While a compromise solution to the Nigerian fuel crisis seems to have been found, the deeper and more dangerous regional and religious crisis is getting worse.  Significantly worse.Even as estimates for the bombings in Kano rose from 150 to up to 250, new attacks left churches burning in one part of the northern Bauchi state, […]

For a literature and history buff like me, teaching political studies has been an eye opening experience. For one thing, I’ve slowly come to realize that students trained in political studies and philosophy approach what people my age used to call “books” and what my younger colleagues call “texts” in different ways.Back in the stone […]

Last week Via Meadia began a recap of the “Ten Trends to Watch” — a series of posts from 2010 that made predictions about the future of our complicated and connected world. So far, we have posted updates to the first five trends: “Disaggregation and Death of the West,” “Small ‘d’ democratization,” “Panopolis,” “Proliferation, Great […]

That advice comes not from Gordon Gekko and his friends on Wall Street, but rather from James Hamilton, a prominent academic economist and observer of the petroleum market. Hamilton writes: If you can figure out a way to find resources whose value in their current use is not very great– in other words, if you […]

Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has a good idea: banks bailed out by the government should pay their executives smaller bonuses.  Bloomberg reports that Clegg said in an interview that “If it was left up to me, we wouldn’t have any bonuses, particularly in the state-owned banks while they’re still being repaired.”This seems right, […]

“Vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople!” said an indignant Voltaire after struggling with the mysteries of English spelling.  “You write London and you pronounce Constantinople.”He was right, and English orthography is the linguistic equivalent of a failed third world country: corrupt, dysfunctional, hopeless. Around the turn of the twentieth century there was a rebellion […]

When we wrote about “Disaggregation and the Death of the West,” little did we know just how close to literally true our prediction would come. The ever-evolving Euro-mess could in fact result in a massive disaggregation in what is the ancestral heart of the West. When Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, he wrote […]

If you are a current or former state employee in the state of Minnesota, watch out.  Your pension depends on hot air, sketchy arithmetic, and the willingness of future taxpayers to make huge sacrifices to cover the deceit, wishful thinking and sketchy math at the heart of your pension system. According to a recent analysis […]

Sending humanitarian aid to conflict areas is a serious challenge. In Sudan, this challenge has lasted decades. The North uses hunger as a weapon of war, blocking international aid and monitors from reaching drought-stricken regions like South Kordofan and Blue Nile.The State Department is now going to try to evade Northern restrictions and try to […]

For years, one of the primary criticisms of America’s expensive and self-destructive drug war has been that it leads to the incarceration of large numbers of nonviolent youths, harming their reputations and future job prospects for the rest of their lives. In his State of the State address this past week, New Jersey Governor Chris […]