Other than that charity which divine commandment mandates that we extend to all our fellow human beings, Via Meadia has no special love for Butcher, sorry, Bashar Assad, but distaste has not blinded us to the strategic reality: the Syrian government has found a winning strategy in its fight against domestic opposition. It has found […]
Megan McArdle has a wonderfully meaty post at the Atlantic on the complicated class and status issues that are increasingly reverberating in American politics today. At this point, the noisiest divide isn’t between the working class and the plutocrats; it’s between the upper-upper middle class and the lower-upper middle class. The bankers and the successful […]
Thus far, the Arab Spring has been a disappointment for those who expected that the Arab world would immediately embrace western-style democracy and the secular rule of law. In another way, however, Arab culture seems to be following a decidedly American path. The Economist reports: SCREAMING hordes of teenage girls are a common sight at […]
A tiny tax on tea destroyed the first British empire by driving the 13 colonies into revolt; will a tiny little tax on financial transactions split the European Union? The Tobin tax (first proposed by economist James Tobin in 1972) is a small tax that would be levied on all financial transactions and would, proponents […]
Thanks to a Time Warner Cable outage at the stately manor, the world has been cut off from the many insights and observations offered on this website for the last 18 hours. After no more than three calls to the service center, six repetitions of my account information, a few long waits and a number […]
There is no internet in glamorous Queens, thanks to the early winter storm that swept across the east coast on Saturday. Posts will be sporadic until regular access to the web resumes.
No, says Philip Jenkins, one of the world’s most serious and best respected students of Christian history. Jenkins has chronicled as few others the story of Middle Eastern persecution and suppression of Christianity; his analysis of the relationship of modern religious life to ‘difficult’ texts in their scriptures — like just about everything he writes […]
The wheels came off the latest EU bailout agreement this morning, at least from the standpoint of the financial markets. European stocks were down sharply in early Monday trading, and the yields on Italian government debt rose as investors priced in new uncertainty about that country’s prospects. The lapdog sector of the financial press spent […]
The decay of American political parties continues as the real money and power in politics shifts inexorably away from party organizations to informal and ad hoc groups. The combination of citizen grassroots movements, decentralized party structures and the vast sums of money short-circuiting the official party structures is changing the way politics works. As this […]
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