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We've got a lot of catching up to do before we're secure. First your cell phone doesn't work. Then you notice that you can't access the Internet. Down on the street, ATMs won't dispense money. Traffic lights don't function, and calls to 911 don't get routed to emergency responders. Radios report that systems controlling dams, railroads, and nuclear power plants have been remotely infiltrated and compromised. The air-traffic control system shuts down, leaving thousands of passengers stranded or rerouted and unable to communicate with loved ones. This is followed by a blackout that lasts not hours but days and even weeks. Our digital civilization shudders to a halt. When we emerge, millions of Americans' data are missing, along with billions of dollars. This scenario may sound like the latest doomsday blockbuster to come out of Hollywood. But each of the elements described above has occurred over the past decade as the result of a cyber-attack. Cyber-attacks are an accelerating ...
America should learn from Britain's disastrous takeover of its biggest auto company. After the Second World War, the United Kingdom's newly elected Labour government resolved to build of Britain a New Jerusalem. It nationalized the commanding heights of the economy and inaugurated the cradle-to-grave welfare state. By the 1970s, the UK faced an economic crisis unrivaled since the Great Depression. Shabby and hopeless, Britain had become, in Henry Kissinger's words, a "tragedy" of a nation, reduced to "begging, borrowing, stealing." British Leyland, Britain's largest automaker, faced bankruptcy in 1975. Fearing that its collapse would leave a million workers unemployed, the Labour government nationalized it. The company remained a ward of the state for 13 years. During that time, the British taxpayers invested 11 billion pounds--the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $22 billion today--in a company whose only sign of life was a willingness to spend that money. ...
The latest environmental nonsense enacted by California's tireless bureaucrats Last week, the California Energy Commission approved a groundbreaking series of efficiency standards for televisions, the first time government at any level in the United States has meddled in the details of how our boob tubes are made. The new rules set maximum power-consumption standards for TVs of up to 58 inches, starting in 2011 and becoming considerably tighter in 2013, and prohibit California retailers from selling sets that break the rules. Only a quarter of all televisions currently on the market would comply with the new regulations. High-definition television sets, plasma TVs, larger sets, and TVs with extra options, such as picture-in-picture, are most likely to fall short. In other words, regulators have effectively chosen to ban the sale of most large-screen televisions in the Golden State. Of course, that's not how the regulators describe it; they bill their decision as a measure to save ...
How the Paris Hilton of British politics became the savior of the Western world Churchill, by Paul Johnson (Viking/Penguin, 192 pp., $24.95) Winston Churchill led the life that many men would love to live. He survived 50 gunfights and drank 20,000 bottles of champagne. He won the public schools' fencing cup and rode in the last cavalry charge of the British Army. He created British Petroleum, invented the combat tank, and founded the states of Jordan and Iraq. And of course, by resisting Hitler, he saved Europe and perhaps the world. Paul Johnson would seem a natural Churchill biographer. With Niall Ferguson and others, he belongs to a school of British conservatives who explore historical topics with fluent verve. In more than 40 books, Johnson has attacked what liberals defend (modernity, secular intellectualism) and defended what liberals attack (Judaism, Christianity, America). Churchill therefore comes with heavyweight, almost pay-per-view expectations: a great ...
Public-sector unions have brought the state to its knees. The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees--thanks largely to the power of their unions--have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens. When I recently appeared on Glenn Beck's TV show to discuss California's dreadful fiscal situation, I mentioned that in Orange County, where I had been a columnist for the Orange County Register, the average pay and benefits package ...
