The end is now at hand for the government of Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt for the last thirty years. Two outstanding questions face us now: What will the army do? And how should the United States react? Called into the streets by President Mubarak in an eleventh-hour attempt to secure his rule, the army […]

Here at my rural retreat in the rolling Dutchess County hunt country in scenic upstate New York, I’m facing a dilemma.  I need to get back to New York City for a meeting tomorrow, but the series of monstrous winter snowstorms has made parking scarce in the purlieus of the stately Mead manor in glamorous […]

As the blue social model gradually falls apart and American society casts restlessly about for something to replace it, charter schools may be on the cutting edge of the social transformation about to take place.This isn’t because they are a magic bullet solution to our education problems.  The research surrounding the effectiveness of charter schools […]

In its issue of January 7, 2011, the National Catholic Reporter had an interview with Douglas Vakoch, a psychologist who is “director of interstellar message composition” at the SETI Institute (a job description prone to produce ecstasy in any teenage consumer of science-fiction). SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and is located in Mountain […]

In music, as everybody knows, the blues were born in the Mississippi Delta and traveled up the river and the railroads from New Orleans to Memphis, St. Louis and on to Chicago.In politics, the blues were born farther north: in the Puritan commonwealth of 17th century New England centered around Boston.  For the Puritans, the construction […]

When we talk about American social models and the need to go beyond what I’m calling the blue social model and on to liberalism 5.0, race needs to be discussed.  The collapse of the blue social model, a shift from federal to local power and a shift from government to the private sector are not […]

Conservative Cassandras are turning out to be empirically correct, even if one disagrees with their philosophy: once you legitimate same-sex marriage, you open the door to any number of other alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Social reform, asserted Confucius, begins with the rectification of names.I can think of one case where he’s unquestionably right: the use of the word ‘developed’ as applied to certain wealthy and industrialized countries mostly found in western Europe and North America, but sprinkled elsewhere throughout the world.  The widespread and unchallenged use of that word […]

As attentive readers have noticed, blogging has been slow here at Via Meadia since the end of the Christmas season.  Other commitments have pulled me away from posting as regularly here as I like.  This is about to change and I hope to return to my normal pace in the next week.Thanks to all of […]

Radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr returned to Iraq from three years of exile in Iran last week to a rapturous welcome, riding a wave of popularity and adulation attributable not only to his storied family history and his closeness to the poor urban Shi‘a masses but also to his role as kingmaker in Iraq’s new […]