http://www.worldtribune.com/ That loud noise you hear now coming out of the Middle East is the sound of a frighteningly dangerous game of chicken between Russia and Israel [and inferentially the U.S.}. Last minute pleas by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Soviet President Vladimir Putin, delivered at Sochi on the Black Sea where Moscow has […]
Bengazhi: the honor of the American military is hanging in the balance Despite the distractions of a continuing unemployment crisis and the media’s concentration on stories of human depravity, the scandal of the death of four Americans including an ambassador in Bengazhi — “a long time ago” according to the Administration’s spokesman — will […]
Home The president of the United States is jeopardizing national security with his public and his executive team’s cutting the umbilical cord of jihadist terrorism to Islam. By refusing to identify the terrorists as a part, however pernicious, of the overall Muslim community, he makes it difficult if not impossible for the kind of […]
A version of this column is scheduled for publication Monday, Jan. 7, 2013, in The Washington Times
Follow the money No. 150
China – the odds are long
Perhaps more than Westerners, Chinese have a gambling streak.
Even during the darkest hours of Maoist oppression and pretended Puritanism, Beijing tolerated gambling on its southern flank in the Portuguese colony of Macau. Now reincorporated into China, in 2012 the world’s largest casino, holding the country’s only legal gambling monopoly, raked in $38 billion. December record receipts showed the tide was up with 19.6% growth.
Next door, even old Mentor Minister Lee Kwan Yu has had to abandon Singaporean self-righteouness to welcome casinos to compete for Chinese tourists pouring into neighboring Thailand at a million a year.
But the biggest gamble in Chinese history is now on in Beijing as the regime heads toward a new generation of Communist Party [CCP] rulers. After months of soul-searching for “reforms”, in the tightly controlled media and with the help of China watchers overseas, it’s pretty clear there are going to be only cosmetic tweaks.
Basically, Communist leadership is gambling. Despite enormous growing problems, in no small measure arising out of its two decades of economic transformation, the CCP is hoping its two-decades old development formula will continue working.
The dirty little, big secret of “Benghazi” With each new story, each new interview, every Congressional hearing, it becomes clear the Obama Administration presented a false picture of the attack om the U.S. Consulate General in Bengazhi, Libya. The Bozo Theory or the Conspiracy Plot explain this. The Bozo Theory writes off failures to prepare […]
http://yeoldecrabb.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/ Jack Garner, a Texan whom Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt chose as his first VP for “balance”, put it succinctly: the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm p__” [later cleaned up to “spit”]. But Garner, ironically enough, helped block FDR’s power grab when the most charismatic president ever tried to “pack” the […]
What Mr. Romney [might have] meant Americans have always liked to believe one of the remarkable achievements of U.S. society – differentiating it from The Old Country – was social mobility. Our “aristocrats”, whether moneyed or “stars”, were mostly only a generation away from obscurity. And chances were their progeny wouldn’t hang on to their […]
Alas! Conventional conventions! Call me masochistic, but I watched both conventions. Chalk it up to nostalgia for a mistaken teenage as a politics junkie. Then, we bet whether “Roll Call of the States” might trip up FDR’s dumping his popular leftwing populist vice president Henry Wallace for Harry Truman. Or the rush felt when a […]
The culture of economic development
Poor ol’ George Romney! He forgot politicians are supposed to cater to the media. And when he spoke truth to power of the leftwing comme il faut Anglo-American journalist mob, they came down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks.
And so what were all those uncommon observations labeled “gaffes”– which might have been travel notes by a 19th century visitor — setting off another fusillade in the boisterous presidential campaign?
Romney said our British cousins seemed to be making a balls up of their Olympics preparations. By any criteria it was true — just as early stages of the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games which he allegedly “rescued”. And who else would the Salt Lake worthies have chosen for the clean-up other than a successful Mormon entrepreneur! Not that the Olympics in Montreal, Athens, and a half dozen other places over the last half century haven’t been total economic disasters. [You ain’t seen nothing yet – wait for the Russians’ Sochi winter Olympics 2014!]
Even less controversial – if equally uncomfortable for his critics – was Romney’s suggestion the Palestinians might look to their Israeli neighbors for notions on how to build the economy of their hoped for future state. That too was hardly earthshaking
In the early post-colonial days, before bilateral and multinational aid agency bureaucrats took over “development”, scholars assumed culture was indivisible from economic progress. Remember Max Weber’s iconic “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, required reading for an earlier generation?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/22/sanders-in-syria-another-nationalist-failure/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS Whatever develops out of the bloody, chaotic mess Syria has become, it is unlikely that the short-term outcome will be good or the long-term prospects much brighter. One has only to recall the dozens of post-World War II coups that preceded the arrival of the Assad/Alawite/Baathist dictatorship in 1970, a dictatorship that survived in […]
