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Well, here’s a shocker. Whoever could have imagined such a thing? Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries? Actually, what’s shocking is not so much the rediscovery of the obvious truth that human capital matters — but that the story has actually been picked up by the press (it’s all over the place this morning). [...]

Here’s a sad item about central California — a lament, perhaps, or something approaching the final draft of an obituary — from Victor Davis Hanson.

There are few surer ways to mark oneself as a moral leper these days than to be a “nativist”: to imagine that over time the particular inhabitants of a place form a naturally balanced community, with an organic harmony that the mass importation of aliens is likely to disrupt, often with catastrophic results. To harbor [...]

Mark Steyn weighs in on the DSK affair. A morsel: As the developed world drowns under the weight of Big Government, the gilded princelings of statism will hunker down in their interior courtyards and guard their privileges ever more zealously. Once in a while, as in that Manhattan hotel suite, a chance encounter between the [...]

Biologists use the term “neoteny” to describe the retention of juvenile characteristics in an organism’s adult form. Humans exhibit neoteny in many of the morphological features that distinguish us from our primate cousins: our big heads, big brains, small jaws, thin skulls, small teeth, and lack of body hair. Thinking back the other day on [...]

I yammer on a lot about liberty in these pages, and sound the alarm when I think it is threatened. For all of that, though, I’m not an extreme libertarian; limitations on liberty are necessary for a well-functioning society. I just don’t like to see it limited beyond necessity, and I don’t like policies whose [...]

The other day I paid a visit to Google’s vast New York office complex to have lunch with my friend Greg, a former co-worker who took a job there about a year ago. As you’d imagine, it’s not your ordinary workplace. Everywhere you look, there are comforts, amusements, and diversions: toys, jungle rooms, sleeping pods, [...]

This past Saturday was the occasion, once again, of “Earth Hour“, an annual smug-fest in which progressive ideologues the world over come together to thumb their noses en masse at the advanced civilization that feeds and shelters them, that allows them to take for granted a level of wealth and comfort unexampled in all of [...]

Lawrence Auster asks: “Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.” Yes, some kind of intensification of the world is going on, and I think we can find an [...]

Things are just so terribly unfair, so pitilessly unequal in this awful society that some days it’s all I can do not to retire to the attic with a notepad and a length of stout rope. Today’s Times brings to our attention yet another clamant injustice: egregious gender inequality at Wikipedia, where it turns out [...]

In today’s New York Times we learn that President Obama, to his credit, recently made clear to President Hu Jintao that if China would not do more to contain North Korea, the USA would have no choice but to increase its military presence in the region. China has, in response, made a few helpful gestures. [...]

I very much wanted to change the subject, to write about something else tonight. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the tension between Left and Right in this country is moving far beyond mere matters of policy — and as I wrote in a comment at another website today, the level of animosity now [...]

We hear a lot about the inherent goodness, copious blessings, and paramount importance of diversity, but the obvious fact of history is that diverse populations frequently disaggregate, very often violently, into more homogeneous assortments. Shocking though it may be, there actually seems to be some truth to the obsolete and offensive notion that people, on [...]