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Rethink and Restructure

It happened thirty years ago, but I still recall my absolute outrage the day my draft notice arrived. How dare they? I didn’t even bother to read the thing, just sent it back with a hand-scrawled note: I will never serve in the United States Army. Stop wasting my time and the government’s postage. Sincerely yours. P.S. I recently joined Read More ›

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Line of voting privacy booths at an empty polling station, USA Election Day, copyspace
Image Credit: Sunshower Shots - Adobe Stock

Pundit predicts a surprising outcome to next year’s election

By J. Pierpont Pundit* PUNDITTOWN, INSIDE THE BELTWAY–There are great benefits to your reading an insider’s column like this one. Thanks to the wisdom of the pundits, you can now be told the outcome of the 1996 Presidential Election, ten months early. A preliminary hint: You voters are wasting your time. Starting sooner than the January sales are three solid Read More ›

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Child decorating Christmas tree with homemade gingerbread man cookies at Christmastime
Image Credit: Kristen - Adobe Stock

Designer trees? I say, ‘humbug!’ to these fashion zombies

I suppose I'll make a lot of people mad and start some household fights, but I have to say it: Designer Christmas trees aren't the real thing. I'm willing to accept all varieties, sizes and shapes of Christmas trees as genuine. So long as the ornaments are many-colored, I'll go for all white lights, since the early trees had candles on them, after all. I'll even admit that some artificial trees from Thailand or China can qualify as "real;" in fact, our family has been thinking of getting one (we are always thinking of getting one). But I draw the line at self-consciously arty trees, especially those of monochromatic decorator design. You know them: the elegant ones with, maybe, all gold balls and gold ropes and bows. A two-color scheme isn't much better: the maroon and silver numbers, for example, with (yawn) all maroon ribbons and silver baubles and perhaps a silver light cleverly shining down on them from the ceiling. Such self-conscious concoctions are to real Christmas trees what robots are to human beings; they lack souls. Read More ›
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A lawyer is presenting a case in front of blurred figures in a courtroom setting; professionalism and law
Image Credit: gunzexx png and bg - Adobe Stock

Tort reform one route to restoration of a more civil society

A woman at McDonald’s spills hot coffee in her lap and a jury awards her $2.7 million. Another jury awards a man $4 million from BMW because he wasn’t told that his new car had received a minor paint touch-up before he bought it. Yet another man is awarded $12.3 million, most of it in “punitive” damages,” because he fractured Read More ›

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Global network modern creative telecommunication and internet connection. Concept of 5G wireless digital connection and internet of things future.
Licensed from Adobe Stock

Angst and Awe on the Internet

Well, it had to happen. As the Internet emerges as the central nervous system of global capitalism, the Luddite left is bursting into “flames” against the microcosm and telecosm, against interlinked computers and the global radiance of electromagnetic communications. This rising resistance resonates with the press coverage that has long lavished attention on the excesses of the Net. Richard Shaffer Read More ›

America Unmasked

I’m a think tank pogue, specializing in national defense. “Pogue,” by the by, is a venerable military term, meaning anybody who’s farther from the fighting than you are. By this standard, Seattle’s a pretty poguey place. Still, whenever the metallic density of the air increases somewhere, I morph into a Media Resource. Since the ordnance started popping in Yugoslavia, I’ve Read More ›

Envy of the World?

Fifteen years ago, an historian of American culture captured in one sentence the essence of the decision-making that got us into Vietnam. In his brilliant (and therefore sadly ignored) book, “Backfire,” Loren Baritz called it the work of men “who didn’t know how to win, but couldn’t conceive of losing.” Today, it’s reversed. The decisions of the Clinton administration regarding Read More ›

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Wall building with bullet holes from Bosnian War period in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Image Credit: Fotokon - Adobe Stock

Clinton risks leading us into quagmire of ‘Vietnam II’

Vietnam started, too, with limited purposes in service of a universal goal (containing communism, in that case.) And it ended with a goal of merely getting our prisoners home - and with years of disillusionment. President Clinton, who cut his political teeth on opposition to the war in Vietnam, has learned some of the lessons of that conflict, but not the most important one: Don't send troops into a war unless you have a way to win and get out. Yes, of course, "peace enforcement" is not war, supposedly. But it also is not mere "peacekeeping," and in Bosnia even the latter resulted in the deaths of more than 200 United Nations troops. When the president says that the United States mission "may well involve casualties," and that if U.S. troops are attacked "they will have the authority to respond immediately and . . . with overwhelming force," what then follows, if not war? In explaining to the American people and Congress why he had avoided direct intervention earlier, the president said, "I decided that American ground troops should not fight a war in Bosnia because the United States could not force peace on Bosnia's warring ethnic groups: the Serbs, Croats and Muslims." Just so. But why does he think he has "forced" that outcome now, when the Bosnian Serbs are still uncommitted and when whatever commitments are made on paper mean so little in the Balkans anyhow? There have been 34 "truces" and "cease-fires" and other "agreements" before this one, and none has held up. What enables peacekeeping is a manifest and genuine desire for peace on all sides or, even better, the defeat and disarmament of the aggressors. Is someone planning to go door to door to disarm the Bosnian Serbs? Read More ›

Going for Lofty Goals

Congratulations to the United States Army. When Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki gave his recent “Army Vision” speech to an Army audience, he offered a set of goals that are correct, compelling, and–if aggressively pursued and adequately funded–the best thing to happen to the service since Desert Storm or the day they consumed the last of their Nam-era C-rations, whichever Read More ›

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Desert combat with a battle tank that supports the army on the advance generative ai
Image Credit: Scheidle-Design - Adobe Stock

Think tanks instrumental weapons in conservatism’s arsenal

Polls show that the public primarily blame Republicans in Congress, rather than President Clinton, for the recent (and future?) government shutdown. Those who blame both sides equally think that the battle is merely “political” in the worst sense. At the state level, Referendum 48, the property rights initiative, was soundly defeated earlier this month by a margin of 60-40. Is Read More ›