When thinking about the future of jobs during the Information Revolution, it’s important to remember that the drive to work is embedded in human nature rather than in economic scarcity. Human beings don’t just work because they want to get paid so they won’t freeze and starve in the dark; they want to make meaningful contributions to the societies in which they live, and they want to be recognized and esteemed for the contributions they make to the common good.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer. “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

This week, Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe walked back from nationalistic comments he made in the past, though tension will remain high in the region; Seoul and Beijing will probably now see Tokyo as insincere and antagonistic. In China, the people of the Chinese city of Kunming protested loudly about during demonstrations against the construction of a possibly dangerous factory. Balancing the environment with economic growth is an enormous challenge for China—already the country is struggling mightily with water scarcity and water pollution. Looking south, a delay in the China-Myanmar oil and gas pipeline that will eventually connect China to the Bay of Bengal kept Beijing reliant on oil shipped through Asia’s most important and clogged waterway, the Strait of Malacca.

Russia kicked more dirt in John Kerry’s face this week when it arrested a man on charges of spying for the United States. The news wasn’t much better in Europe, where a ring of Bulgarian gangsters were caught defrauding the Dutch. Episodes like that threaten the viability of the European welfare state, and news that France is now more euroskeptic than Britain underscores just how fragile the EU is.

Syria produced more horror stories this week; the country has disintegrated into a bloody mess of warring provinces. Things are looking grim for OPEC, which is being undermined by the shale revolution and falling American demand for oil. One piece of news out of the Middle East proved that truth really is stranger than fiction: Iran was selected to chair this month’s UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament.

Texas, of all places, proved to be a global green paragon in this century’s first decade when it reduced its percentages of emissions more than supposedly green places like California, Germany, and Europe. A new report on America’s changing driving habits was another boost to US emissions curtailment. But domestic energy news wasn’t all positive; America’s biofuel boondoggle continues to boggle the mind as we learned that the US both exports ethanol to and imports ethanol from Brazil in a complicated and messy arrangement that underscores just how misguided our country’s ethanol policies are.

Obamacare looks to be slowing job growth, at least for now. It also seems designed to kick young men while they’re down. Comparing the ACA to the Swiss system can help us understand what we’ll be getting in the coming years, and the outlook isn’t good.

But MOOCs continue to show promise; Georgia Tech announced a $7,000 Masters program. Dr. Dre and music mogul Jimmy Iovine jumped into the higher education game with a $70 million donation to USC. But if you read one thing about MOOCs this week, make it the New Yorker piece we discuss here.

This is more than the problem of recovering from the last economic slump; it is more than the impact of globalization and automation on manufacturing jobs. The American economy is shedding jobs, especially long-term, well-paying jobs with good benefits, and the jobs that replace them are often less secure and less well paid. The relentless transformation of the American labor market is changing the nature of American life, calling into question some of the basic assumptions and building blocks of the last fifty years, and generating a complex mix of political and social pressures that will shake the country to its foundations.

Essentially, the problem is this: automation and IT are moving routine processing, whether what’s being processed is information or matter, out of the realm of human work and into the realm of machines. Factory floors are increasingly automated places where fewer and fewer human beings are needed to transform raw materials into finished products; clerical work and many forms of mass employment in business, government and management are also increasingly performed more economically by computers than by trained human beings.

In Asia this week, China and India finally ended their weeks-long standoff along the border in the Himalayas, Japan decided against whitewashing its WWII record, and North Korea decided to move its long-range missiles off of their launchpads.  In India, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress Party won big in regional elections, while across the border, Pakistan prepared for a general election of its own, in which terrorists and hate-mongers appeared on the ballot. All this despite a campaign of violence and a high-profile kidnapping by terrorist groups like the Pakistani Taliban.

Much of the coverage of the Middle East focused on the ongoing mess in Syria and the US-Russia meeting. Early signs are not good, as Israel and Turkey acted to scuttle the plans, while Russia kicked dirt in America’s face by shipping missiles to the Assad regime.  In addition, much attention has been focused on “BenghaziGate“, which even the NYT admits might be a real scandal. Indeed, the MSM as a whole has been cooling on Obama’s Middle East policy since the beginning of his second term.

