I can’t be the only person seriously doubting that this flagrant show of prosperity is sustainable: I have this gut feeling that the completion of the Burj Dubai skyscraper (amazing pictures here) will mark a moment of incredible economic collapse, and it will stand for decades as a 707 metre monument to boom psychology run ridiculously amok. Just speculating… I wish Dubai nothing but the [...]
global
I wasn’t sure if I’d write anything on Remembrance Day, but then I saw this National Post editorial: Still, we risk dishonouring those Canadians who have gone to war to defend our nation and its values when we seek to revise our history and downplay our contributions to wars fought in the name of freedom. [...]
Remember after 9/11 when George W. Bush said everyone should go shopping — “or the terrorists will win”? But wasn’t the economy supposed to have receded anyways, without the terrorist attack? There was the super-hyped dotcom bubble and then Enron and the accounting blowup. Things needed to cool down. Then the attack happened, the reactions of Bush [...]
Just as there are benefits of appreciating our economic situation in terms of a long-run historical perspective, it’s also wise to appreciate our economic situation as just one aspect of our whole political situation. I’ve been thinking about this in light of recent events and reading parts of Tony Judt’s latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten [...]
Yesterday I dealt briefly with the long- vs. short-run looking forward. Today I want to deal with the long- vs. short-run looking back. We are always in a zone of imperfect visability so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we were in the hollow of the historical [...]
Quite a contrast from Where Canada Stands: Pakistan moved closer to a balance of payments crisis on Friday, as the rupee slumped to a record low after the central bank reported it had barely enough foreign currency to cover six weeks of imports. [Reuters]
The conditions that create Islamic terrorists aren’t as straightforward as one might assume. None of the easy answers accord with the facts. According to research presented in a new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman, here’s a rough summary of what doesn’t cause people to become terrorists: mental illness poverty lack of education sociopathy psychopathy [...]
