American security depends on the balance of power in Europe and Asia. If a single power were able to dominate the continent (France under Napoleon, Germany under Wilhelm II or Hitler, the Soviet Union), it would also be strong enough to threaten the US.
As Jefferson put it: the enduring …
read moreA few days after my latest post, John Robson hadn't responded, so I asked on Twitter whether I'd persuaded him that CO2 traps heat. He replied:
In a jar, sure. Have I persuaded you the climate is a lot more complicated than a jar?
I was hoping for a little …
read moreJohn Robson has kindly replied to my comment on his surprising IRPP post.
I'll try to keep it brief.
John asks how we know that atmospheric CO2 traps heat:
read moreWe cannot measure directly how atmospheric CO2 traps heat. How would we? You can't put …
Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (1967):
read more... real power is always something far greater than military power alone. A balance of power is not a balance of military power alone: it is, rather, a balance in which military power is one element. Even in its crudest aspect, power represents …
If you didn't know anything at all about the shape of the earth, and you just looked around you, how could you tell that the earth isn't flat? You can't see the curvature of the earth, so it's natural to think of the earth as a flat circle supporting the …
read moreThere's a lot of partisan misinformation on the Internet. This isn't a new problem. Orwell wrote in 1945:
read moreMuch of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events …
In Enlightenment 2.0 (2014), Joseph Heath describes how conservatives in the US are hostile to experts, and prefer feelings (also known as "common sense") over reason. (If this makes you doubt Heath's even-handedness, he and Andrew Potter also wrote a book criticizing the Left's idea that political change will …
read moreI'm a software developer based in Vancouver, Canada. I'm married, with two children.
I'm interested in politics and history, especially 20th-century history, diplomacy and war, good government, and Canadian politics. How did we get into the nuclear arms race? What were the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent …
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