Fear subverts political stability

The character of the post-Cold War world is the subject of a sobering, doomsday cover story by editor Richard Kaplan in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Kaplan doesn’t dwell on the usual post-Cold War themes: regional conflicts, the role of the UN, growth of trading blocs. Kaplan is a Malthusian and a pessimist, not…

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Health-care plan on its last legs

The Clinton plan for healthcare reform is dead. The coup d’grace was administered by Robert Reischauer, economist and chief of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO report was devastating. It showed the Clinton proposal to be a budget buster. While the Administration said the reform would save $59 billion during the first five years,…

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Roadblocks loom on superhighway

Dallas–More than a thousand people–from engineers to policy wonks–are assembled here to participate in the Western Communications Forum, an annual event to assess technology and new applications in the communications industry. Speeches and panel discussions are alive with enthusiasm for the achievements and great potential of the convergence in communications technologies–CATV, telephony, computers, software and…

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Times changes — must values, too?

Remember when a “joint” was a beer hall, “hash” was the dinner just before payday, “switch hitter” was a guy who could bat left or right-handed, and “crack” was the space between two sidewalk slabs — as in “step on the crack and break your gramma’s back”? Times change. Remember the survey released a few…

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