The government of India announced this week that it “agreed in principle” to the anti-corruption plan put forward by Anna Hazare, a modern-day civil disobedience campaigner in the mode of Mahatma Gandhi.  Hazare’s  twelve-day fast gripped the imagination of everyone in India who follows politics and was the culmination of weeks of demonstrations against corruption […]

Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom.  All […]

As Hurricane Irene barrels up the coast and the weather service warns about hurricane conditions in New York, at Via Meadia this morning we are more concerned with short term weather forecasts than with medium term economic predictions. Nevertheless I see from the Twitter feed that Nouriel Rubini (@Nouriel) is predicting a double dip recession […]

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline will carry oil from tar sands in Canada across the entire midwestern United States to Port Arthur, Texas. It could eventually transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day and without government funding of any kind has the potential to create 20,000 jobs starting early in 2012. The greens want President […]

With the forces of humanitarianism and international law, or at least the forces of his tribal and religious enemies, closing in on his Tripoli lair, Africa’s King of Kings and Loon of Loons is on the verge of overthrow. And in Damascus, Butcher Assad, the world’s most notorious opthamologist, watched the Great Loon’s last stand […]

Besides healing the planet and returning the rising seas to their natural beds, then-Senator Obama promised that his administration would create beautiful green jobs: well paid, stable, abundant jobs, unionized, with full benefits and making the earth healthier and the American people richer. As President, he stayed on message: even after the truther-enabling “green jobs […]

With the Middle East in flames and news coming faster than governments can react, nothing is more important than to step back from the fray, take a deep breath and get some perspective.  Historical perspective.  That is particularly true when looking at what historians may consider the most important change in the Middle East recent […]

In one of those lapses of news judgment that with regrettable frequency make mainstream journalists resemble characters in Scoop, the media herd that gathered in Wisconsin to chronicle the great Democratic triumph in the state senate elections has gone back to the coasts — and missed what could grow into a much more consequential story […]

For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved.  The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year.  The national media are doing their best to avoid […]

The invisible hand has been writing on our wall of late, and the message is scaring the markets.  The markets should be scared; there is real trouble afoot, and the world’s political and economic leaders are terrifyingly out of their depth. In the Book of Daniel, King Belshazzar of Babylon held a great feast for […]