Thus far, the Arab Spring has been a disappointment for those who expected that the Arab world would immediately embrace western-style democracy and the secular rule of law. In another way, however, Arab culture seems to be following a decidedly American path. The Economist reports: SCREAMING hordes of teenage girls are a common sight at […]

Thanks to a Time Warner Cable outage at the stately manor, the world has been cut off from the many insights and observations offered on this website for the last 18 hours.  After no more than three calls to the service center, six repetitions of my account information, a few long waits and a number […]

There is no internet in glamorous Queens, thanks to the early winter storm that swept across the east coast on Saturday. Posts will be sporadic until regular access to the web resumes.

No, says Philip Jenkins, one of the world’s most serious and best respected students of Christian history.  Jenkins has chronicled as few others the story of Middle Eastern persecution and suppression of Christianity; his analysis of the relationship of modern religious life to ‘difficult’ texts in their scriptures — like just about everything he writes […]

The wheels came off the latest EU bailout agreement this morning, at least from the standpoint of the financial markets.  European stocks were down sharply in early Monday trading, and the yields on Italian government debt rose as investors priced in new uncertainty about that country’s prospects.  The lapdog sector of the financial press spent […]

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 […]