January 30, 2012 – 11:51 am
At the Washington Post’s website there’s an item titled “Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.” The article looks over the gap between Presidential job-approval and job-disapproval ratings (by respondent’s party affiliation) over the years, and concludes that Mr. Obama has divided the nation more than any third-year President ever has. (In a recent poll, 80% [...]
January 25, 2012 – 8:12 pm
Are you tucked away in an elite intellectual and cultural cocoon, isolated from America’s ‘vibrant’ popular mainstream? One can only hope. Find out here.
January 22, 2012 – 11:39 pm
More on the blessings of socialized medicine, from the Daily Mail.
January 22, 2012 – 11:26 pm
What say you, readers? Is this child abuse?
January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them. The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them [...]
January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item: Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional. “Human rights do not prescribe national [...]
January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, [...]
December 22, 2011 – 12:41 am
Here is a long and deeply depressing essay about California’s dying Central Valley, by one of its lifelong residents, Victor Davis Hanson. How did we let this happen to ourselves?
December 18, 2011 – 12:40 pm
Horrifying images and video from Egypt, here. One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to [...]
December 15, 2011 – 7:25 pm
In an excellent little essay at NRO, Michael Knox Beran reminds us that human suffering is, to borrow a word from the natural sciences, conserved: it can be transformed but not eliminated — and that the modern liberal obsession with its eradication at any cost is futile, and in the end destructive. We read: The [...]
December 15, 2011 – 7:05 pm
Here are a couple of recent items on the dawa-jihad front: First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the [...]
December 13, 2011 – 4:31 pm
A few months ago I started noticing a particular female announcer’s voice on radio and television commercials. She had a pleasant enough voice, but I thought it exhibited a peculiar weakness — in her falling inflections she would routinely drop below the bottom of her tonal register, and her sonorous voice would break momentarily into [...]
December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm
President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro [...]
December 3, 2011 – 5:08 pm
Pure insanity in deep-blue Boston: First-grader accused of sexual harassment A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin. But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on [...]
December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm
The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must [...]
December 1, 2011 – 10:20 am
Here’s some common sense from Thomas Sowell, in the context of an essay about Newt Gingrich’s position on immigration: Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the [...]
November 21, 2011 – 6:24 pm
Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read: Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious [...]
November 13, 2011 – 1:36 pm
There’s a good piece by Katie Roiphe on “sexual harassment” in today’s Times. Money quote: The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose… Also: Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, [...]
November 12, 2011 – 1:26 pm
One melodic voice in the complex polyphony of the “OWS” uprising is the lament of the young college grads who, despite their hard-earned degrees in important fields of study, today find themselves laden with scholastic debt and unable to descry a clear path to prosperity. It’s terribly unfair: they’ve done what they were supposed to [...]
November 10, 2011 – 4:28 pm
Here’s a tart item by Charles Murray about the prevalence of certain groups in educational “gifted” programs, and the willfully blinkered obstinacy of media commentators thereupon. One quibble. In response to a journalist’s claim that “most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social [...]
November 9, 2011 – 8:47 pm
Further thoughts on OWS from Victor Hanson, here.
November 8, 2011 – 7:52 pm
Here’s an entertaining item by “David Kahane”: The Cold Civil War.
November 4, 2011 – 11:22 pm
Today a friend mailed me a clipping from last Saturday’s New York Times. It was an Op-Ed by Charles M. Blow, in which Mr. Blow presented a chart summarizing a report ranking the world’s nations on their level of “social justice”. (I’ve reproduced it below the fold.) The columns in the chart include an “overall [...]
November 4, 2011 – 10:05 pm
Looking At The Left‘s El Marco pays a visit to Occupy Denver, with notebook and camera. Here.
November 3, 2011 – 10:20 pm
Our friend The Stiletto has a nourishing little parable for us, here.
November 3, 2011 – 11:17 am
A while back I wrote a post examining why a society’s need to maintain public harmony in the face of increasing diversity necessarily comes at the expense of meaningful liberties. George Will takes up the same topic in his latest column, Conformity for diversity’s sake. We read: Illustrating an intellectual confusion common on campuses, Vanderbilt [...]
October 27, 2011 – 11:28 am
Over at the AEI blog, a new piece by Jim Pethokoukis calls into question some received wisdom about income inequality. Disappointingly, it carries a provocative title — 7 Reasons Why Obama Is Wrong About Income Inequality — but then, as one reader points out in the the comment thread, completely neglects to cite the particular [...]
October 26, 2011 – 12:07 pm
Streetlights are supposed to dispel gloom, but the new-and-improved ones described in this item are having the opposite effect on me, I’m afraid.
