The USPS is one of the great surviving examples of the blue social model and, not surprisingly, it is going down the tubes.  Technological change has made its original mission of delivering vital information and private correspondence obsolete.  Judging by what comes in through the mail slot at the stately Mead manor these days, the […]

From the Washington Post: The Obama administration escalated its crackdown on health-care fraud Wednesday, announcing charges against 91 people in eight cities who are accused of bilking the Medicare system out of nearly $300 million and victimizing the elderly and disabled people who rely on the federal insurance program…In Miami, 45 defendants — including a doctor and […]

The Great March of Bolivarian Revolutionary Progress is entering a rough patch. The two winds of leftist economic populism and aggressive environmentalism that have freshened the sails of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have calmed, according to a report in the Financial Times: In his zeal to kick out foreign companies, Mr Morales’ […]

Iran-based hackers attacked a Dutch government site used by over half of Holland’s 17 million citizens, making off with codes used to steal personal information. As the Wall Street Journal reports: The Dutch government Tuesday sought to contain a hacking scandal officials believe originated in Iran…In July, [U.S.-owned, Netherlands-based DigiNotar] DigiNotar suffered the theft of […]

As regular readers know, I’m in Yaroslavl, Russia this week for the Russian government’s Global Social Forum.  It’s been a solemn time; yesterday a plane crashed at the local airport killing more than 40 people including the very well regarded and well liked local hockey team.  The facility hosting the conference is the hockey team’s […]

Tomorrow President Obama will stand before Congress and put forward a jobs plan. A real jobs plan? One that will work? One that learns from past mistakes? David Wessell, the WSJ‘s economics editor, thinks so: The package, fashioned over the past couple of weeks, draws from two lessons the president has learned in the past […]

A environmental theory that proposes a cause of global warming unrelated to greenhouse gasses is undergoing something of a renaissance at CERN, the world’s most important research facility for questions involving things that are very small and very fast. As the WSJ reports: [There is] another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from […]

Citing a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts the Washington Post is out to panic the millennials a story about how a wave of downward mobility driving Americans out of the middle class.  It turns out a number of Americans whose parents were middle class don’t do as well once they are out on […]

While the climate change movement has been chasing down one blind alley after another for the last twenty years, other environmental issues have gotten short shrift.The most urgent problem is the unsustainable assault on the world’s fragile fish stocks. As a paper in Marine Policy and a subsequent report in the Washington Post tell us, […]

“We should resign ourselves to the fact that the ‘new normality’ is characterised by volatility and uncertainty.” So says the CEO of Deutsche Bank.One element of that volatility and uncertainty — the possibility of heavy losses for holders of sovereign bonds issued by cash-strapped European countries — could lead to the collapse of a number […]