Europe was relatively quiet this week. In Russia, Putin made an example of unfriendly polling firms and dissatisfied French people are leaving the country for opportunities elsewhere. Meanwhile, Europeans in both Italy and Germany are beginning to see the EU as a handicap for their countries.

At home we had more bad news on pensions. Denver has just spent nearly a quarter billion after gambling and losing in the Wall Street casino in an attempt to make up a pension shortfall. Meanwhile, cities in New York are courting disaster, underfunding their pension funds now to pay for services, setting themselves up for similar troubles in the future. The SEC has made it harder for struggling cities to raise money in the bond market by charging Harrisburg with fraud. Meanwhile, New York City continued its war on food trucks, US disability rolls surpassed the entire population of Greece, and retirees were warned against blue states.

On education, we saw early signs that college costs may finally be peaking as students become more price sensitive, although this will spell trouble for schools that invested heavily on state-of-the art facilities. Elsewhere, one Florida university is eliminating tenure for its employees, while new college-alternative programs are attempting to bring back the apprenticeship model. And in the background, law schools are continuing their rapid decline.

On the environment, the Department of Energy is preparing to release new guidelines on fracking, US oil production is quickly catching up to imports, and Obama spoke in favor of natural gas exports. It was a good week for Tesla, which has just recorded a profit for the first time, but a bad week for other green programs, which are going belly-up left and right. The situation in solar power was particularly ugly, as one prominent solar panel installer sued the US for more money while disputes about solar subsidies threatened a trade war between Europe and China. Meanwhile, the latest global talks on climate change ended with nothing accomplished, not that anyone was paying attention.

Places like Egypt, where things are going from bad to worse: armed robberies are up twelvefold over last year, and homicides have tripled. Or Syria, where American foreign policy seems to be to dither fecklessly until it’s too late. Or Iran, where better, badder bunker-buster bombs are ratcheting up the pressure on Tehran.

In Europe, Italy’s new PM Enrico Letta challenged the EU, promising tax cuts and increased government spending while rejecting austerity. He went even further, essentially telling Berlin: all your money are belong to us. Challenging the EU is getting popular in Europe; the UK’s anti-EU party made huge gains in recent elections. And while the UK ponders EU membership, Scotland is considering leaving the UK. Our advice: stay together for the kids.

The US shale boom got a huge boost this week after the USGS reported that the Dakotas have twice the recoverable shale oil and three times the shale gas than previously thought. But while shale got good news, ethanol was dealt another blow as an Indiana ethanol processing plant was sold for scrap. Young people looking for work in the energy industry might want to stay away from America’s biofuel boondoggle and hop on the shale bandwagon. But shale isn’t just employing people and providing cheap natural gas, it’s also reducing US emissions, something Europe has only been able to imitate with an economic disaster.

We learned this week that the biggest danger during your time as a patient is when your doctor is talking to you. Humans tend to make more mistakes than machines, which is why the accidental Apple health care revolution is so exciting. And on Wednesday, pundits of every size, shape, and color were proven right by a new Medicaid study out of Oregon.

Higher ed continues to struggle with higher costs and dimmer job prospects for its graduates. In a recent survey just 65 percent of college presidents thought it was “very important” that their graduates find a job. College professors are blocking the rise of MOOCs, opting to preserve their interests (and jobs) instead of embracing this disruptive new method of learning that has the potential to keep spiraling costs of college down. College faculty and staff both need to focus on improving the quality of higher ed while keeping costs down. Oh—and getting their graduates employed.

This week we continued our series on the failures of the Bush Administration and looked at where the Republican Party needs to go in the years ahead:

American political parties are constantly reinventing themselves. Bill Clinton ran as the un-Carter and un-Dukakis. President Obama ran as the un-Clinton. In 1968 Richard Nixon ran as the un-Nixon or, as he put it, the “new Nixon.” Calvin Coolidge didn’t run as the second coming of Warren Harding; Franklin Roosevelt didn’t run as the second coming of Woodrow Wilson. General Eisenhower didn’t run as Herbert Hoover redux. Hilary Clinton appears to be positioning herself to run as an un-Obama.

