A 7.8 magnitude earthquake has devastated Nepal. Buildings, old and new, have crumbled. Older brick and wood homes are almost exclusively reduced to rubble. In an interview with The Guardian, Bhaskar Gautam, a local sociologist, describes the situation: “Outside Kathmandu it’s the rural poor. But in the city it’s the people in the older precarious housing. It’s…

If you’ve been paying attention to the trends of copyright law in the last ten years or so you may have noticed something: Corporations are gaining more and more power over what they claim is rightfully “theirs”. One of the largest company in making agricultural machinery, John Deere, is the latest in this destructive trend…

We speak of the blowback that results from American foreign policy, the senseless, heinous acts of terror that represent an unfocused and irrational rebellion against American imperialism. We understand that calling it what it is, blowback — pointing out the causal relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism — is not an attempt to exculpate…

After the Providence Journal printed Chad Nelson’s commentary on Boston’s violations of Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure protections (“Marathon Security Violates Constitution” April 20), reader Rick Hawksley responded in a letter to the editor that Nelson “seemed to be more concerned about drug dealers than with the health and welfare of his neighbors.” The sharp escalation of…

Just when I’d managed to get control of my laughter over the “Obama is a Marxist” trope —  he held Red Study Circles where he read Quotations From Chairman Mao with Geithner, Rubin and Summers, presumably — David Harsanyi accuses Hillary Clinton of “class warfare” (“For Hillary Clinton, No War But the Class War,” Reason,…

The Everglades are among the last sub-tropical wilderness areas in the United States. Their Floridian air is thick with humidity, but a cool breeze is commonly felt from both the fresh and saltwater systems that spread throughout the landscape. Open prairies provide relief from the dangers of the swamp. A mosaic of forest, from pinelands…

On April 15th, the Department of Education stated it is “working on a process to help federal student loan borrowers submit a defense to repayment of their federal student loans.” The statement came with a press release announcing that the federal government will fine Corinthian Colleges $29.6 million for lying to students about its jobs…

In a recent speech to the Mortgage Bankers Association, Sen. Ben Sasse — a freshman Republican from Nebraska — jokingly accused his colleague Elizabeth Warren of wanting to remove all risk from the economy. Presumably he means that Warren wants to insulate ordinary people from risks like mortgages with unsustainable payments relative to their unexpectedly…

The U.S. government has charged into another civil war in the Middle East. When you find yourself repeatedly asking, “Will they ever learn?” the answer may be that the decision-makers have no incentive to do things differently. What looks like failure may be the intended outcome. Quagmires have their benefits — to the ruling elite…

With the second anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing upon us, NPR is running a series called “The Road Ahead”. In its daily segments, NPR examines how everyday lives have been affected by the horrific events two years ago. One unfortunate but seemingly inevitable part of that road entails law enforcement’s stepped-up abuses of its…

Right now the usual suspects are united in joy by Hillary Clinton’s official announcement of her candidacy for president (although anyone who seriously believed she was previously undecided on the issue probably also still believes in Santa Claus). By “usual suspects,” I mean self-styled “progressives” who think the Red/Blue divide reflects a serious disagreement in…

On April 12 at the Summit of the Americas, US president Barack Obama publicly spoke with Cuban president Raul Castro about ending the tension between the two countries. This marks the first time Cuba has participated in the summit and hopefully marks the beginning of freer exchange and travel between the two countries. Obama had…

The New York Times revealed April 7 (Bernice Dahn, “Yes, We Were Warned About Ebola“) that there was adequate prior warning of an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, but nobody drew the proper conclusion from the data and acted on it because the necessary information was all hidden behind academic journal paywalls. An article in Annals…

A recent story on the British elections reports on a letter warning voters that a Labour government would prove harmful to the country’s economic recovery. Endorsed by leaders in Britain’s business community and submitted to The Telegraph, the letter argues that the election of a Tory government would signal to the rest of the world…

A recent headline from The Week says “NSA: We were just about to stop spying on everyone before Snowden spoke out” (March 30, 2015). At first glance this may seem like a good imitation of an Onion headline but truth is stranger than fiction. The Associated Press tells us, “The proposal to kill the program…

California Governor Jerry Brown’s April 1 decree (Executive Order B-29-15) for rationing water has gotten lots of undeserved positive coverage on the center-left. If you read the fine print, it doesn’t actually reduce the state’s total usage by 25% (although that’s the impression you’d probably get just reading the headlines). It only applies to “potable…

On April 1st, Indiana Governor Mike Pence requested a revision of his state’s recent “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” which, potentially allows for-profit businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexuality. The law spurred widespread boycott campaigns and in which individuals, as well as, state and local governments refused to do business in Indiana. Corporations such…

Recent investigations by the Associated Press into the practices of Tennessee prosecutors during plea-deal negotiations have alerted Americans to one of their government’s most gruesome and supposedly forbidden traditions: forced prisoner sterilization. According to AP reporter Sheila Burke, a recent example of this practice involved a mentally ill Tennessee woman whose infant child died under…

I hear expressions like “I don’t see race” or “I’m color-blind” a lot from people who want to ignore the issues of structural power imbalance or privilege in race issues. The same people are fond of equating racism to simple bigotry; by this standard, white bigotry against blacks and black bigotry against whites are equally…

Usually when right-libertarians defend gentrification, they do so by framing it as an entirely spontaneous free market phenomenon, and minimizing or ignoring the state’s role in promoting it. That’s bad enough. But we don’t usually expect them to come out explicitly in favor of direct state intervention to evict poor people for the sake of…