It usually began with the engineers walking the length of a street, threading charges through house after house along a whole block. Then the countdown, and then the block went down together, a single rolling wall of dust where a neighborhood had stood, and over the...
The most recent tech dystopia discourse has been driven by a meeting between AI bigwigs and Pope Leo XIV, wherein one of them tried to convince the Pope that artificial intelligence can develop consciousness. Why, if possible, this would be desirable, is outside of...
This month, a Trump administration report confirmed Joe Biden's White House secretly connived to destroy Americans’ financial freedom. Those bureaucrats were upholding hallowed precedents stretching back to the Nixon era, when Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act....
Serbia’s 2000 Bulldozer Revolution, which culminated in the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević, in many ways set the standard for what we now refer to as the “color revolutions.” It is only fitting that, 26 years later, the country is once again experiencing...
People have been debating what to do with murderers for thousands of years. Plato discussed the contentious matter in his dialogues, and it is likely that disagreement about the proper course of action has existed for as long as there have been murderers. In recent...
Before dawn on January 3, 2026, American warplanes pounded military targets across Venezuela while U.S. Special Forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas. The raid drew on more than 150 aircraft flying from twenty land and sea...
One of the most persistent myths about war is that it is sometimes inevitable. States are carried along by the impersonal forces of history: the balance of power, alliance commitments, ideological antagonisms, the rise and decline of great powers, et cetera. Leaders...
After Hosni Mubarak became president of Egypt in 1981, his government maintained a close relationship with the United States. Over the following decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would become increasingly involved in reforming Egypt's...
When one of my acquaintances expressed his enthusiasm for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece—seeing it as the de facto launching of a presidential campaign—I thought to watch the talk in its entirety. It was worth...
Piers Morgan recently said on his program of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I do think he's the nearest thing to a modern day Hitler…” Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton had something to say about that. “You know what?” Horton said. “Noriega's Hitler and...
Well, it’s election season, and the routine embrace of mindless partisanship has commenced. We are again being told by Republican politicians that we must ignore monetary inflation, the disastrous war of choice with Iran, the ever-expanding surveillance state, and the...
There has been a good deal of discussion recently among libertarians and conservatives over whether to vote in the upcoming midterms. Those among us (I confess to being one) who had hopes that what passes for the political right among American politicians might...
On October 9, as Ukraine’s negotiating team was meeting with American envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Miami, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Russia that would see the United States provide sanctions relief for Russia to sell diesel to the...
On September 29, China and Laos opened the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy at Ban Keun Airport, roughly thirty-one miles north of Vientiane. China’s Defense Ministry said both sides would jointly maintain and...
In 1924, the Lord Chief Justice of England quashed a criminal conviction over nothing more than an appearance. The clerk who had sat with the magistrates while they deliberated also worked for the firm that was suing the defendant in a related civil matter. No one...
When Xi Jinping departed Washington at the end of September, the verdict was already plain. Another carefully choreographed encounter produced a short extension of the trade truce, a modest $30 billion reciprocal tariff arrangement on non-sensitive goods, some coal...
Unfortunately, the probability rises with every passing day that NATO will wage war with Russia. The proxy war, openly fought since February 24, 2022 between Russia and Ukraine and which has lasted longer than World War I, may soon become an open war between Russia...
On October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro narrowly defeated incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by two points, 47% to 45%, in the first round of Brazil’s election, forcing a runoff to be held on October 25. It was a shockingly strong performance by Bolsonaro in an...