Unless President Obama so thoroughly trashes the Democratic brand that the two parties are in a race to the bottom, the next Republican nominee will need to be an un-W—even if the nominee’s own surname happens to be Bush. That doesn’t mean saying that everything W did was wrong, but it means that a successful presidential candidate needs to speak for and embody a future-focused vision and set of policies calibrated for 2016 rather than 2001 or 2004.

Senator McCain might have helped his campaign by doing more of this in 2008. Senator Obama’s camp believed the Bush record was an anchor to be wrapped as tightly around McCain as possible in order to sink his campaign; Senator McCain’s team sometimes seemed to be trying to help make that happen.

Without declaring war on the Bush legacy or insulting the leader of his party, Senator McCain could have developed a message that was more clearly distinct from his predecessor’s.

News from Asia was, as usual, dominated by reports of conflict between China and Japan. It began early this week when a group of nationalist Japanese politicians made a controversial visit to a shrine honoring the country’s war dead. China wasted no time in responding, sending a fleet of patrol ships into disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe struck back, delivering a speech question whether Japan’s wartime actions amounted to an invasion of its neighbors. The tension with Japan wasn’t China’s only conflict this week: Beijing also got into a spat with India over the presence of troops in disputed territory between the two countries. Meanwhile, all the ASEAN countries besides China agreed to put up a united front against Beijing at the organization’s next summit. And they aren’t the only ones getting tougher with China: The US is beginning to get serious about countering Chinese hacking.

Elsewhere in Asia, tensions are rising on the Korean peninsula as South Korea withdrew all its workers from the jointly-run Kaesong factory and North Korea unsuccessfully petitioned the US for official recognition as a nuclear power. In Pakistan, a group of extremists and charged terrorists are on the brink of election to Parliament. In Burma, religious violence continued as police allowed a massacre of Muslims by Buddhist mobs.

The big news from the Middle East this week is the growing consensus that Assad did, in fact, use chemical weapons. One Israeli general is convinced that he has evidence the Syrian Regime has used chemical weapons, and the Qatari PM has claimed the same. And as the Syria conflict gets worse, Iraq is being dragged into sectarian conflict of its own, leading to disillusioned voters and low turnout in the recent elections. Meanwhile, the US is trying a different tactic in its negotiations with Iran by selling weapons to Israel and its Gulf allies.

Europe continued its painful disintegration, as Grecian demands for German WWII war reparations heightened tensions in the already fraying EU. The EU’s handling of the Cyprus banking fiasco has soured Iceland on idea of potential membership. And the great unraveling continued in France and Spain, as both countries posted record joblessness numbers.

On the home front, Calpers’s asset price has rebounded to its pre-recession peak, David Petraeus opted to continue his public service at CUNY, and a new boom in “professional princesses” has opened up a new avenue for creative entrepreneurs. In more depressing news, young Americans still want homes as much as their parents did, but will have serious trouble affording them.

This was an exciting week for education. Coursera opened the first-ever Asian MOOC, spreading the new technology into a massive new market. Meanwhile, Obama called for more STEM initiatives in his new budget, while the Department of Education approved financial ad for a new college that aims to be the first to “completely decouple from the credit hour,” emphasizing “stuff learned” rather than “time served.” Elsewhere, we questioned whether top-tier schools are really worth the extra money, and asked what exactly the goal of a college education should be. And on a more distressing note, we’re beginning to see early signs that student loans may be turning into junk bonds.

The impending implosion of the plug-in hybrid sports car maker Fisker Automotive is reminding many of the 2011 Solyndra disaster—taxpayers are on the hook for $171 million in government loans extended to the company that has only sold 2,000 of its $100,000 sports car. But it’s not all bad news on the green front: The corn ethanol lobby is joining the chorus of voices calling for a reform to the broken ethanol mandate. If we want to keep that momentum going, we should support telework, because bad traffic cost the US $121 billion in lost time and wasted gas in 2011. $121 billion. With a b.

