South Sudan, the world’s newest country, is applying to join the Commonwealth (formerly the British Commonwealth) and to join the East African Community, an economic grouping of mainly English speaking countries like Kenya and Tanzania.  English will replace Arabic as the language taught in schools, though presumably that will have to be phased in.Rwanda has […]

The Washington Post has finally laid it out: Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, not a prudent savings program.  As the Post special report points out, Social Security has now gone “cash negative“: the payroll taxes coming in are not enough to cover the pension payments going out.Ah, you say sagely, but that is not […]

It looks as if those of us rejoicing over the overthrow of the Great Loon will have to accept something less than perfection from his successors.  NY Times readers were shocked this morning to discover that Mustafa Abdel-Jelil, the interim leader of the North African country, is calling for a return to polygamy as Libya […]

Thanks to the snowstorm, there was no cable and wireless service this morning; thanks to the state of emergency it wasn’t possible to drive to anyplace where the internet was working.  Thankfully service is back up and the roads will be opening soon.Regular posting will resume shortly.

I was scheduled to give a talk at the Hannah Arendt conference here at Bard this evening on the problems of the green movement in dealing with the connections between scientific data and public policy, but just received word that the talk has been canceled because of the snowstorm now enveloping the Hudson Valley.The northeaster […]

While I was traveling in China, President Obama announced that American troops will soon be withdrawn from Iraq, and the State Department is following suit. The New York Times reports that a number of planned diplomatic missions in Iraq will be scaled back or closed, partially for budgetary and security reasons: Those plans have now […]

Could there be something in the water?  The longer President Obama stays in the White House, the more closely his foreign policy seems to track George W. Bush.On the rogue state front, Obama has long since dropped the attempt to reset relations with Iran.  Now at the other end of Eurasia, the US is confronting […]

Gaming the public pension system for inflated retirement funds is bad enough; scamming the public pension system by pretending to have permanent disabilities is much more disgusting. As the NYT reports: The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, said, ‘Employees [of the Long Island Railroad], in many cases, after claiming to be too disabled […]

Via Meadia is shocked, shocked! at the latest disclosures from Washington DC that some of the President’s largest campaign donors are lobbyists in all but name.  Apparently, some of the people writing checks for thousands of dollars and asking their friends to do the same are hoping to influence government policy! Horrors.  The NYT has […]

One of the most pronounced trends of the 2000’s is now grinding to a temporary halt — the migration of the American population from the Northeastern and Midwestern rust belt to the more temperate sun belt states of the South and Southwest. Cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix had long been magnets for Americans […]