Regular next-day delivery of the mail has been a part of urban life in the English-speaking world for the last 200 years.  No more in the US, apparently; crushed under huge pension burdens, overstaffing, poor business decisions, senseless congressional mandates and competition like email and text messaging, the USPS is giving up overnight first-class mail. […]

Journalists who spent the last six months in Tahrir Square and talking to privileged, young western-educated Egyptians may have been surprised by the Islamist sweep in last week’s Egyptian elections, but few others were.  The Muslim Brotherhood has been around longest and has the deepest ties to poor communities inside of Cairo and rural communities […]

This apparently is what Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has done following a series of mysterious and extremely damaging explosions at Iran’s most sensitive nuclear and ballistic missile sites.According to the Telegraph, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been placed on a war footing, fighter planes are practicing intercept missions, and strategic materials are being […]

Vladimir Putin is still the tsar of all the Russias, but a few flakes of rust have appeared on the iron fist.  United Russia (URP), the political party of Vladamir Putin, appears to have won a majority in Parliament in Russia’s most recent elections. It is not quite the majority Putin would have wanted, and […]

America needs people who write and think out of passion for something other than tenure, and this NYT article tells of a group of young people who are doing just that. According to the article, twenty-somethings who found it impossible to break into New York’s publishing world are banding together to start their own literary […]

Cue the ominous horror movie music: news reports from China keep getting bleaker. Experienced China watchers have seen an economic slowdown on the horizon for some time now, and the potential for political unrest is rising. The indispensible Financial Times reports: Beijing has underlined its concern that an economic slowdown could lead to social unrest […]

Last month’s warm reception to US diplomatic moves in Asia showed that US policy in the region resonates well with governments; a new poll from Japan indicates that in at least one important Asia country public opinion is also increasingly pro-US.According to the New York Times, a recent poll of Japanese citizens finds positive attitudes […]

There are many things American higher ed does very well, but providing job-related training at a reasonable price isn’t one of them.  The explosive growth of higher ed costs (driven by factors including administrative bloat and mission creep, government mandates, the guild system for faculty, and a fixation on the research university model) combined with […]

The news that Herman Cain is suspending his presidential campaign was no surprise by the time it was made; it had been clear for sometime that his presidential bid had been hit below the waterline.  One hopes that he and his family will have some peace and quiet in which to come to terms with […]

Another great week at Via Meadia. One of our biggest hits this week was “Weather, Not Climate“, which laments the quickness in which the world, led by green “hacktivists”, jumps to conclude that extreme weather equals climate change, while at the same time the absence of weather — in this case big hurricanes, which have […]