Another week, another flurry of bad news for Obamacare. As states scurried to educate consumers on the impending effects of the new insurance plans, Congress mulled exempting itself from mandates to enroll in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges. Overall, health care spending slowed down, possibly as a result of employers shifting the burden of insurance payments onto individual employees, making health care something of a luxury. No wonder that the trickle of Democrats getting nervous about Obamacare is quickly becoming a flood.

[George W. Bush image courtesy of Shutterstock]

In other news, did you know that on paper Spaniards, Italians, and Cypriots are much wealthier on average than Germans? Wolfgang Münchau wrote a must-read piece in the FT this week on what that means for the euro, and we responded with an essay:

The median German family is worth €51,000 whereas the median Cypriot household is worth €267,000…But even if one were to look at the mean, Germans are worth €200,000 per household, while Spanish net wealth is somewhere around €300,000…

But anybody who’s traveled in Europe understands that these numbers have something wrong with them. Germans are significantly richer than Italians and Greeks. The answer, says Münchau, must be that varying price levels across the eurozone are responsible. [...]

Prosperous Germany has lower prices than the dead broke Club Med countries. In American terms, imagine that real estate in Manhattan was cheaper than in Detroit, or that prices in Buffalo, New York, far outstripped prices in Silicon Valley.

There are two ways to solve this problem within the eurozone: Germany can let its prices inflate to match Club Med levels, or the Club Med countries can deflate to match German prices. But the first option is closed: since the Germans are dead set against inflation, prices in the south will have to come down. [...]

As Münchau points out, this situation means that Europe’s single currency has in effect already failed. €300,000 in Germany is not the same as €300,000 in Italy or Spain, and there is no way to equalize values without years of wretched and ruinous pain.

News elsewhere in Europe was just as bleak. In Italy, there is still no sign of a government that will be willing or able to adjust to European realities. And European leaders refused to resuscitate the EU’s keystone green policy, its carbon emissions trading scheme.

The Chinese and US militaries are opening new channels of communication and becoming more transparent with their strategic goals in the region. But while China appeared to be warming its relations with the US, it hasn’t stopped bullying its neighbors: it scolded Japan for scrambling its jets whenever Chinese aircraft violated its airspace. Meanwhile, Chinese local government debt is reportedly out of control. But news that China spent more on clean energy than any other country in 2012 was a bright spot in China’s smoggy skies.

Ahead of upcoming elections, suicide bombers bathed Iraq in blood. Obama’s poorly conceived and loosely controlled Middle East policy is having unfortunate consequences. File the next two stories under strange and stranger: three Emirati men were deported from Saudi Arabia for being too sexy, while Oman’s religious leaders rejected Justin Bieber for similar reasons.

There was good news for nosy bosses and lonely teleworkers this week in the form of a new video chat service called Sqwiggle. Meanwhile, medium-sized business owners should be heartened by a study that showed significant increases in revenue for telecommuting businesses. And, if you needed reasons to ask your boss to telework, a study was released linking commuting with obesity and higher rates of early death.

The Republican Party like all parties in modern democracies doesn’t need a narrow orthodoxy on foreign policy or on anything else; it needs a rich discourse among competing schools of thought and visions. But the reality that cannot be avoided today is that those voices must be able to explain to the public why the choices they recommend will lead to different results than the ones that Bush got. More, the failure of more internationally minded Republicans to advance credible foreign policy approaches based on lessons learned from the Bush years opens the door to the neo-isolationists. If those within the GOP who believe in an active and global American foreign policy don’t distinguish themselves from the Bush approach, and offer a convincing critique and revision, they will inexorably lose ground within the party even as the party itself loses ground with the public.

Fluency in discussing the disasters of the Bush years is going to be a job requirement for Republican candidates and mandarins for some time to come. This doesn’t mean GOPers need to harp incessantly on the subject, but the sooner individuals and the party as a whole can embrace and project a message of rethink and change, the sooner the country will be ready to listen to what else they have to say.  The charge that the Bush administration was a disaster and that Republicans haven’t changed is the strongest weapon in the hands of Democratic politicians; Republicans must either wait for the public’s memories of the Bush administration to fade or they have to think about how they can distinguish themselves from the past.

