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9-11

The Long View 2002-08-08: War Talk

US Military Bases Worldwide in 2007This post of John's is a good reminder of how we got ourselves into this mess. The first Gulf War was a rousing success. In the lead-up to that war, lots of respectable people said the war would devolve into a messy guerrilla

The Long View 2002-06-16: Ministers of Terror

John's surmise here about Jose Padilla was very much correct. Once the Department of Defense had custody, they sweated him for three years, and probably only put him back into the criminal justice system because he had no further information of value. The civil rights issue was willfully

The Long View 2002-05-21: The Office of Evil

The Oatmeal clearly agrees with JohnOne notable disagreement of mine with John was the competence of the terrorists who struck the United States on 9/11. I'm sure lots of people, especially at the time, saw bin Laden as a terrorist mastermind, but in retrospect it seems like

The Long View: Questions and Answers on 9/11

If I were on the ball, I would have posted this on 9/11. Part of the reason I foster John's memory is that he perceived the structure of events so acutely. He knew the worst outcome of 9/11 for the United States would be a universal

The Long View 2002-02-27: Getting Back to Normal

Thirteen years later, and we don't really seem back to normal. The immediate, searing impact of 9-11 on most American's consciousness has faded, but by and large we seem resigned to the changes it wrought on our country. We gripe about the TSA, but we still

The Long View 2002-02-11: The American Prerogative

The Long View 2002-02-11: The American Prerogative

This is another short one. I'll copy the whole thing here again, because it illustrates some interesting points in John's thinking, and some interesting developments in the last decade. Kyoto HoaxThe Kyoto Protocols were an unenforceable hoax, and it is good someone finally said so. By

The Long View: The Fourth Turning

There was something magical and terrible about the end of the nineteenth century. The term coined to describe it, fin de siècle, itself accelerated the process already underway. Apocalyptic expectations can become feedback loops in certain situations. You might call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but in English this term carries a