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Always best when someone else volunteers to be the horrible warning. It should be a short leap from "countries have different standards of living" and "countries have traditionally had controlled borders" to speculating on the ways in which the latter contribute to the former.

I don't care about the haphazard US administration control of its military power. What I'm looking at is the politics. There are really only two possible futures: one in which Iran never has the power to follow through on its government's desire to extinguish Israel, and one in which it...

As I wrote, "...and every corporation with operations in a country which co-operates with Iran...". If China is propping up Iran, let corporations trading in/with China bear a cost. There is an obvious risk in forcing corporations to decide whether to be all in or out of a particular set of...

You don't try to take the country. You force it into approximately the position of having to be an autarky and let nature take its course.

There aren't that many unique mass human behaviour patterns. One of the archetypes is the tyrant or tyrannical regime emboldened by successive capitulations until eventually an intolerable provocation results in a conflict more destructive than if a conflict had erupted earlier. The most...

Any country that chooses, on its own turf, by legislation. Suppose foreign-based corporation X does business in/with the US and Iran. The US levies fees against its business in/with the US. Any of X's competitors willing to forego opportunities in Iranian markets for opportunities in US...

Blockade and complete interruption of trade is pretty specific. "Give me specifics" is a rhetorical game. It should be clear that I advocate dealing with the kinds of problems posed by Iran and its clients and associates with the entire suite of measures. Every measure is a "specific". So...

Sure, it was the USA and Israel that provoked Iran into doing everything it has been doing for decades. Surely no-one was stupid enough to believe that Israel was going to continue to be the major bearer of the costs of Iran's misbehaviour indefinitely. If the "international community"...

Almost everything possible hasn't been tried already. Iran is not really being seriously isolated and pressed in all aspects. Too many people are taking counsel of their imminent fears, which are not imaginary but are not necessarily (and probably not) the worst eventual outcome. There's...

DIME. All of it. No need to repeat 1930s techniques of accommodations and appeasement. We already know that to the tyrants of the day, everything short of force that doesn't compel them to stop their bad behaviour is a sign of weakness. Solve the problems (Iran, Houthi, whoever) while...

Beyond that, as far as needed. The alternative is to tolerate some amount of banditry, such as Iran's sponsorship of terror. How much?

The heart of the matter. "We're going to behave like bandits, as we have done for years, and if we think you threaten to extinguish us, we'll behave even more like bandits." Might as well deal with the bandits decisively the first time. No point going through a series of appeasements and...

Passing along claims by IRGC (or Hamas) is like passing along claims by the Trump administration.

Interesting that at some point a threshold was crossed and it became necessary, somehow, by someone, to "create an environment" for what people have done for millennia.

LNG in, Interfor out.

It's really instructive to dive deep on the "excesses of capitalism" to learn how overwhelmingly often the faults are "excesses of government".

If the Swedes are at the top of your list, you better check your methodology.

You probably need to fly over it on a day without much cloud cover to appreciate the size of some of the cut blocks in those regions too. Not making ugly cuts where the people travelling major highways can see them has been a habit, if not formal policy, for decades.

I assume the main aim of the BCGEU strike was to break the bargaining mandate, and the same for the nurses. I had a good laugh watching their president deliver the "Oh we were not part of any bargaining that produced that mandate; that's their problem" line. The NDP only needs to pretend to...

Hordes of chickens, descending on parachutes...