Many Republicans will instinctively reject this approach and recoil from the thought of a public washing of the party’s dirty linen. Fair enough, but one has to ask whether the party as a whole really wants to pay the heavy political price of this kind of reticence.

News from Asia this week was dominated by North Korea, whose bellicose rhetoric is facilitating America’s pivot to Asia, much to China’s dismay. This wasn’t the only bad news for China, which is currently dealing with a bird flu outbreak in addition to a downgrade from Fitch. China is also coping with a mass exodus from cities due to deadly smog, which we tracked in this handy infographic. India dealt with bad news of its own, as the economy is growing at its lowest rate in a decade. Elsewhere in the region, Japan and Taiwan made a bilateral deal over the use of the waters surrounding the Senkaku Islands, and Japan’s bond-buying program may be buying some time for crisis-torn countries in Europe.

Speaking of Europe, the main news from the continent this week surrounded the death of former PM Margaret Thatcher. We weighed in with our own take here. Elsewhere in the region, Russia’s economy is sputtering to a halt, damaging Putin’s “national greatness” agenda.

In the Middle East, Egypt’s slow death spiral continued, as religious violence between Copts and Muslims broke out in Cairo. Meanwhile, Egypt has been drastically overstating its wheat crop, suggesting trouble ahead for the world’s largest wheat importer. And all the while, the army is gaining power in the behind-the-scenes struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood. Elsewhere in the region, nuclear talks with Iran broke down again, while Ahmadinejad brazenly declared that Iran is already a nuclear power. In the West Bank, the Obama Administration took a new, smarter approach to the peace process, looking to develop the Palestinian economy, only to see an early setback with the resignation of Palestinian Authority PM Salam Fayyad.

America’s pension crisis continued apace this week, as Calpers sticks to its recklessly optimistic assumptions about future pension payments. Meanwhile, a number of union pension plans are running out of money quickly, and the NYT is quietly warning many pensioners that they may not get all the money they were promised. On a more positive note, Rahm Emanuel is finally beginning to take on Chicago’s chronically underfunded pension program.

We had more bad news for California this week: Google announced that red tape has prevented it from bringing Google Fiber to the state, a federal court ruled that California’s prisons are still in violation of the eighth amendment. There was, however, one positive sign, as the legislature moved to limit capital appreciation bonds, which have caused fiscal crises in a number of municipalities. Elsewhere in the country, a number of New York cities are nearing bankruptcy, Obamacare is corroding the employer-based health insurance system, and the coverage of the Gosnell abortion trial is a sign of the rise of alternative media vis-a-vis the MSM.

It was a big week for education news. Blue California is looking to make it easier to fire bad teachers, while Texas is looking to build on its recent success by giving teachers more freedom over what is taught in their classrooms. Cornell University has added some practical business education to its computer science programs, while an education commission is taking steps to make it easier to offer MOOCs across state lines.

On the environment, Congress may finally end America’s biofuel boondoggle, ending one of the most disastrous policies in recent memory. We had more good news from North Dakota, where ground was broken on America’s first new refinery since the 1970s. It was also a bad week for green alarmism: One energy expert suggests that failing to build new pipelines actually increases the chance of dangerous spills, while a US government report found that recent weather-realated disasters were not a result of global warming.

There are plenty of good reasons to fight shy of involvement in Syria; trying to get on Iran’s good side by letting Assad murder his people with impunity isn’t one of them. It’s a grotesquely immoral sacrifice of the innocent on the altar of a terrible policy idea. Trying to please the mullahs by giving them their way in Syria would be like trying to quiet Adolf Hitler by giving him the Sudetenland. It would be appeasement, and it would be as dishonorable as it is futile.

Here’s the problem: the calculation the mullahs are making is whether or not, when President Obama tells them that there will be war if they don’t give up on their nuke plans, he really Means It. If they think he’s bluffing, if they think he is either unable or unwilling to compel them to comply, there is no reason on earth for them to give way. The mullahs don’t like President Obama, they don’t trust him, and they want to break his power and his policy in the Middle East. [...]

