The Right Freaks Out (1)
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Jon Taplin (57)
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Andy McCarthy, one of the smart guys on the National Review Corner. We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture. Here’s what Obama needed to do tonight: Convince the country that he was an utterly safe, conventional, centrist politician who ...
Warning From Kabul (2)
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1 week, 4 days
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The British Foreign Service is known for its independence. The famous Downing Street Memos gave us a clear-eyed view from a British diplomat of what was really going on before the war in inside the Bush White House. Now in a leaked diplomatic cable we learn what the British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, really thinks about the war there. “The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the ...
Lost Worlds (1)
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1 week, 4 days
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I treasure great photography above all other arts, but was not really aware of the early autochrome work of the Lumiere Brothers and their associates. The colors have a wonderfully subtle gradation, almost as if they were hand tinted. Evidently the French Financier Albert Kahn sent teams of photographers all over the world with the delicate autochrome plates and cameras. The Interregnum of 1908. Tagged: Albert Kahn, autochrome, Interregnum
Republican Doublethink (2)
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1 month, 1 week
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The last night of the Republican Convention was probably the most vivid exercise of George Orwell’s theory of Doublethink, in the modern political era. As Orwell wrote, If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. As the hall monitors from The War ...
Return to the Mean (3)
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2 months, 2 weeks
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Merrill Lynch just privately published to their clients a very scary report entitled, “The emperors’s new clothes in a post bubble society.” It picks up on some of the economic themes I talked about in “The Cost of Empire”, most specifically, Regrettably, we have become a bubble society, always in search of the quick-fix strategy to build wealth – Tech, real estate, and now commodities (although though the latest action points to a break in ...
The Interregnum (1)
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6 months, 2 weeks
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Financial apocalypse seems to be in the air. NBC Nightly News has a new nightly segment called Hard Times, which provides economic “survival strategies” to the viewers. We have entered The Interregnum. As I said before, the notion of an interregnum has classically been tied to those periods when one king has died and there is no clear successor. But for our purposes, the notion of interregnum refers to those hinges in time when the ...
