 million-euro ($18.49 million) project which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives and research institutions, to preserve the world’s digital assets as hardware and software.

Once among the four largest lakes of the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometres (26,000 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into three lakes[2] – the North Aral Sea and the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea. By 2009, the south-eastern lake had disappeared and the south-western lake retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea.[3] The maximum depth of the North Aral Sea is 42 metres (138 ft) (as of 2008)

As Glen Greenwald notes, it's not just that Obama has continued the dodgy policies of his predecessor. No - it's that he has embraced and adopted these policies as his own -- and even innovated on them.

Arar is a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen who was mistakenly detained at JFK in 2002 for alleged links to terrorist groups; he was then kept in US custody for several weeks before he was quietly renditioned to Syria. In a Syrian dungeon, he was tortured and kept imprisoned in a tiny, rat-infested cell for roughly a year.