If this hopefully-misguided AP dispatch is right, and President Obama really is letting the mullahs use their nuclear program as leverage to convince the US to stay out of Syria, the administration is inadvertently but inescapably sending two unmistakable messages to Tehran. First, that the US is desperate, very desperate, to avoid a war with Iran and will clutch at just about any straw to get out of the hole it’s dug for itself. Second, even the threat of Iran developing a nuclear bomb is enough to get the US to humiliatingly climb down the ladder and allow a blood-smeared dictatorship that the President has repeatedly said “must” go, to stay. [...]

Letting someone have the Sudetenland almost never works; as Churchill said, Britain and France had to choose between dishonor and war in the 1938 Czech crisis. They chose dishonor, he said, and will get war.

Meanwhile, North Korea continued bellicose rhetoric and posturing this week, and announced a restart of a defunct nuclear reactor. This is more of the same from the Norks, and not necessarily cause for much concern; what does have us worried is South Korea’s vow to shoot first and ask questions later on the Korean peninsula. In China, one criticizes Norks at one’s own peril. And a war-weary American public would be willing to go to war with North Korea.

Elsewhere in Asia, Taiwan jumped into the Game of Thrones with the unveiling of two new patrol ships, while China continued to struggle with an environment ravaged by unchecked growth—28,000 rivers have “disappeared” there over the past few decades. In India, possible PM candidate Rahul Gandhi failed to impress at a gathering of Indian business tycoons.

Spain was Europe’s latest country to miss—by a lot—EU budget deficit targets. But 75% of Germans think the worst is yet to come in the ongoing euro crisis. Greece’s radical neo-Nazi party looks to go international. Amidst all these worrisome reports, a miracle occurred: the Pope won over the NYT.

America is poaching European industry with cheap shale gas. And while Europe continues to snub shale, it’s burning wood—a dubious “renewable” energy source—to meet 2020 green targets. The US stands in stark contrast, as it prepares to lose its position as the world’s biggest importer of crude oil to China next year. And as the fracking industry grows and big companies like Exxon and Shell move in, drilling is getting safer.

But technology isn’t just a boon to America’s energy future. New software is going beyond Scantrons by grading student essays automatically. Healthcare is being disrupted as well, as a new gene therapy has been found to cure leukemia in just eight days. Government is also looking to leverage new tech; Los Angeles released an app that will let citizens communicate directly with city officials. And the reasons for businesses and employees to take advantage of telework continued to pile up: We learned that telework can help boost small business revenue and increase volunteerism.

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Another essay this week focused on the contentious issue of gay marriage. We concluded the essay saying that “It’s more important that we find a way to get along than that we reach a consensus on every divisive social issue. In recognizing and protecting the rights of sexual minorities, we should not forget to honor and respect the rights of religious dissenters as well.”

In China, ducks were the domestic soup de jour. Beijing signed a raft of energy and arms deals with Russia, though it seemed intent on provoking its other neighbors. A “green détente” seems unlikely on the Korean peninsula; the Norks put their tantrum into overdrive. Religious persecution flared up in the region as Christians and Shiites were targeted in Indonesia, and Buddhists mobs in Burma are being blamed for the disappearance of Muslims.

Cyprus featured in news out of Europe this week. The deal Cyprus reached with the EU and the IMF to secure a bailout for its banks spared small depositors, but made the markets gasp. And Hollande’s handling of the crisis showcased France’s waning influence in Europe. As Israel-Turkey relations continued to warm, anti-Semitism spread in Europe; in Libya, a prominent Jew was banned from visiting the new regime he helped create. And France still refuses to label Hezbollah a terrorist group.

Syria’s future looks grim as the opposition is in shambles, and the conflict threatens to spill into Iraq. Things aren’t looking much better in Egypt; what would happen there if the Muslim Brotherhood were to fail?

When it comes to Obamacare, even the good news is bad news: the new system will cost restaurant chains much less than initially reported, but only because workers will choose to opt out of coverage. That trend could destabilize the entire healthcare system. And as we found out on Tuesday, Obamacare will raise insurance premiums for some Americans, especially for young men. The War on the Young rolls on.

Silicon Valley is the new home of American political giants, and also home to the production facilities of the much-hyped upcoming Google Glass project. And while Google is moving beyond the internet by pioneering a new same-day delivery service, a Congressman is keen to harness the power of the internet and get politicians teleworking. That could be a politically savvy decision—telework can save children from asthma.

