In a rare glimmer of good news from the vexed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli government has announced it will turn tax revenues over to the Palestinian Authority, allowing the Palestinians to meet payroll and cover some other basic expenses.  Holding the payments back was Israel’s response to the Palestinian quest for statehood at the UN.The […]

Stocks soared yesterday around the world after the Fed coordinated action to make sure troubled European banks could access dollars, and the financial crisis has eased — perhaps until Europe’s toxic mixture of political impasse and slow reaction time takes the world back to the edge of the abyss.At Via Meadia we are still wondering […]

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is becoming smaller and more dangerous.

Some perspective on the twilight of the Arab-Israeli peace process.

There’s a short list of issues on which Via Meadia and OWS agree; one is our mutual feeling that students today are too often stuck with excessive debt and that something needs to be done.Change may be coming to higher ed faster than many people understand.  The New York Times reports that Education Secretary Arne […]

The dissolution of the global climate movement continues in Durban.  As every developed country outside the EU united to shovel the expiring Kyoto Protocol into its coffin, China and other developing countries turned on the conditions Europe wants to make Kyoto more palatable.As the FT reports: “We think the EU is just shifting the goalposts […]

The unsustainable course of American health expenditure is placing growing pressure on state budgets from one end of the country to the other.  The Washington Post has the story: The Fiscal Survey of States says that even as states struggle with tepid revenue growth, they will be called on to spend more because of the […]

What many saw as a revolutionary conflict at Tahrir Square fizzled away yesterday as an astonishing (and peaceful) turnout of Eygptians all over the country demonstrated their preference for voting over Molotov cocktails and strikes. Although much too early for final results in the multi-round Egyptian election process to be clear, observers from all over […]

Apologies for light blogging during the day today; I will be teaching a combined class at West Point with my Bard students and some West Point cadets.  As this involves traveling from the stately manor up the Hudson to West Point, and then traveling on up to my rural hideaway in the rolling Dutchess County […]

Some years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker showing Zeus in conversation with two other Olympian divinities. The caption read: “They call it monotheism. I call it downsizing.” Also some years ago, a Japanese philosopher (whose name I forgot) wrote that Western civilization has been dominated by two fallacies: monotheism, the belief […]