brian.mcguigan

Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard has a piece out calling for increased domestic oil production. He makes the case on the grounds of national (economic) security saying that producing oil in the US would stop the flow of petrodollars overseas and relieve prices at the pump. The first point is undeniably true. The second is wrong. Drilling for oil in the US is not economical; most of it is not...

A Washington Post article about a political protest on Facebook paints an Orwellian picture of modern day Egypt. Young Egyptians came together in a Facebook group to organize a passive rebellion against the 27 year reign of President Hosni Mubarak. They wore black shirts, stayed home from work, and wrote slogans on currency. Then they were crushed by Egypt's brutal security services. That...

Aside from being ignorant of Chamberlain's Munich Agreement with Hitler, missing from the conversation is the fact that it actually won the war for the Allies. After World War I, with Germany disarmed, the would-be Allies spent money rebuilding their countries instead of their arms. The problem was that Hitler re-equipped Germany at an astounding pace, meaning that England and France were...

We will eventually find life in space. That from the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. "If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there," said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour, which returned to Earth in March. "Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe," he...

The zeitgeist of Rome, Italy made itself plain last week: For many Romans, these are jittery times. For the first time in a generation, the mayor of the Eternal City, once a left-wing stronghold, is on the political right. Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-Fascist, swept to power late last month on a tough-on-crime platform that included bulldozing encampments of Roma [gypsy] people, expelling...

Victims of the recent cyclone in Burma aren't being helped. The junta is incapable and intrinsically xenophobic. It can't help itself and is wary of accepting help from outsiders. Meanwhile, people are dying. The lack of clean drinking water is, amongst other things, causing concern of widespread illness and further death. As such, it was only a matter of time before someone suggested that the...