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Not very interesting. They come up with some other mechanism for paying the lender's profit and risk premium, which is all that interest is for, and reportedly the alternatives are all more expensive (because the risk is greater). If it happens that any of the products is actually cheaper, I'd...

Whether or not that's true is irrelevant. Israel may be a colonial project by your lights, but here's the reality from the point of view of some Jews: they were nearly exterminated in much of Europe, and their Arab neighbours tried repeatedly to do something that might have ended up as ethnic...

0. Demilitarization of Iran. Necessary for the other 4, and about as likely as 1, 2, and 3.

Yes, within the constraints of predictable/stable contracts and the associated laws. Yes. If there are real losses to anyone, those should be "socialized". Governments have a bad habit of allowing costs of their policies to be privatized.

Well, there goes the support of much of the left. They hate that "Axis of Evil" stuff.

The market doesn't decide zoning restrictions, which are "the rules" when people buy into a neighbourhood. And then changes are political decisions.

They don't face re-election. What you propose - that people read and listen - may be entirely true. But if "party interests >> country interests", we get the results we see.

It's not exactly the same thing in means. But the ends - things that erode property values - are the same, and that's the point.

That might be all that it is (ie. your case is strong). Example: Adam Schiff (the US House member) was notorious for leaks, mostly untruthful ones, which is why briefings were switched from oral to written (to be able to deny creative interpretations). Obviously declining the information give...

Regardless how well the specific instance fits, the use of classified briefings to muzzle political opponents isn't new and certainly not unknown. As soon as a page is included in a document dump, the material on it is covered. "Oh, that wasn't supposed to be there. Nevertheless, we must...

It's difficult to protect freedoms of conscience and expression. The easy part is to forbid governments from getting involved, and even then people will be pushing the extreme cases, and using "wins" to move the Overton window and start on the next encroachment. Beyond government, the only...

No more so than if the city permitted a commercial/industrial operation to move into the neighbourhood and start depositing soot all over everyone's houses and lawns.

A tale is told of a day early in PET's PM-ship, when he admonished the people around the table for not having read/digested the background material prior to a meeting. It's reasonable to wonder how much that ethic has declined.

Iran is the Persian world. Also the Shi'ite world. Normalization between Israel and the Arab/Sunni world has been slow - the work of decades - but progressive. Attacks against Iran, and Iranian proxies in neighbouring Arab countries, aren't likely to overturn much of that.

So is China. So is Iran. Probably some others. So what?

At which point, everyone excuses himself to go to the bathroom.

There's an unresolved tension between the property rights of people who bought into a neighbourhood with the expectation of maintaining its character and the property rights of people who want to make a profit selling to a developer and moving out.

I prefer them to be continuous.

Yes. Deterrence is much, much less expensive than war. Not enough people are thinking about what international security will look like after the usual members of coalitions of the willing have become, in the estimation of countries inclined to get frisky, weaker. Canada and the US are already...

Not "shithole", but also "not good enough". Canada is sliding. Either at one time we didn't have so many people living rough, or they were better hidden.