There’s a short list of issues on which Via Meadia and OWS agree; one is our mutual feeling that students today are too often stuck with excessive debt and that something needs to be done.Change may be coming to higher ed faster than many people understand.  The New York Times reports that Education Secretary Arne […]

The dissolution of the global climate movement continues in Durban.  As every developed country outside the EU united to shovel the expiring Kyoto Protocol into its coffin, China and other developing countries turned on the conditions Europe wants to make Kyoto more palatable.As the FT reports: “We think the EU is just shifting the goalposts […]

The unsustainable course of American health expenditure is placing growing pressure on state budgets from one end of the country to the other.  The Washington Post has the story: The Fiscal Survey of States says that even as states struggle with tepid revenue growth, they will be called on to spend more because of the […]

What many saw as a revolutionary conflict at Tahrir Square fizzled away yesterday as an astonishing (and peaceful) turnout of Eygptians all over the country demonstrated their preference for voting over Molotov cocktails and strikes. Although much too early for final results in the multi-round Egyptian election process to be clear, observers from all over […]

Apologies for light blogging during the day today; I will be teaching a combined class at West Point with my Bard students and some West Point cadets.  As this involves traveling from the stately manor up the Hudson to West Point, and then traveling on up to my rural hideaway in the rolling Dutchess County […]

Some years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker showing Zeus in conversation with two other Olympian divinities. The caption read: “They call it monotheism. I call it downsizing.” Also some years ago, a Japanese philosopher (whose name I forgot) wrote that Western civilization has been dominated by two fallacies: monotheism, the belief […]

Olli Rehn, the European Union’s Commissioner for Financial and Monetary Affairs, has a level head and has occupied the hottest seat in Europe during the long financial crisis; Via Meadia therefore takes him seriously.  Reuters reports him saying earlier today that: “We are now entering the critical period of 10 days to complete and conclude […]

According to this report, two Iranians were kayaking off the coast of Thailand when their kayak overturned far from shore.  They were rescued from drowning by two Israelis who saw them struggling in the water and rowed back to shore. When they reached the shore the two, who introduced themselves as Mundar and Ali, hugged […]

Despite the seasonal feasts of free-range turkey (or tofurkey better still) and fair-trade mashed potatoes, Thanksgiving brought bad news for the global green unicorn hunters. Hopes for an international agreement to regulate the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were dashed by Chinese and Indian refusals to go along with the plan. The Washington Post has the […]

With all the turmoil going on in the Middle East, one area that has been curiously quiet has been the Israeli-Lebanese border. In fact, it has been so quiet there that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) temporarily deactivated its anti-missile early warning system.  Monday night, however, the silence was broken by two Katyusha rockets. The […]