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The Long View

The Long View 2007-09-24: Danilevsky; Demographics; The Syrian Desert; Cumbey

As John points out here, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that Russia would eventually revert to her historic pattern of Church-State relations, but the twentieth century had some rather dramatic events that obscured that pattern for a time. And “eventually” can sometimes be a very long time. Along

The Long View 2007-09-21: The Fall of Empire; Board of Estimate; Future Follies

John J. Reilly makes an aside here, borrowing from Mark Steyn, that a large part of the world currently enjoys a perfectly reasonable standard of living, approximately equivalent to Portugal, which is likely no American’s idea of a hellhole. The numbers tend to be a little hard to wrap

The Long View 2007-09-14: The General and His Enemies; Tolkien's Geopolitics; The Final Twilight

That “General Betray-us” thing was a skilled bit of political invective. I still remember it more than a decade later. The General and His Enemies; Tolkien's Geopolitics; The Final Twilight General Petraeus's spokesperson addressed the nation last night. Great fan though Peggy Noonan is of Petraeus

The Long View: The Scorpion's Gate

Richard Clarke was often featured on The Long View, as a hostile insider to the Iraq policies of President George W. Bush. Re-reading this review of the novel, The Scorpion’s Gate [Amazon link] by Clarke, I feel that Clarke didn’t necessarily have quite as terrible a grasp of

The Long View 2007-09-11: September 11; Real Intelligence; True Fanatics; The Other Public; The Subterranean Reactionaries of Manhattan

John opines here that chant ought to be slow, but the priest who used to celebrate the old Mass for us always got annoyed if the choir was too slow. He liked a brisk pace. September 11; Real Intelligence; True Fanatics; The Other Public; The Subterranean Reactionaries of Manhattan Another

The Long View 2007-09-18: Xenopathy; Episcopal Tyranny; Be Well

Back to our regularly scheduled program. This in an interesting post, and one of a thread of arguments on healthcare that strongly influenced me. The occasion was John commenting on a plank in Hilary Clinton’s presidential platform that is very much like what the Affordable Care Act turned out

The Long View 2008-06-04: Toward the Courts of the Crimson Kings

This review of In the Courts of the Crimson Kings [Amazon link] is a great excuse for John J. Reilly to indulge in his hobby of metahistory, the way that cultures have a tendency to follow cyclical patterns of development over centuries. The book is fun, and John’s digressions