There is no internet in glamorous Queens, thanks to the early winter storm that swept across the east coast on Saturday. Posts will be sporadic until regular access to the web resumes.

No, says Philip Jenkins, one of the world’s most serious and best respected students of Christian history.  Jenkins has chronicled as few others the story of Middle Eastern persecution and suppression of Christianity; his analysis of the relationship of modern religious life to ‘difficult’ texts in their scriptures — like just about everything he writes […]

The wheels came off the latest EU bailout agreement this morning, at least from the standpoint of the financial markets.  European stocks were down sharply in early Monday trading, and the yields on Italian government debt rose as investors priced in new uncertainty about that country’s prospects.  The lapdog sector of the financial press spent […]

The decay of American political parties continues as the real money and power in politics shifts inexorably away from party organizations to informal and ad hoc groups.  The combination of citizen grassroots movements, decentralized party structures and the vast sums of money short-circuiting the official party structures is changing the way politics works.  As this […]

South Sudan, the world’s newest country, is applying to join the Commonwealth (formerly the British Commonwealth) and to join the East African Community, an economic grouping of mainly English speaking countries like Kenya and Tanzania.  English will replace Arabic as the language taught in schools, though presumably that will have to be phased in.Rwanda has […]

The Washington Post has finally laid it out: Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, not a prudent savings program.  As the Post special report points out, Social Security has now gone “cash negative“: the payroll taxes coming in are not enough to cover the pension payments going out.Ah, you say sagely, but that is not […]

It looks as if those of us rejoicing over the overthrow of the Great Loon will have to accept something less than perfection from his successors.  NY Times readers were shocked this morning to discover that Mustafa Abdel-Jelil, the interim leader of the North African country, is calling for a return to polygamy as Libya […]

Thanks to the snowstorm, there was no cable and wireless service this morning; thanks to the state of emergency it wasn’t possible to drive to anyplace where the internet was working.  Thankfully service is back up and the roads will be opening soon.Regular posting will resume shortly.

I was scheduled to give a talk at the Hannah Arendt conference here at Bard this evening on the problems of the green movement in dealing with the connections between scientific data and public policy, but just received word that the talk has been canceled because of the snowstorm now enveloping the Hudson Valley.The northeaster […]

While I was traveling in China, President Obama announced that American troops will soon be withdrawn from Iraq, and the State Department is following suit. The New York Times reports that a number of planned diplomatic missions in Iraq will be scaled back or closed, partially for budgetary and security reasons: Those plans have now […]