Obamacare supporters have a new defense of the botched rollout: Well, look at Romneycare, they say. That started off poorly, too, but things got straightened out eventually. So all will be well with Obamacare before long. President Obama plans to use that line in a speech in Massachusetts tonight, according to WaPo: The White House […]

The peasants in France are revolting, refusing to pay the “ecotax” their enlightened masters have designed for their betterment. This new green levy on large vehicles was meant to raise money for infrastructure repairs, but recent protests—including road blockades made out of cauliflower—have forced the French government to suspend its implementation. The FT reports: Prime Minister Jean-Marc […]

Springfield, Illinois, is the HQ of America’s pension mess, presiding over the worst state-level debt and pension crisis in the country and now home to its own municipal pension woes. The WSJ reports on what happens to the most basic city services when a public employee pension fund gets buried under increasing benefits each year […]

The New York Times ran a really important article on Egypt this morning that makes a few things very clear:First, the military is moving to re-establish the old regime in Egypt, including the systematic use of economic incentives to hold civilian and military elites in place. Called “corruption” by those not included, it is really […]

The application period for Georgia Tech’s MOOC-based computer science master’s program has just closed, and the results are stellar. More than 2,350 applications were received for the program’s first year, nearly double the number of applicants to the school’s more traditional computer science master’s program. Clearly, the fears that nobody would be interested in a MOOC-based […]

There’s a way for older Americans to solve their health care problems and live well on a tight budget: retire abroad. The Lynches are a retiree couple profiled by the WSJ who moved to Granada, Nicaragua, by way of Costa Rica largely to get a better deal on  health care. They were 62 at the time and decided to […]

The modern Fordist paradises of the industrial world have seen their birthrates crater to the point that mass immigration is the only thing that can keep their economies staffed. This is riskier than it looks. The industrialized West is undertaking a historic experiment in real time: by allowing and even encouraging mass immigration from countries […]

Most human beings are not logicians. They muddle through life with beliefs and values that often do not hang together logically. I think that, basically, this is good news. Rigorously consistent doctrines, in politics as in religion, have a tendency to become murderous. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz (in his wonderful book The Labyrinth of […]

“I am a Peace Corps Volunteer.” Like 98 percent of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, I was proud to declare this and believe my two-year service was worthwhile. I grew professionally and personally, and I did some good. But the program is broken in many ways.More than 210,000 Americans have served as volunteers in 139 countries […]

Much has been written on whether the European Union and Ukraine will sign agreements on association, free trade and, just as important if not more so for average Ukrainians, visa liberalization. Lots of analysis also has zeroed in on how Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minions have approached the Ukraine-EU relationship, using threats and […]