It was an essay-heavy week at Via Meadia. The big story was without doubt the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare. Our take: though we don’t much care for the law, the American political system worked and that’s nothing to sneeze at. The President made a proposal, the Congress then in office debated the proposal […]

[iframe src=”https://apps.the-american-interest.com/campaign/index-embed-magic-701.php”]With four months to go before the election, and two months before the “real” campaign starts after Labor Day, polling on the presidential election continues work better as a national mood indicator than as a way to predict what will happen next November.That said, it’s clear the presidential race has changed since the last […]

Kashmir, according to recent reports, has been more peaceful over the past few years than it has been for decades. Tourism is at record levels, there is no news of riots or disappearances or extremism.But things are still tense under the surface. Kashmir’s Grand Mufti tried to convince the government to outlaw the Ahmadiyyas, a […]

The news from the legal world keeps getting worse. Recent financial data published by the University of California-Hastings, a San Francisco law school that is part of the UC system, and publicized by the indefatigable Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam, shows the kind of questions that prospective students need to ask before […]

Though neither the date of the vote nor the make up of the ballot have been agreed upon, the campaigns over the coming Scottish independence referendum are now in full swing.Despite widespread dissatisfaction with their present economic situation, support for outright independence among Scots is down to around 35%. The governing nationalist party and First […]

Religious freedom is not just under attack in Germany; New York City has also been conducting whatever the secular equivalent is of a crusade or a jihad to win the “freedom” to discriminate against religious groups who want to rent city schools for worship services on Sunday.In the US, at least, the courts are siding […]

There’s a WRM piece in the Wall Street Journal out today about the likely impact of the latest big wave of immigrants to reach the United States. The main takeaway: immigration in this country is not what you think. Immigrants from Asia have now replaced immigrants from the Spanish speaking world as the largest source […]

Although market conditions vary around the country, Tara Siegel Bernard has a strong piece in the New York Times that potential home buyers and mortgage refinances would do well to consult. The home mortgage market has been very confused ever since the bubble burst late in the last decade as rates have fallen to historic […]

It wasn’t that long ago that Cold War analysts feared Soviet domination of Iran and, with it, the Persian Gulf. The Russian and Persian world had a long history of rivalry, as the Russian Empire gobbled up territories like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of Kurdish Anatolia that Persians regarded as belonging to a “Greater Iran.” […]

The robots are breathing down our necks. The Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Tokyo, experimenting with highspeed motion sensors, have programmed a robot-hand to play rock-paper-scissors, or “roshambo.” Thanks to the motion-sensors, the machine can recognize what move a human is about to make and gain the upper hand, so to speak.IEEE Spectrum has the story: […]