October 20, 2011 – 10:18 am
Interesting item from New Scientist: the global corporate network that dominates the world’s economy. Here.
October 18, 2011 – 8:44 pm
My friend and neighbor Danny Fisher started a website a few months ago called Wish I Didn’t Know. Here’s an item that really measures up.
October 12, 2011 – 5:47 pm
Here’s a short video from Ray Kurzweil, in which he outlines his view of our progress thorough six “epochs” of the evolution of intelligence. I’m inclined to think he’s overlooking or ignoring some serious possible impediments to this progression, going forward (not to mention some unwelcome possible outcomes), but this is of course just a [...]
October 7, 2011 – 10:59 pm
In our previous post about OWS, we linked to an item that’s been making the rounds today: this Huffington Post grumble from lesbian “electronic punk” musician JD Samson, who has become dissatisfied with how things are working out for her, affluence-wise. NRO’s Daniel Foster has add some pointed commentary over at the Corner. An excerpt: [...]
October 7, 2011 – 3:10 pm
The weather being particularly fine here in New York this week, with Gotham’s hibernal sleet and snow still well over the horizon, the occupation of Wall Street is humming along nicely, and has the attention of everyone in the chattering classes. (Including, obviously, my own.) As longtime readers will know, the lovely Nina and I [...]
October 4, 2011 – 5:20 pm
In case you haven’t heard, the good folks at OccupyWallStreet have made public a list of their demands. Given their youthful zeal, I had been worried that their expectations might be excessive or unrealistic, but as you’ll see, it’s all modest, reasonable stuff. Here it is: Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand [...]
October 3, 2011 – 8:36 pm
Poking around at NRO just now, I ran across some solid pessimism from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. In a piece called “The End of the Future“, he argues that the steady technological progress that pulled the world’s economy upward for a very long time has stalled. The essay seems a shade too gloomy, even for [...]
October 2, 2011 – 11:41 pm
Rings shall vanish from our noses, And the harness from our back, Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips no more shall crack. I can already taste those mangel-wurzels. All must toil for freedom’s sake! Learn more here.
September 30, 2011 – 9:27 pm
What’s the worst thing a person can be? No, no, not that. Way worse than that. Oh, that? Not even close. Once upon a time, maybe… What, that??? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s about the best thing you could be, these days. Want to get into college? Want a government job? Want to be [...]
September 16, 2011 – 5:02 pm
Here’s an amusing remark from Lawrence Auster on conservatism, liberalism, and the Hegelian dialectic process whereby, as the liberal thesis moves leftward, the liberal/conservative synthesis tends to follow: In the Hegelian Mambo, as the left become more left, the right, in defining itself in opposition to the ever-more threatening extremism of the left, and not [...]
September 16, 2011 – 1:49 pm
Speaking of Bill Vallicella’s excellent blog, here’s another fine post of his, just published.
September 14, 2011 – 10:48 am
Or perhaps a better title would have been Sauce For The Gander. Here.
September 13, 2011 – 10:33 pm
A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt [...]
August 13, 2011 – 11:57 am
Here’s some trenchant commentary on the UK’s oikophobic response to its wave of riots, from Brendan O’Neill at spiked.
It’s been a fortnight now since Anders Behring Breivik’s havoc in Oslo. Cultural-conservative bloggers, aghast, have mostly tried to do three things in their subsequent commentrary: First and foremost, to condemn Breivik’s mass slaughter as irredeemably evil; Second, to dissociate themselves from any responsibility for it; Third, to attempt, within the context of the strongest [...]
A “tweet” from Iowahawk just now: Read this, then read this. O’Brien: You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged.
I had the TV on just now, and was watching Piers Morgan. He had on a fellow named Brad Thor, who apparently is a “terrorism expert” and author of “thriller”-style novels. They were talking about Norway, and about how much of a shock the Breivik rampage was to a nation that never saw it coming, [...]
I haven’t said much about the debt-limit squabble, for at least two reasons: First, what’s the point of having a debt limit anyway, if it just gets raised whenever we approach it? Second, in the real world, as Kevin Williamson points out here, the only meaningful debt limit isn’t one that you impose upon yourself; [...]
… goes unpunished. Next time, just throw it back. Accountants say the man who caught the home run ball that Derek Jeter smashed for his 3,000th hit Saturday will have to pay as much as $14,000 in taxes, New York media report. Christian Lopez, 23, caught the ball and promptly handed it over to the [...]
From the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch: Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death. – Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, p. [...]