The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Malthusian Mind Virus Mathew Crawford " Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy ." -Brian Tracy Early during the summer of 1985, shortly before my eighth birthday, I picked a book off the family bookshelf. I don't recall the author or title (maybe a reader here knows?), but it was a book about practical  meditation . The author included anecdotes about professional athletes, including Jack Nicklaus, and how so many of the greats practiced  positive visualization  en route to achieving success.  A few miles from our home was a Putt-Putt mini-golf and arcade center. On Saturdays, for five dollars, I got a hotdog, a soda, and could play as many rounds of 18 holes as I liked. I'd be there for hours, sometimes playing the same hole over and over to find the right angle or point on a rail to swing at, or working to control stroke impact. On other days, I would sit in my room, or on the ground outside, and imagine the process of putti...

Who Really Runs the Middle East? By Cynthia Chung  Afghanistan is on many people’s minds lately, though the sentiment is rather mixed. Some think of it as a cause for celebration, others for deep concern, and then there are those who think it an utter disaster that justifies foreign re-entry. Most of the western concern arises out of 9/11 and the Taliban’s supposed connection to this through Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, however, as Scott Ritter (who was the lead analyst for the 7 th  Marine Amphibious Brigade on the Soviet war in Afghanistan)  wrote : “ The entire Afghan conflict must be examined considering this reality – everything is a lie. Every battle, every campaign, every contract written and implemented – everything was founded in a lie… Admiral McRaven, when speaking of the operation to kill Bin Laden, noted that there wasn’t anything fundamentally special about that mission in terms of the tactics. ‘I think that night we ran 11 or 12 [other] missions in Afghani...