The chickens are coming home to roost. It’s only a question of when.
Herbert Stein was chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and is the father of the more well known Ben Stein. In 1976, he propounded what he called “Stein’s Law”: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Stein was referring to economic trends, but the same law applies just as much to foreign policy and the concept of empire.
Last month, the United Nations released its Human Development Index , which is a report that attempts to quantify the quality of life in world’s nations in a way that looks beyond purely economic measures. According to the report:
Last week, a team of researchers under the auspices of the Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH) at Oxford University published an article in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE.
The news in Latin America this year has brought two reminders that Latin America’s stringent gun controls have not stemmed the growing homicide problem in many parts of the region.
The first is that homicides reached new highs in Mexico this year , reaching record levels not seen since the country began keeping records twenty years ago.
A new record breaking skyscraper for Europe has been completed as the tallest skyscraper in Europe. Under construction for six years, the 87 story building (Lakhta Center) in St. Petersburg will become the headquarters of Russia’s natural gas giant and its oil subsidiary, Gazprom. The building will not be finished on the interior and open to the public until next year.
This sets the stage for the Skyscraper Curse.
The World is locked today in a fierce war of ideologies, in some ways strangely resembling the wars of religion in the Middle Ages. The doctrinal points at issue in those wars have become unintelligible to most of us today, and there are some equally strange paradoxes in the present ideological war.
