The world economy is like a person with a bad stomach flu; that horrible sick feeling keeps coming back.  In 2008 it was mortgage-backed bonds and the failure of Lehman Brothers; last year it was the worst recession since the 1930s; this year it’s the European financial crisis.  We still don’t know where this is […]

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit are two of the keenest observers of Thai society and their recent Wall Street Journal article on the violence in Bangkok, like their book Thaksin on the exiled businessman who revolutionized Thai politics is required reading for anybody who wants to understand the events that are shaking what used to […]

I’m a book person; I spend much more time with books than I do watching TV or going to movies.Most of the time, I like books.  I’ve spent some of my happiest hours reading and over a lifetime of learning books have opened new worlds of ideas and experience to me.I like the way books […]

The new British government was still settling into its offices when the 38-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer (in the US he’d be called the Secretary of the Treasury) George Osborne dashed off to Brussels to announce that Britain would not fight, because it could not win, over new regulations on hedge funds.  Meanwhile, the next […]

The news from Thailand is bad.  The Associated Press spoke of Bangkok “in flames“; 18 provincial capitals and have been placed under curfew and government buildings have been attacked in the cities of Udon Thani and Khon Kaen.  An estimated 65 people have been killed in the last two months of on-again, off-again violence and […]

Geopoliticians like GUTs–Grand Unified Theories–that reduce the complexity of world events to a simple underlying concept.  For the last ten years the world’s favorite GUT has been “the decline of America.”  For the ten years before that it was “America’s unilateral moment.”GUTs are always oversimplified; sometimes they are useful.  Right now, the reigning GUT is […]

Our apologies to those of you who were unable to connect to the blog this afternoon.  We had some problems with the servers, but these are apparently behind us. 

It was the beginning of the end of the Episcopal Church as we have known it.  At a Saturday ceremony in Long Beach, California, Mary Glasspool was consecrated as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, California.  Bishop Glasspool has lived for 22 years in a committed relationship with another woman.  She is the […]

There’s no place like home.  The trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories was a great experience, but now that I’m back inside the welcoming portals of the stately Mead manor I’m glad to be off the road at least for a couple of weeks.While there was no time to post on literary topics on […]

Volcanoes blast; glaciers melt; economies implode; currencies nose dive and voters revolt.  It is the worst of worlds for the climate change movement, and the outlook continues to darken.None of this dimmed the glory of the majestic moment in Amsterdam yesterday as the part-time IPCC chair and part-time sleazy book author Rajendra Pachauri emerged from […]