But those who think right wing, ultra-Zionist Jews control the American debate over Israel policy don’t understand American politics very well. In the first place, a politician simply motivated by the desire to get Jewish campaign contributions would have better luck working the anti-AIPAC side of the street. Liberal Hollywood and the overwhelming preponderance of wealthy Jews who care about the Middle East prefer politicians who take a softer and more nuanced line.

In the second place, there are some things AIPAC and its peers can do, and many others they cannot. For 26 years now the “Israel lobby” has been trying to spring Jonathan Pollard; for 26 years he has been rotting in jail.

There are other things the “Israel lobby” opposes that the United States regularly does. Many of our Gulf Arab allies now have access to some of the most advanced weapons we possess. Ultra-Zionist groups don’t want the United States to pressure Israel at all over settlements and have never liked the two-state formula, but the United States continues to oppose settlements and continues to predicate its peace diplomacy on the two-state solution. The “Israel lobby” has been fighting for decades to get the United States to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The embassy remains in Tel Aviv.

The reality is that the “Israel lobby” is extremely powerful when its goals accord with non-Jewish American public opinion, but it runs out of steam when it goes against that opinion. It is irresistible when its demands accord with the general disposition of non-Jewish Americans to support the Jewish state; it immediately becomes feeble if it takes up an issue (like a pardon for Pollard) that this public opinion dislikes.

Events in Australia dominated the Asia-Pacific region this week, as Prime Minister Julia Gillard fought off a coup attempt from within her own party only months before the next election. Meanwhile, times are getting more difficult for Beijing, as the country’s leading solar panel manufacturer defaulted on $541 million bond payment, while a chronic labor shortage has led workers to become more demanding. Meanwhile, President Xi made his first foreign visit to Moscow this week, and appears to be looking for a calmer relationship with Japan as well.

The biggest stories in the Middle East this week were Obama’s visit to Israel and the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq War, which America has marked with tough talk towards Syria and Iran. The Israel trip looks like a success for Obama, as he made significant progress in repairing the important Israel-Turkey relationship which had been fraying for years. Elsewhere in the region, an interesting cast of characters is preparing for Iran’s next presidential election, while the Saudi Grand Mufti is warning his countrymen against the use of Twitter.

Europe this week was consumed by news from Cyprus, where the EU, Russia and Cyprus itself are now engaged in a dangerous game of chicken after a week of disagreements between the three actors over how best to rescue the country’s failing banks. But all was not quiet on the rest of the continent: The UK has finally set a date for a referendum on Scottish independence, while the rest of the country debates the broad new powers of the government’s press regulator. Meanwhile, France is finally giving up on the proposed 75 percent tax on its richest citizens, while Germany has been forced to scrap many of its green programs due to the failure of Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme.

Domestic news this week continued to focus on California, Michigan and Illinois, each of which has been struggling with decades of destructive blue politics. In Illinois, the State Senate passed a slight modification to teacher’s pensions but put off meaningful pension reform for the future, even as funding problems caused Chicago to shut down over 10 percent of its public schools. In Michigan, Detroit prepared for its new emergency manager while state unions fought to put off the new right to work law for nearly a decade. And despite news of California’s “comeback” the state retains the highest unemployment rate in the nation, and a board member on the state pension fund was just indicted on charges of fraud, conspiracy and obstruction.

The week was also rich with news on healthcare and education. Obamacare appears to be causing insurance premium spikes across the country, and a number of states are falling behind on price transparency for health insurance, making it difficult for consumers to choose the plan that best suits them. Meanwhile, a scandal at a successful VA hospital points to the dangers of single-payer healthcare systems.

In education, vocational certificate programs are emerging as a promising and cheaper alternative to traditional bachelor’s degrees. Elsewhere, pension spending is making a massive dent in state spending on higher education, while a regulatory “blob” of school administrators, politicians and bureaucrats are making meaningful education reform difficult at the K-12 level.

