California College Shakes Up Higher Ed

Santa Monica College is trying something new: a two-tiered pricing system separating its most popular courses from all the others. The community college is charging a premium for classes with the highest demand, pricing them at $180 per credit hour rather than the usual $36, the New York Times reports.Predictably, this has a number of […]

Preview of Afghanistan after Pullout?

As President Obama moves the U.S. toward a pullout from Afghanistan by 2014, it’s time to start asking the question: What will Afghanistan look like when America leaves? Events in the remote region of Baluchistan in western Pakistan may give us a clue.In this impoverished and sparsely populated region, a bloody and poorly understood insurgency […]

Self-Driving Cars: Another Reason Why High Speed Rail Is Pointless

We’ve known for some time that the Google geeks were working on cars that could drive themselves. Lasers, cameras and radar work together in Google’s system to, well, drive a car with no human help. According to Google, it’s working: This week, Google celebrates 200,000 miles of computer-led, accident-free driving. (Reports that a self-driven car […]

School Reform Hits Snag in Britain

The big-box school model that has dominated educational systems is looking shakier by the day. In America, parents fed up with poor results in public schools are taking more control over their children’s education: To look at just one metric, there were 1.5 million children homeschooled in America last year, 75 percent more than eight years […]

Venezuelan Struggle for Chavez Succession Breaks Into The Open

Apparently, the people who know Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez best and work with him most closely think he’s a liar. That’s the only possible reason why, despite Chavez’s frequent and continuing claims that his cancer (type and status still held as a secret) has miraculously been cured, his entourage is erupting in a mad scramble […]

End, Don’t Mend, the Syrian Regime

David Ignatius thinks that “it’s time for Syrian revolutionaries to take ‘yes’ for an answer from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” The Washington Post columnist believes that an opposition that, by some estimates, has already suffered more than 10,000 dead, should “back a U.N.-sponsored ‘managed transition’ of power there, rather than rolling on toward a civil […]

History, Journalism and the Repetition of Error

There is an old adage which states that history is written by the winners. No doubt this is generally true, and the unstated premise of this adage certainly makes logical sense: Those who die in a failed military campaign, after all, are not going to be writing anything. But sometimes history is not even written […]

The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue

After oral arguments before the Supreme Court this week, the odds that the Court will strike the individual mandate rose sharply; Intrade markets after the hearings showed bettors thought there was a 62 percent chance that the mandate will fall.I can’t tell you whether the law is unconstitutional; I can’t even tell you whether the […]

Israeli Politics Continuing Rightward Drift

Fearing huge losses at the next election, Israel’s largest opposition party, Kadima, has removed Tzipi Livni as its leader. Livni was foreign minister in the previous government and is one of Israel’s strongest advocates for peace with the Palestinians. Her replacement, Shaul Mofaz, is a former army chief-of-staff and ex-defense minister.The FT‘s political post-mortem on Livni’s […]

Voters Tire of Green Agenda

No surprises here: A new Gallup poll reports that Americans are still broadly skeptical of the Green agenda, currently putting economic growth ahead of the environment by 49 percent to 41 percent. And moderates are increasingly joining conservatives in the opinion that economic growth should be a priority even if it incurs some environmental damage.Gallup polls […]

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