Some thoughts on the Austro-Hungarian empire’s legacy on the occasion of the passing of Otto von Habsburg.

This time of year it is worth remembering  Mein Kampf, the turgid and unreadable Bible of the Nazi movement that was published back in July of 1925.  The last time I looked, you could still buy it at the international airport newstand in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur — along with other classics of […]

We’ve been trying to solve the problems of the American inner cities for almost fifty years with the ideas, institutions and techniques of twentieth century progressive and liberal thought.  While individuals have been helped, the Black middle class has grown, and better policing has brought crime rates down out of the stratosphere, those left in […]

If the green movement hasn’t done much for the planet lately, it has given us some cool new expressions.  One of the best is “global weirding,” the trendy new way of branding the apocalypse formerly known as global warming.  It combines the virtue of ‘climate change’ (which is that anything from deep freezes and record […]

On July 5, 2011, The Boston Globe carried a story by Joanna Weiss with the title “Mormons on center stage”. She felt that we are in a Mormon moment. She may well be right.Mormons are certainly very visible on the political scene. As Republican candidates for the presidency are popping in and out at a […]

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities. Not since the 1960s, when scores of American […]

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city. I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing […]

Since the September 11 attacks, federal judges have out of necessity plunged into the real-life facts of terrorism’s twilight world of training camps, safe houses, and dry runs, as they review the Guantanamo dossiers of al Qaeda and Taliban suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even in the view of hard-bitten intelligence types, the federal […]

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.  Racial problems in the US contributed to the particular history of the urban underclass and race can never be totally ignored in this country, but the inner city today is haunted by […]

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science focuses on a single topic in each issue. In its July 2011 issue the topic is “Patrimonial Power in the Modern World”, edited by two sociologists, Julia Adams and Mounira Charrad. The topic is interesting in itself, and the several authors provide a vivid […]