Ancient Mediterranean religions seem to have taught that the job of the king was to please the gods, with the divine favor assuring good crops and plenty of food.  If the crops were bad, the solution was obvious: kill the king, sprinkle his blood on the fields, pick a new and more righteous ruler, and […]

Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun Doth his successive journeys run; His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more. That’s how an old missionary hymn begins, and it turns out the missionaries were right.  In the last 100 years Christianity became the most diverse and global religion […]

Here at Via Meadia we have long argued that the internet and other new technologies offer opportunities to make education both cheaper and more rewarding for students. A recent article in the New York Times highlighted new advancements in online textbooks, noting that because the book was designed for the digital market, Students will pay […]

Europe and China have this much in common: the bad economic news just keeps getting worse.  The latest headaches for Beijing: Growing numbers of analysts fear that a combination of slumping exports and overexposed loans could spell real trouble for the increasingly vulnerable Chinese economy. First, the export problem. As Reuters reports: The first quarter […]

One thing citizens of the Democratic Republic of Korea learn to do is to follow orders and fake emotions on command.  A lifetime of staged shows, forced confessions, and ritual expressions of patriotism and undying loyalty to the Kim dynasty have prepared them for the required displays when a leader, Great or Dear, passes away.  […]

Interventions in the western hemisphere typically involve US Marines in Latin American countries, but this month has seen a different kind of intervention: Latin Americans telling Uncle Sam that he’s got to do something about his drug habit.  The Washington Post reports: Alongside official declarations, Latin American governments have expressed growing disgust for U.S. drug […]

The protestors in Wukan, who for months have publicly campaigned against local officials and an illegal land grab, are moving on. They are planning a march to a nearby town, committed to enlarging their protest. Upping the ante means trouble for Beijing: the government doesn’t want to pay the political price that a harsh crackdown […]

From the Wall Street Journal comes word that the US, the EU and key Arab oil producing states are putting plans in place to manage the consequences of an embargo on Iranian oil.  Stepping up production and organizing a supply chain could dramatically reduce the effects of a European decision to block imports from Tehran.Those […]

Russia, as Winston Churchill famously said, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.But Russia was and is as transparent as glass compared to the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of (North) Korea.  Now that the Dear Leader has gone to meet Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the Great Beyond, the world’s experts are […]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear.  Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much […]