krebscycle

  • Who was right about the Iraq War: Ukraine edition

    Stephen Walt writes about the dominance of failed “experts” in US foreign policy circles (with bold added by me) [M]ost of the U.S. foreign policy establishment performed abysmally during the run-up to the war. Top officials in the Bush administration told several important lies to bolster the case for war,…

  • The Importance of History

    Moscow has wanted to redraw the internal borders of the USSR, which do not reflect ethnic realities well, ever since 1991, and in this revanchist game Ukraine is the biggest prize of all. Simply put, Barack Obama is the first American president Moscow has felt they could pull this off…

  • Ukraine Crisis shows that Conservative Economic Policies are National Security Threats

    Europe’s weak response to Russian aggression in the Ukraine is the product of short-sighted “free market” and “frugal government” policies loved by Conservatives and their Pet Economists. Free Market Economic Ideology says Russian gas will be delivered to Western Europe at market rates, no matter what. But Vlad Putin is…

  • Learned nothing, forgot nothing: the US “hawks”, Ukraine and Iraq

    There is an uncomfortable amount of truth in this op-ed: http://t.co/j4YkujH6t7 — John Schindler (@20committee) March 5, 2014 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Americans who objected to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq were liable to receive peculiar, earnest, and often wildly angry lectures about how it was time to put away our unserious,…

  • It turns out that Putin is just an American neo-con

    The vociferous hawkish critics of US foreign policy in Ukraine and Syria often like to “explain” that the Obama admin & EU have profoundly misunderstood Vladimir Putin’s character and world-view. The critics argument is that  Western governments have assumed Putin is just like them, law abiding, mild mannered, nice. But,…

  • Why our intelligence agencies suck: Part gazillion

    When I told one of my children that I was sure he would finish his homework, both of us, as native speakers of English, understood that I was suggesting a course of action, not declaring a belief. But this subtlety is perhaps too much for General Michael Hayden: “Here our…

  • Economics is phrenology plus calculus: part 2

    Engine of what? Mainstream economics fails to help us with good policy decisions on our critical problems because, as a discipline, it does not practice anything close to the radical skepticism that is necessary for real science, social or not. Microfoundations, which is about as scientifically rigorous as eugenics or…

  • Economics is phrenology plus calculus

    Much of mainstream economics is based on mathematical models which, it is claimed, represent the “utility” of various economic policies. Utility  is often described as a number – the higher the number, the more successful the economy. And that number is often calculated in a way  that depends on two…

  • Krugman starts to realize Geithner was right.

    And policy responded pretty effectively, too: the financial crisis may have come as a shock, but it was more or less contained by the spring of 2009. – Paul Krugman, February 2014.  Oh, really. Well, Dr. Krugman thought differently at the end of February 2009  An important article by Gillian…

  • What’s wrong with the left?

    At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. Before the civil rights movement, before feminism, before Stonewall, we had  the golden age of Democracy in the West – the opinion you’d expect from some…