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George Will
For George Will's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 30, 2015
Commissioner Bud Selig's winning legacy
American baseball has a spring in its step as spring approaches, thanks partly to the winning legacy of a longtime fan from Milwaukee, retiring baseball commissioner Bud Selig.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 9, 2015
Learn from climate change's instructive past
How do climate-change Cassandras accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change that were not produced by human activity?
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 29, 2014
Texas license plate challenges sensitive people
The legal skirmish over a Texas license platet implicates a burgeoning new entitlement in the U.S.: the right to pass through life without encountering any disagreeable thought.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 28, 2014
Cuba Derangement Syndrome strikes again
Cuba Derangement Syndrome, a recurring fever, afflicts U.S. senators and others who argue that U.S. diplomatic relations and economic interactions lead to legitimizing Cuba's regime.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 1, 2014
Meet the real turkeys in America
Americans should give thanks for living in such an entertaining country.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 17, 2014
Adolf Eichman: a murderer's warped idealism
A biography on Adolf Eichmann rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things — ideas that denigrate reason.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 14, 2014
Republican rethink about U.S. foreign policy
U.S. military misadventures are leading Republicans to think afresh about the world and American foreign policy.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 19, 2014
Obama must get Congress to approve conflict
Today's issue for the U.S. is not whether the president should declare war but only whether he should even seek congressional authorization, for the protracted use of force against the Islamic State.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 5, 2014
In a NATO state of mind
Can social media really add anything to the fact that a nuclear power — governed by an unconstrained despot fueled by a dangerous brew of disappointment, resentment and contempt — is dismembering another nation?
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 21, 2014
Bereft of sense, government does what it can
Washington's response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism's ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school lunches, so it must control the lunches' contents, which validates regulation of what it calls 'competitive foods,' such as vending machine snacks.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2014
The government decides 'Redskins' bothers you
Some Americans who are paying attention to the absence of Native American revulsion over the name 'Washington Redskins' are not comfortable with the government saying, in effect, that if people are not offended, they should be.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 23, 2014
Stop this president from distorting rule of law
None of the policy disagreements roiling Washington at present is as important as the unchecked presidential aggrandizement of Barack Obama and his distortions of the rule of law.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 19, 2014
Retreating from a policy of ruinous grandiosity
The U.S. Republican challenge is to articulate a policy that fills the vast space between President Barack Obama's retreat on foreign policy and the ruinous grandiosity of the 'freedom agenda' of Obama's predecessor.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 1, 2014
Only amnesiacs could laud this recovery path
American graduates this season are entering an economy where more than 40 percent of recent college grads are either unemployed or in jobs that do not require a college degree. Barack Obama seems to suffer from amnesia concerning the policies that produced the robust recovery from the severe recession of 1981-82.
COMMENTARY / World
May 19, 2014
Double-edged legacy of LBJ's War on Poverty
The American Enterprise Institute's Nicholas Eberstadt wonders if it's simply a coincidence that male 'flight from work' and family breakdown have coincided with the Great Society policies instituted 50 years ago.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 25, 2014
Barack Obama: America's adolescent president
U.S. President Barack Obama talks like an arrested-development adolescent, using teenage tropes such as invoking straw men, truncating arguments and showing righteous indignation when confronted with disagreement.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 27, 2014
When the need to 'protect' signals a land grab
U.S. President Barack Obama seems to harbor the surreal hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to help regarding Syria's civil war and Iran's nuclear weapons program. Putin's helpfulness, if not fictitious, has been ineffective.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 14, 2014
How about better health through good choices?
The premise that health is the product of medicine leads the U.S. government to believe it can deliver health by judiciously distributing preventive or therapeutic medicines rather than disseminate cost-effective public health information.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2014
Putin's contribution to Obama's miniaturization
Russian President Vladimir's aggression in Ukraine has contributed to the miniaturization of Barack Obama — after Obamacare shattered the general belief in Obama's competence and honesty.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 28, 2014
Warming or not, this is the best climate for liberals
Bleak judgments about stimulus spending in the U.S. miss the main point of it, which was to funnel a substantial share of the money to unionized, dues-paying, Democratic-voting government employees. In this way, the stimulus succeeded.

Longform

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.
Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree