One of the big trends we follow here at Via Meadia to try to figure out what’s going on in the world is the impact of technology driven change on our institutions and our lives. An interesting article over at PandoDaily shows how even the titans of the tech world like database giant Oracle are […]

The conservative leader in the European Parliament, Martin Callanan, said today that the European Union must plan for Greece’s “orderly withdrawal” from the eurozone. At long last, a European leader is acknowledging Europe’s habit of “fudging.” Each new “solution” designed to “fix” Europe’s problems has in fact been a distraction, as layer upon layer of temporary […]

Europeans may not be adept at managing their finances, but at least they’re on the cutting edge of civil rights. On Tuesday a German high court ordered universities to raise salaries for beginning professors, claiming that a base salary roughly equivalent to $60,000 “violated the principle of appropriate pay for civil servants.”  The ruling comes […]

Many states are doing better this year than at any point since the beginning of the recession five years ago. Unfortunately, Rhode Island isn’t one of them. State and local government finances are in a deep hole after years of profligate spending. The only question now is who’s going to pay the price.Partisans of the […]

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s bad month has just gotten a bit worse. He was already facing an attack from the left, in the form of Hollande’s attacks on big finance and German influence in French politics. Now, he is getting hit from the other side as well. Marine Le Pen, the French Right’s alternative to […]

The past four years have been dismal for the dismal science. After mostly failing to predict the largest economic crash since the Great Depression, economists have responded by repeatedly failing to anticipate shifts in the major economic indicators—like the unrealized predictions of a strong recovery in 2010 and the upswing of the past few months, […]

Russia was a key player in the nineteenth-century Great Game, and now it appears to be toeing the waters of the modern, sea-based version. Three Russian ships docked yesterday in the Philippines, including the anti-submarine warship Admiral Panteleyev. Russia’s envoy to the Philippines emphasized the cooperative and peaceful nature of the visit: I’m confident that the […]

On February 5, 2012, the New York Times carried a story about a Confucian academy in South Korea. It is one of some 150 such academies (seawon) in the country. Their main program consists of retreats, especially for schoolchildren. The program, apparently quite rigorous, is to provide training in moral behavior and etiquette (the two […]

Tehran officially complained to the government of neighboring Azerbaijan this weekend, accusing the Azeris of turning a blind eye to Mossad agents operating in the country. Azerbaijan (a secular government) is pro-West in its politics, friendly with Israel, and cooperates in the quest to stop Iran from going nuclear. Baku and Tehran have for years […]

Russia’s 2008 campaign against Georgia secured the independence of the border regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but it has curried considerably less favor in the region since then. A New York Times article notes that Russia-backed candidates have lost recent elections in both countries, and only intervention by the Supreme Court prevented an opposition candidate from […]