This week’s big story was at the Vatican. Our take on the Conclave’s canny choice:

It appears that, among other qualities, he is a compromise between those still nostalgic for the long Italian stranglehold on the papacy (Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian Bishop of Rome since 1523) and those who want a more globalized leadership in the Church. He is as Italian as a foreigner can be.

With all this, though, comes political baggage. Most Cardinals from Europe these days have not had to cope with the political monsters running loose in much of the world. The selection of Benedict XVI, who came of age in Hitler’s Reich, raised some eyebrows, but generally speaking most European prelates these days haven’t had to exercise their ministries in countries run by murderous thugs. [...]

Francis straddles more than just geographical divides. Doctrinally, he is as tough minded as his predecessor. Those expecting a new pope to ordain women, bless abortion, and allow gay priests to marry in St. Peter’s must brace themselves for disappointment. But what we know of Francis’s ministry in Argentina suggests that he knows that in Christianity doctrine, important as it may be, is not the heart of the matter. Christianity at the end of the day is about God’s all-forgiving, all-embracing, illimitable love. Love is the chocolate, doctrine is the box and the point of the doctrine is to protect the chocolate and keep it fresh for use, not to separate people from the feast God wants us to share. [...]

Our other big essay came down hard on the ghastly collusion between urban machine politicians and Wall Street, and the high-minded progressives who look on as they fleece the poor:

…thieves like the despicable Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit are anything but a racial phenomenon. There were Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish and Greek Kilpatricks in their day. We can confidently expect a wave of Latino Kilpatricks as Latino voting power pushes African-American machines aside in more urban areas.

And there’s another thing American history teaches: unscrupulous politicians will find unscrupulous bankers who will float them abusive loans in exchange for fat fees.

If our so-called ‘progressives’ today weren’t so intellectually decadent and, well, historically challenged, they would be leading the charge to clean up American cities. Instead they are mostly silent — and sometimes even defend the machines.

Lots of Asian news this week. As the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated newspaper thundered that “Japan must recognize Beijing’s will”, a report was released showing that Asia is spending more on defense than Europe as a whole—including non-NATO countries. Are those the Guns of August we’re hearing?

As the world marked the two year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, we defended nuclear power as a clean and—if deployed correctly—safe energy source. We noted China’s struggles in getting its shale boom off the ground, and looked at Japan’s strides towards exploiting “fire ice,” a harbinger of another energy revolution. Meanwhile, the lame duck leaders of Pakistan and Iran agreed to build a pipeline between their countries, though we thought the move was more a PR stunt than anything else.

China’s society is changing fast. We highlighted a story about how the country’s long tradition of matchmaking is getting an update for the 21st century. And we mused that China’s newly entitled generation of “little emperors” surely must be making Beijing’s leaders nervous.

‘News’ out of Europe feels more like Groundhog’s Day with each passing week. There are no heroes in this movie, though. Only knaves and fools. Merkel gave Hollande an “F” for effort after France was unable to live up to the EU’s budget deficit rules. But at least Europe’s leaders are starting to realize that their green policies were ill-conceived: they backed down from a great green trade war, and a leaked document shows that Europe’s long-term green goals are being reconsidered in favor of pro-growth policies.

In the Middle East, Qatar cut Cairo off as the Egyptian economy continued to spiral down the toilet, just as a poll noted that Americans’ distrust of Egypt hit a twenty-year high. The UN was doing what it does best, telling those naughty Syrian rebels to behave themselves. Meanwhile, another UN report suggested that a Palestinian rocket—not an Israeli one, as originally reported—killed baby Omar last November. When it comes to the truth, better late than never, we guess.

Finally, Obamacare: the bill we had to pass in order to find out what was in it. It raises  premiums for the young. It sticks businesses with job-killing fees for insuring its employees. And it’s got a neat little adverse selection bug baked in: employers with healthier workforces are choosing to self-insure, leaving an older and sicker population to participate in the mandated exchanges.

But while we continue to struggle with the policy side of healthcare, researchers are to making strides that may very well remake the healthcare industry. Telepresence advances are giving new meaning to the words “doctors without borders.” While you’re wrapping your head around that, start getting comfortable with the idea of robosurgeons. Domo arigato, doctor roboto.

[Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]