The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia faced a near catastrophe this week when three Emirati men clearly too handsome to appear in public attended an annual cultural festival. Thankfully, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was on the scene, and quickly dispatched the Saudi religious police to seize and deport the […]

Seven people were killed and more than sixty injured during sporadic riots over the past couple days, following the controversial election of Hugo Chavez’s chosen heir, Nicolas Maduro, to the Venezuelan presidency. Already faced with allegations of vote rigging and the surprisingly narrow margin with which he won office, Maduro turned to a tactic from page […]

Be warned: there is a growing consensus of thoughtful observers, both Chinese and foreign, who think China’s local government debt is dangerously inflated. Joining the chorus this week is Zhang Ke, the head of an important Chinese accounting firm.“It is already out of control,” Zhang told the Financial Times. “A crisis is possible. But since the […]

The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers yesterday became the first union to reverse its support for Obamacare. It once backed the Affordable Care Act and campaigned vigorously for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but growing concerns over the cost and availability of insurance under ACA have lead the union to call for the law’s repeal. WSJ: “After […]

Over the weekend, we noted that the US Treasury put the Bank of Japan on notice regarding its newly announced quantitative easing program, warning it not to artificially depress the yen in order to gain a trade advantage. We went on to speculate that the Chinese would complain even more loudly given the heightened tensions […]

Climate models keep getting it wrong: the earth’s temperature isn’t rising as quickly as the climate scientists’ best models predicted it would. Many policymakers (ahem…many European policymakers) have set carbon emission targets with the ambition of avoiding a specific temperature increase as determined by these models. But the technocracy isn’t infallible, as Reuters reports: Often focused on […]

You have to be crazy to get a PhD these days. So argues Dan Drezner at Foreign Policy. We’ve tangled amicably with Drezner in the past over the higher ed bubble, but in his latest piece he says something we wholeheartedly agree with. After pointing out the many disadvantages of getting a doctorate—the poor job market, the high attrition rate—he says: […]

It makes former Bush aide Peter Wehner really unhappy that anyone would criticize President W. Bush. In our latest essay, we noted that the Bush presidency remains widely unpopular and that national Bush fatigue remains a serious political problem for the Republican Party. We said that “more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood,” but […]

Executives at the Calpers state pension system are proposing a new plan to plug its $87 billion dollar hole and bring it to fully funded status in 30 years. The road to solvency would be rough, requiring municipalities to pay as much as 50 percent more in pension contributions. Bloomberg has the details: In a […]

The sorry state of the labor market could be deflating the marriageability of men and tearing at the social fabric of the American family. So argues Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, and he claims that, with 496,000 people exiting the labor force since 2007, this problem will likely only get worse: Even before […]