The fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall has brought out the red in a handful of Germans nostalgic for the good old days when people trying to flee the East German dictatorship were shot down like dogs and left to bleed to death.  Some Left Party delegates refused to observe a minute […]

San Francisco is the epitome of blue America — a city where to be a liberal is to be center right.  These days, it’s a city with a pension crisis: promising too much to city employees and paying too little into the pension fund for years leaves the city of San Francisco with a gaping […]

From The Financial Times: “The US now has information that Pakistan, particularly the ISI, gave access to the Chinese military to the downed helicopter in Abbottabad,” said one person in intelligence circles, referring to the Pakistani spy agency. The Chinese engineers were allowed to survey the wreckage and take photographs of it, as well as […]

From the Associated Press we learn that a Denver judge has thrown out a school voucher program that would have let parents use vouchers to pay tuition in private schools.  For the ACLU and other critics, this was unconstitutional because some of the schools are, gasp, religious.  To use taxpayer money to support religious schools […]

Over at Pajamas Media, Michael J. Totten has a fascinating report about the state of the Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt. The subject of the Brotherhood’s role in January’s regime-ending protests, as well as the demonstrations against the current government has long been controversial. Totten thinks the confusion may be due to ineptitude and incoherence […]

If you can’t convince people of the need for a global carbon treaty with documentaries and IPCC reports, why not try it with fiction? Rajendra Pachauri has already published Return to Almora, his steaming novel about a tin-hatted, serially sort-of-monogamous Hindu holy man/neuroscientist, but unaccountably this contribution to world literature remains bereft of an American […]

John McWhorter at The Root has an interesting piece on the recent flash mobs in Philadelphia. Rather than viewing the violence as a result of poor parenting or institutional racism, McWhorter sees the root of the problem as the relationship between Black communities and the police in the war on drugs: Cops trawling their neighborhoods […]

Dan Drezner has a post up that gives a pretty gloomy outlook on the global political and economic climate. He also links to the study (pdf) by the Center for Economic Policy Research that analyzes the link between economic austerity and social unrest. Budget cuts, conclude the authors of the study, lead directly to social […]

David Cameron has vowed to get tough with rioters, and the usual suspects complain. What about the rights of the looters, they ask.  What about the freedom to tweet #fire in a crowded theater?A legitimate democratic government fighting looters and rioters (as opposed to peaceful demonstrators) has the right to restore social order by all […]

The Republican straw poll in Ames is an excellent example of a story that serious people should ruthlessly ignore.  For Republican political operators and people trying to figure out which candidate to back in order to get a government job in 2013, perhaps Ames matters.But for most of us, following the Iowa straw poll is […]