The Asian unrest, a much bigger deal long term than the over hyped Arab Spring or even the crisis of the euro, is spreading from China to Indonesia, as strikes pop up across the fourth most populous country in the world.The Asian industrial revolution is the single most transformative social event on our planet today.  […]

Is American manufacturing making a come-back? According to Joel Kotkin, that’s what the numbers indicate. Thanks largely to the rising cost of wages in China and the discovery of cheap natural gas everywhere from Texas to New York “the U.S. industrial base has been on a powerful upswing, with employment climbing steadily since 2009…In 2011 […]

The decline of the manufacturing Rust Belt has been one of the great American tragedies associated with the decline of the Blue Model. Once vibrant, working-class cities have become hollowed-out crime-ridden shells of their former selves. Decades of well-meaning attempts to deal with this have so far produced a confusing hodgepodge of conflicting policies which […]

Hollywood and China just can’t seem to get along. Just three years after famed director Steven Spielberg spurned the Beijing Olympics over concerns about Darfur, Christian Bale has gotten into a spat of his own with Chinese officials. The New York Times reports: The actor Christian Bale was assaulted by government-backed guards on Thursday when […]

Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shiite cleric and vocal opponent of the American occupation, recently declared that all Iraqis who assisted foreign forces are now “outcasts”. When Britain pulled its troops out of Basra a few years ago, 17 such “outcasts” were murdered, their bodies dumped in the streets.Today, there are thousands upon thousands of interpreters, […]

The Game of Thrones in the Middle East took a strange new turn this week with Iran launching a charm offensive to improve relations with longtime nemesis and archfoe Saudi Arabia.  Last week, the Saudis were threatening to get their own bomb unless Washington “cut off the head of the snake” — ie stopped Iran […]

A chunk of the American intelligentsia is permanently convinced that the American people are waiting for a genuinely left-populist message before turning out in large numbers to transform the American political system, and that if the Democrats in particular would just embrace left economic ideas, they could become the dominant party for the foreseeable future.Unfortunately […]

In another sign of the looming apocalypse, Via Meadia finds itself in strong agreement with Screamin’ Howard Dean, onetime presidential candidate and leader of a grassroots political committee.  There is a lot Dr. Dean gets wrong, but he is right about innovation in the US. Here’s what he said recently in DC, from the Washington […]

One of the world’s most important developing economies, “Europe’s BRIC” (according to David Cameron), and a rising political power not just in its neighborhood, but the world as well, might be heading for a fall. As the FT reports, Turkey could be in trouble: Ankara’s current account deficit in absolute terms is the second biggest […]

Newsflash from Gallup: Fewer and fewer Americans see the country as divided between haves and have nots: Americans are now less likely to see U.S. society as divided into the “haves” and “have nots” than they were in 2008, returning to their views prior to that point. A clear majority, 58%, say they do not […]