Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has a good idea: banks bailed out by the government should pay their executives smaller bonuses.  Bloomberg reports that Clegg said in an interview that “If it was left up to me, we wouldn’t have any bonuses, particularly in the state-owned banks while they’re still being repaired.”This seems right, […]

“Vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople!” said an indignant Voltaire after struggling with the mysteries of English spelling.  “You write London and you pronounce Constantinople.”He was right, and English orthography is the linguistic equivalent of a failed third world country: corrupt, dysfunctional, hopeless. Around the turn of the twentieth century there was a rebellion […]

When we wrote about “Disaggregation and the Death of the West,” little did we know just how close to literally true our prediction would come. The ever-evolving Euro-mess could in fact result in a massive disaggregation in what is the ancestral heart of the West. When Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, he wrote […]

If you are a current or former state employee in the state of Minnesota, watch out.  Your pension depends on hot air, sketchy arithmetic, and the willingness of future taxpayers to make huge sacrifices to cover the deceit, wishful thinking and sketchy math at the heart of your pension system. According to a recent analysis […]

Sending humanitarian aid to conflict areas is a serious challenge. In Sudan, this challenge has lasted decades. The North uses hunger as a weapon of war, blocking international aid and monitors from reaching drought-stricken regions like South Kordofan and Blue Nile.The State Department is now going to try to evade Northern restrictions and try to […]

For years, one of the primary criticisms of America’s expensive and self-destructive drug war has been that it leads to the incarceration of large numbers of nonviolent youths, harming their reputations and future job prospects for the rest of their lives. In his State of the State address this past week, New Jersey Governor Chris […]

Coordinated bomb attacks on police stations across the important northern Nigerian city of Kano have killed up to 150 people, early reports say.  But horrifying as that is, the death toll is not the worst thing about these attacks.These attacks tell us that Boko Haram is more effective and organized than previously believed, has more […]

Once upon a time, a law degree could basically guarantee a decent-paying job and a nice suburban house. But all that has changed. Now, many law schools are fast becoming credentialing degree mills — and the expensive, three year degrees don’t guarantee legal jobs. Increasingly, people with law degrees work at jobs that don’t even […]

A new front has opened in the quasi-war between Iran and the West. Reuters reports from Tehran: Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions […]

In January 2010, Via Meadia suggested that traditional structures of authority will everywhere be stressed; without embracing (and indeed while rejecting) the ideals of western democratic liberalism, people around the world will be ‘small d’ democrats who insist on a greater say in what matters to them.In the light of the Arab Spring, I’d say […]