Via Meadia has long viewed the G-20 as one of the most useless international talking shops, and the recent meeting in Los Cabos certainly fit the bill.  But while it is useless from a pragmatic political perspective, it does serve one important function: an opportunity for world leaders and politicians to look important, be photographed […]

California’s once vaunted and now derided high-speed rail project keeps getting kicked in the pants. In early June a poll revealed that 59 per cent of Californians oppose the project. A few days later, Central Valley farm groups filed a lawsuit seeking to block rail construction. Now the Sierra Club, traditionally a group loyal to […]

Once again, California is boldly going where no state has gone before. As budgetary pressures continue to dictate the political reality, the Golden State has decided to hand over the management reins of six major state parks to private companies, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move comes after a whopping 20 percent decline in annual […]

Pop stars around the world, rejoice: the production of new hit singles may soon require only the push of a button, forever banishing those moody and overpaid songwriters. Researchers in London have transposed the law of natural selection onto the world of music, devising a program to evolve simple tunes out of scattered sounds:The Telegraph […]

The Lightest of a Succession of CalamitiesOn September 10, 1814, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president of the United States and destined to become its fifth, the most accomplished American diplomat of his generation (and perhaps the most able in American history), conversant in half a dozen languages, was, as usual, dissatisfied with […]

One of the commenters in my last post criticized me for misunderstanding the situation in Egypt. I stood accused of exaggerating the revolutionary reality of the post-Mubarak period. Apparently, this commentator is unaware of what I have written about Egypt since January of last year. So let me briefly repeat my original analysis from 18 […]

Friends don’t let friends fly junk. This week the Indian Air Force turned over the production of its flagship defense project to General Electric. The American company will now play a huge part in upgrading the Indian Air Force: Its GE-414 engine will replace the domestically produced Kaveri engine in the IAF’s new light combat aircraft, […]

The latest Gallup polls measuring Americans’ confidence in the nation’s institutions have been released, and the news is not good. Newspapers, banks, and small businesses all took a hit, while gains for the Congress, the Presidency, and the criminal justice system were relatively minor. One of the largest drops was for public schools. According to […]

More bad news for law school grads: increasingly sophisticated computing technology is eliminating entry-level jobs at law firms.Judges are beginning to allow the use of “predictive coding” in cases involving millions of (often extraneous) legal documents. As the Wall Street Journal explains, predictive coding is the use of algorithms to determine which documents are relevant to […]

Call it a pivot. Call it a rebalancing. Call it what you will. Whatever the label, it is clear that America’s commitment to Asia-Pacific is continuing to deepen. New Zealand has joined Australia in welcoming a closer relationship with the United States.New Zealand’s defense minister was in Washington yesterday affixing his signature to an agreement […]