September 10, 2009 – 11:41 pm
I do like that Camille Paglia. Though a liberal Democrat, she always thinks for herself — and what a lively and penetrating mind she has. In a recent column for Salon.com, she offers some common sense about this excruciating national set-to over health-care. She begins: As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at […]
September 9, 2009 – 11:54 pm
I imagine most of you watched tonight’s health-care speech. My first day back at work was a long one, and so I missed almost all of it; I’ll have to find a transcript. From the post-mortems I did see on the news channels it seems the central issues linger, including perhaps the most central of […]
September 1, 2009 – 3:32 pm
The New York Times columnist and W.F. Buckley protégé David Brooks has been, amongst influential conservative voices, on e of the most admiring of, and sympathetic to, President Obama. In his most recent column, however, his tone is somewhat less approving, and for exactly the right reasons. We read: This is a country that has […]
September 1, 2009 – 11:49 am
Here in Cape Cod, as everyone looks back on the life of Ted Kennedy, the tone, has been, to put it mildly, approving. It’s bad form to speak ill of the recently dead, so one has hardly heard a peep about the darker aspects of Mr. Kennedy’s life, or the skeletons in his closet (not […]
August 25, 2009 – 11:57 am
Required reading: an outstanding essay on the Obama presidency by Fouad Adjami in today’s WSJ. I’m working today, so can’t comment at length myself just now, but readers are invited to weigh in below. The gist: Mr. Obama, carried into power on a tide of anxiety and guilt, misjudges the fundamental nature of American politics […]
August 13, 2009 – 12:02 am
Our friend H. Jeffery Hodges, who writes thoughtfully about the problem that Islam poses to the rest of the world, has been doing so again lately. In posts here, here, and here, he discusses the book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by the Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell.
Forgive me for beating a dead horse, but British physician and writer
Today we direct you to an excellent post by Bill Vallicella about the putative “right” to health care. A little while back I mentioned that left-leaning governments tend always toward acting in loco parentis; Bill’s post offers the Democratic health-care initiative as an illustrative example. Bill makes the important point — seldom acknowledged — that […]
Recently President Obama, in what he must have known would be a controversial choice, selected the geneticist Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is an eminent scientist, and a capable administrator — indeed, his professional qualifications for the post are unimpeachable — but he has also […]
I’ve linked to a few essays by Pat Buchanan recently, and have another for you today. There is much that I disagree with Mr. Buchanan about, both culturally and politically — his paleoconservative isolationism comes to mind, as well as his doctrinaire opposition to evolutionary theory, the scientific bedrock of modern biology (see, for example, […]
In 1972, when I was 16, I took a drive across America with my good friend Tom “Toby” Sherwood (peace be upon him). Toby was the older brother of Evelyn, a girl I had been orbiting, and although he was a few years older — at 21, he had just emerged from Harvard with a […]
An engaging item in today’s Physorg Newsletter reported on a recent study, published in Nature Geoscience, that examined the Earth’s carbon chemistry during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. During this torrid interval, which took place about 55 million years ago, the Earth’s average temperature shot up by 7° C. over […]
Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code — […]
With conservatism back on its heels all over America, loyalty to tradition seems everywhere to be a waning virtue. Not so in New York State politics, where the stewards of the commonweal are every bit as venal and corrupt as they have been since before the Revolution, as we see in this heartwarming item from […]
This is rather a big deal: Senator Arlen Specter has crossed the aisle, and is now a Democrat. This leaves the foundering GOP with its decks even more conspicuously awash, and gives the ruling party the 60-seat, unfilibusterable majority they have been struggling to gain. I hope they use it wisely.
When a political movement seeks to control behavior, an important first step is customarily to stigmatize the practice in question as morally offensive. For example, during the First World War, when criticism of the Wilson administration’s policies was suppressed by harsh restrictions of the press, it was common to hear calls for severe punishment, all […]
When President Obama won election last fall, many of us thought that his victory might lead, at long last, to a re-evaluation of our nation’s endless, obsessive, futile, puritanical and ruinously costly “war on drugs”. Alas, it appears that this insane policy, which perpetuates the enormous black market and resulting drug-cartel violence that have effectively […]
With a hat tip to Norman Geras, here’s a fine essay by Joe Queenan on the “euphemism treadmill” that is now affecting what used to be called the “War On Terror”.
