May 02, 2003
Bird flu is sweeping the Netherlands, the fourth livestock plague in a handful of years after swine fever, mad cow, and foot-and-mouth. Treating each outbreak as a one-off disaster the government pays to clean up might be exactly the wrong policy, if you're trying to actually change anything.
May 02, 2003
We keep hearing about Muslim fanaticism, but if you look at the actual scoreboard, the supposed thousands of suicide attackers heading to Iraq turned out to be two guys, and they may not have been all that voluntary. Compared to the Nazis or the Japanese in 1945, this lot folds early. So what's actually going on?
May 02, 2003
Iraq made it plain: foreign policy is power, dressed up in moral language for the cameras. So where does that leave the UN? One country, one vote isn't democracy when half the countries aren't democracies themselves. And if Europe really wanted to stop Washington, there's an awkward question about why it couldn't.
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.