The U.N., the Trilateral Commission, the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers — these are the conspiracy theories for which right-wing nuts are infamous. But what about the conspiracy theories of the left? I’m sure you have heard of them: the...
A few days ago, Bill Gates received a rather malicious piece of hate mail singed, “Ralph Nader.” It wasn’t his first. Presumably, the infamous “Consumer Advocate” left his return address off of the envelope, because someone at Microsoft...
Anybody can be mistaken — except haters, apparently. Whenever others express their hatred of Americans, in words or deeds, the hand-wringers among us want us to ask: “Why do they hate us?” Apparently we should automatically go in quest of those...
I was in the university section of Pittsburgh for a meeting right after the attacks of September 11, just an hour after thousands of people had been burned alive or crushed to death or jumped to their deaths from the top of the inferno that had been the World Trade...
Imagine that your child comes home from school one day and announces that in his math course there are no textbooks, no teaching — and no right answers. Instead, students form groups to construct their own math “strategies.” They add fractions by...
The events of September 11 have intensified a long-standing debate: What causes Muslims to turn to militant Islam? Some analysts have noted the poverty of Afghanistan and concluded that herein lay the problem. Jessica Stern of Harvard University wrote that the United...
For the gun controllers, the year gone by was bleak. As 2001 began, their lawsuits against gun manufacturers were being dismissed in one city after another. An attorney general nominee they bitterly opposed was confirmed. Soon after, he wrote to the National Rifle...
Basketball star Scottie Pippen played for some great Chicago Bulls teams and won multiple NBA championships. Then, as now, he also pulled down some hefty paychecks. This year, for instance, Pippen will make $18.1 million playing pro hoops for the Portland Trail...
An odd controversy briefly dominated the sports pages in March 1996. A player in the National Basketball Association, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to follow the league’s rule requiring that players stand in a “dignified posture” during the national...
“By creating private accounts, you’d create private assets and private assets could be passed onto another generation as capital. And I think that would change the lives of millions of people,” says Wade Dokken. And Wade would know. A former advisor...
On September 11th, Americans found their nation under attack. Terrorists hijacked civilian airliners, turned them into missiles, and used them to kill thousands of innocent Americans–men, women and children–as well as people from dozens of nations. Today,...
Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s famous fictional detective, tells a story about one of his early cases: An accountant, he says, was walking down the street when a steel beam fell from a construction site and smashed into the ground, narrowly missing him. After his...
If homeland defense means anything, it means being able to dictate who can and cannot call our country home. The case of Melanie Jeanbeaucejour shows that America does not yet have the guts or willpower to swiftly throw out unwelcome guests. This story is sure to...
This article was first published as “Bin Laden and Herndon, Virginia” in the The Jerusalem Post (June 20, 2001). Unfortunately, no one listened to its dire warning until after September 11th.–Editor Islamist terrorism has afflicted nearly every...
Most people seem to have responded to the demands for reparations for slavery in one of two ways. Either they have supported the demands or they have maintained a discreet silence. One of the few people to treat these demands as a serious subject requiring a serious...
Self preservation is said to be the first law of nature, and this applies not only to human beings but also to organizations and movements. The March of Dimes was set up to fight polio but it did not disband when polio was wiped out by vaccines. Nor did civil rights...
The murder trial of the year began a few days ago (January 7th) in Atlanta. The case began in May 1999, when a 55-year-old Black-American named Jamil Al-Amin was stopped in the outskirts of Atlanta for driving a stolen car. To avoid arrest, Al-Amin flashed a fake...
Dear President Bush, “What can we do to help win the war against terrorism?” Americans all across the country eagerly ask. In response, you insist that we “go about our daily lives,” but with a heightened sense of awareness. To live in fear,...
The prospect of war between India and Pakistan shows how profoundly things have changed since Sept. 11. “From this day forward,” President Bush announced just days after the attack, “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be...
I had been thinking that Harvard did well to make former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers its new president last summer, and when the news broke recently that Summers had so offended the stars of the university’s Afro-American Studies Department that they were...
Globalization is bad news for the world’s over-taxed welfare states, particularly those in Europe. Thanks to the increased mobility of capital, individuals can more easily shift their economic activity to low-tax jurisdictions. Such tax competition liberalizes...
“We will not rest until we stop all terrorists of global reach, and for every nation that harbors or supports terrorists there will be a day of reckoning,” says President Bush. Let’s hope he means it. Until we overwhelmingly smash every government...
Other than being rich and famous, what do David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson and Scottie Pippen have in common? They all feed at the public trough. More precisely, they collect subsidies from the federal farm program, as do at least 14 members of Congress....
While the world’s attention has been focused on the Middle East, South America has been headed toward chaos and collapse. And worse, it is not merely an economic collapse, but a collapse into a disastrous intellectual confusion that threatens to make recovery...
Newspaper readers have been treated in recent days to an orgy of gut-spilling by Clinton administration officials rather painfully eager to show that when they were in office they, too, exerted themselves mightily to get rid of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda...
Say you fall and break your leg. The leg hurts, so you take aspirin for the pain. But you don’t stop there. You go get a cast, so the leg can heal permanently. Yet the wisdom of treating the cause of suffering rather than merely masking the pain, appears to...
A century ago, it was one of the seven richest nations on Earth. But that was long ago, well before it was racked by a lengthy recession and a climbing unemployment rate. Today, Argentina is a shell of its former self. The street riots that broke out just before...
President Bush had barely finished announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty when the cry went up among missile-defense foes: Why now? After all, they said, it’s not as if we’re about to deploy a...
If you were an ailing foreigner in need of sanctuary and free medical treatment, it’s obvious where you would turn: America. Where could Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind with bad kidneys and a shrinking bank account, be hiding? Well, if you were an...
Even before the amount of Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan had shrunk to virtually nothing and Osama bin Laden’s forces had beat a hasty retreat deep into the mountains, the question arose: Where should we carry the war on terrorism next? Iraq,...
Worrying about bacteria, New Jersey banned restaurants from serving eggs sunny side up. The ban has since been lifted. Some New Jersey localities have a ban on people pumping their own gasoline. Policemen issue citations for driving without a seatbelt. By law, new...
In the next few days, the Wall Street Journal will announce the results of its Investment Dartboard contest for the second half of 2001. In the competition, Journal editors ask four market professionals each to choose a single stock for the six months ahead. Their...
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