One of the greats of the blogging world, Mickey Kaus, warns that a factory explosion in Germany could bring the world’s automobile industry to its knees. The explosion in Germany killed two people, and knocked out a factory that makes Cyclododecatriene.Why should you care? Cyclododecatriene is a key ingredient in the chemical used to make […]

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s trip to China was the first story on foreign affairs in several weeks to garner more coverage by the Turkish press than the ongoing conflict in Syria. On the China-leg of Erdoğan’s multi-state trip, the Prime Minister was accompanied by a 300-person delegation that included nearly half of his cabinet. […]

Poverty alleviation, we argue in an essay this week,  is one of the signature accomplishments that the blue social model claims — and defending this progress is one of the chief reasons that blue partisans advance for keeping the model. But many blue policies aren’t sustainable or even desirable going forward, and as the model […]

[iframe src=”https://apps.the-american-interest.com/campaign/index-embed-magic-415.php”]The 2012 presidential race tightened significantly during the first two weeks of April, with former Governor Romney now needing only a swing of about two percent in national polls to give him an Electoral College majority. At the end of March, the Republican challenger’s magic number was 3.12; a swing of that magnitude away […]

The United Arab Emirates withdrew its ambassador from Tehran this week. The move was ostensibly made in response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the Iranian-occupied, UAE-claimed island of Abu Musa. Of course, the timing of Ahmadinejad’s unprecedented and incendiary visit–no Iranian leader had ever frequented Abu Musa previously–coupled with the extreme nature of the […]

It’s easy and comforting to dismiss the recent wave of anti-semitic hate crimes sweeping France as a continental outlier–an exception to the rule of European tolerance.It’s also wrong.Take Malmö, Sweden, for example, a city whose mayor has taken to blaming Jews for their own persecution: The store window had been smashed many times before. The […]

This excellent chart from Visual Economics (h/t Derek Thompson) reinforces one of the core themes we’ve been following at Via Meadia: the rapid expansion of new technology over time. The graph tracks the spread of the most important new technologies of the 20th century, including cars, refrigerators, electricity and computers.The chart highlights one of the […]

The financial upheaval of the past few years exposed faults in private and public sector institutions alike. The meltdown in the mortgage market, the collapse or near-collapse of important financial institutions, and the subsequent damage to public and private portfolios hit both Wall Street and the Blue government establishment. As we have noted at Via […]

Whe IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer made its debut on Jeopardy last year, few realized that it would mark the beginning of a sea change in the American workforce. Shortly after its debut Watson computers became available for diagnosing patients, and last Month IBM announced that Watson computers would begin a foray into the banking sector as […]