Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.
Forget Everything I Said, or Backing Slowly out of the Echo-Chamber
Climate catastrophism suffered a Category 5 event with the recent confessional by Ted Nordhaus, among the world’s foremost prophets of doom, that he had it wrong all along. The models that forecast runaway global warming, Nordhaus writes in The Free Press, assumed simultaneously soaring populations, booming economies and flatlining technological improvement which, Nordhaus has belatedly recognized, simply can’t all occur at the same time.
