Shockingly, the Libyan rebels are not nearly as nice as Human Rights Watch.  Looting, burning, taking revenge — according to the New York Times, Libyan rebels in the western mountains are behaving much like their government opponents.  Maybe NATO should be bombing the rebels to protect pro-government civilians even as it bombs the government to […]

Shingles is a serious, often excruciatingly painful disease that people who’ve had chicken pox often (roughly 1 million cases a year) get later in life.  The good news: there’s an effective vaccine that would prevent the disease and save billions.  The bad news: there isn’t enough of it and only 10 percent of the at-risk […]

The spirit of Marie Antoinette is alive and well and supporting local produce in the Hamptons according to this story in the Wall Street Journal.  Dedicated social activists have set up a charmingly twee non-profit to promote the production and consumption of local, organic food in the Hamptons.  No word yet on whether I-banker trophy […]

Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation that mandates that California schools teach gay history.I know, I know.  California is plain out of money.  The entire educational system from preschool to the University of California is falling apart.  The Supreme Court may force the prisons to release thousands of inmates.  The state’s budget is a laughingstock […]

If the green movement hasn’t done much for the planet lately, it has given us some cool new expressions.  One of the best is “global weirding,” the trendy new way of branding the apocalypse formerly known as global warming.  It combines the virtue of ‘climate change’ (which is that anything from deep freezes and record […]

More than 220 years after the Bastille went down, we are still trying to figure out what happened and what it meant.  For most people around the world the French Revolution remains the revolution par excellence; the English speaking world talks about 1688 and 1776, but most of the world entered modernity through traumatic meltdowns […]

E. D. Kain at Forbes launched a missile strike at my post on the drug war, then took most of it back after a discerning reader hauled him over the coals.  Kain appears to believe that giving authority over drugs to the states is the way to sort out this mess.  So if cocaine is […]

Too bad they don’t have any money. According to a new Gallup poll, the dollar is still king in Yerevan, Minsk and and Tajikistan.  Residents of the FSU (former Soviet Union) prefer the greenback to the euro in large numbers.  Nobody asked about the yen.

On March 14, Saudi tanks rolled across the causeway to Bahrain to help the Sunni government suppress a mainly Shia revolt. Iran, and possibly Hezbollah, were supporting some of the Shia protestors. It looks like the crackdown succeeded: the Bahraini monarchy locked up doctors, journalists, and protestors, sentenced some to death, gave others long prison […]

Trees do not grow to the sky — and Mexican immigration is not going to swamp the United States.  The always interesting Michael Barone has a must-read column pointing out that the conditions that drove millions of Mexicans into the US are changing and that the immigrant flow may already have slowed.Barone’s combination of sound […]