Throughout our history, Americans have benefited from the extraordinary riches and resources of the wealthy land in which we live.  Compared to any other country on earth, Americans enjoy more fertile farmland, better internal communications by water, rich and diverse mineral resources, a more favorable climate, a more favorable position in the world’s commerce,  and […]

Due to the upcoming holiday, we will be taking a week off from posting. I wish all my readers and their families a very happy Thanksgiving. We will return to our normal schedule next week!

Those who follow Asian political debates don’t need to be told who Kishore Mahbubani is.  As Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the University of Singapore, Mahbubani is leading the development of an institution that hopes to become one of the world’s leading research and policy centers.  Over a career […]

State and local governments around the country have long underfunded their pension funds, covering the gap between what they have and what they have obliged themselves to pay by making unrealistic assumptions about the rate of return they expect from their investments.Now that the wave of Boomer retirement is starting to hit, the gaps are […]

Almost fifty years ago, when the Mead family migrated to London for a year to investigate life on the far side of the pond, a neighboring family came for Christmas dinner.  They had one of those typically hobbity English last names; call them the Snogdens.  They came in the early afternoon for the lavish midday […]

After a morning of meetings in Washington DC, I am preparing to travel with the Grand Matriarch and the Venerable Mead to the storied home of the Philadelphia Meads for the Thanksgiving vacation.  With two nieces, three nephews and an assortment of siblings, in-laws and others, not to mention an unconscionably large supply of holiday […]

The era of the municipal bankruptcy is now upon us, but we may soon be entering the age of entitlement bankruptcies. An excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal spotlights major financial and administrative problems in Social Security’s disability program: But many of the doctors haven’t practiced outside their specialty in decades, if at all, […]

This is the week in which the parrot stopped pining for the fjords; the British Guardian newspaper has given up hope for a global climate treaty taking effect before 2020.  The worthless and deceptive Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and it will be replaced by… nothing.As the left-leaning, pro-green paper writes despondently: Governments of […]

Egypt so far is one of the Arab countries where the Arab Spring has not led to a revolution; the Mubarak family is gone but Scaf, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, lives on.  Scaf is what Turks would call Egypt’s “deep state” institution, the structure behind the structures of the state, and the armed […]

The weekend has come and gone, and China still has yet to respond to America’s diplomatic onslaught in Asia last week. This is partly due to the time it takes for a transitioning Communist Party to reach important decisions, but a new piece in the FT spotlights another reason: worries about the country’s (and the […]