A company is using 3D printing to shoot holes in the idea of restricting the sale and use of guns in America. Last weekend Defense Distributed pointed out the uselessness of gun control measures, like those the Obama administration rolled out yesterday, by printing out a high capacity magazine with a 3D printer. Back in November […]

In the last couple of years I’ve been writing about the death of the blue social model. By that I mean that the characteristic form of 20th century industrial democracy has come unglued, and that the advanced industrial democracies around the world must adjust to basic changes in the way the world works.For those who missed […]

A top Harvard scholar has given green lobbyists and policy makers a solid F for their efforts to enact climate change legislation. Theda Skocpol, a political scientist, isn’t blaming climate change skeptics but the greens themselves for America’s inaction on global warming. The Guardian reports: In a research paper, due to be presented at a Harvard forum next […]

Fresh on the heels of the announcement of a major bilateral trade effort with the EU, the U.S. is now looking towards another large deal with twenty of its largest trading partners, reports the WSJ. This negotiation would focus on the export of services. The specifics will be hammered out over the next few months at talks in […]

Freedom fries are no more and French fries are back on the menu for American neocons. Max Boot now praises France’s Socialist President—in the pages of Commentary, no less—for leading the charge against radical Islam in Mali. He depicts France as the West’s last, best hope in its fight against radical Islam, as President Obama sits on the […]

A mysterious preacher leads tens of thousands of protestors and calls for the downfall of the government; border guards are brutally killed in Kashmir; tribal leaders are assassinated in wartorn frontier provinces; an all-powerful chief justice calls for the arrest of the prime minister. All this, just in the past few days, has thrown Pakistan […]

Public pension funds in major American cities have fallen to an average funding level of 74 percent—well below the 80 percent considered safe, according to a Pew Center study released this week. As the money slowly drains from these funds, cities will be left with a stark choice: Cut promised pension benefits to public-sector workers, or cut vital […]

Has coal found an unlikely friend in Europe’s green policies? According to an analysis in the FT, the people who want to lead the world in clean energy may make their continent a sinkhole for the dirtiest energy resource around. The rationale for investment in renewable energy has always relied on the assumption that fossil […]

Steve Jobs did a lot of things during his life, but solving America’s obesity epidemic wasn’t one of them. In a dubious attempt to combat obesity, insurance companies are turning to app technology that they hope will help doctors motivate at risk patients: In December 2012, Aetna unveiled Passage, a fitness app it developed with […]

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The […]