There appears to be a bit of friction between the US Army and some of its Sikh recruits about whether the soldiers should be allowed to maintain the turban, uncut hair and beard that are emblematic of their faith. This is likely to be cast as a rights issue, but it is of course nothing […]
The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, is something of a contradiction: though a Republican, he is a committed nanny-stater. A little while back he led an initiative to outlaw the serving of trans-fats in Gotham’s restaurants, and he offered praise for Governor Patterson’s ridiculous and insulting “obesity tax” on soda pop. Now he […]
March 31, 2009 – 12:06 pm
Here’s more good sense about our nation’s demented and obsessive “War on Drugs”, this time from Jack Cafferty: Someone described insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. That’s a perfect description of the war on drugs. Exactly right. (That “someone”, by the way, was Albert Einstein.) […]
March 25, 2009 – 11:33 am
Recently the decorated journalist Bernard Goldberg, incensed by a conspicuous left-leaning bias in many of the nation’s news and entertainment providers, published a book called A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. In today’s Washington Post, we find a good example, in […]
March 17, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I am more than a little concerned about our new president’s stewardship of the vital friendship between the U.S. and Britain. Mr. Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown the cold shoulder during his recent visit, saying he was “too tired” for a state dinner, and later a Foggy Bottom staffer blithely dismissed the snub, saying […]
March 11, 2009 – 10:19 pm
I think one of the most amazing gifts of the technological revolution of the past few years has been the use of satellite imagery to create dazzling applications like Google Earth. I just love it, and I love it even more with each improvement in coverage and resolution. But now, according to a recent item […]
Minimum-wage laws are often thought of as a boon to the least fortunate, and a moral rebuke to Dickensian free-market sorts — but they do not always confer the blessings their sponsors desire. A recent government report about a sharp rise in minimum-wage mandates in Honduras shows us something about unintended consequences.
A knowledgeable and inquisitive reader, having joined me in puzzling over the strange “blacklisting” errors we have just experienced here for Asian IPs, thought I might find a certain year-old Slate article interesting. I did indeed. It describes the findings of one Babak Pasdar, a network-security expert who was called in by a major telecommunications […]
There is rather an amusing ruckus underway in the Republican Party, which has been floundering in disarray since the presidential race. The titular head of the GOP, Michael Steele, has been going mano a mano with Rush Limbaugh over who is really the party’s leader. Steele may have the official position, but he made a […]
February 23, 2009 – 12:47 pm
In an editorial piece at CNN’s website, Michael Eric Dyson praises Eric Holder’s recent speech on race relations as “courageous and honest”, and suggests that Holder’s “nation of cowards” remark, which a great many morally stunted people have found tendentious and gratuitously offensive, has been “taken out of context”.
February 22, 2009 – 11:36 pm
If I told you that I knew there were invisible beings directing the flow of traffic on the highway, or that I had just seen someone rise from the dead and ascend into the sky, you’d want some proof — and if I had none to offer, you’d begin to doubt my sanity, and might […]
February 19, 2009 – 11:24 pm
There is quite a ruction today about Attorney General Eric Holder’s calling America “a nation of cowards” for its reticence to speak frankly about race (transcript here). I wonder what he really means, and what he really wants. At the very least, it seems a tad atrabilious for the nation’s first black attorney general — […]
February 6, 2009 – 11:13 pm
More than a few states, facing the prospect of an increasingly activist federal government under the new Democratic administration, have passed measures in their local legislatures to assert their sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. Here are some bills from Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri (this one has to do with resistance to Federal […]
February 6, 2009 – 10:52 pm
In today’s Best of the Web newsletter, WSJ editorialist James Taranto pokes some fun at the New York Times: The editorial board of the New York Times has stumbled onto a possibly revolutionary economic idea. The paper is sounding a note of caution about Gov. David Paterson’s proposal to impose a tax on theater tickets: […]
January 29, 2009 – 6:22 pm
Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been removed from office. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Next!
January 20, 2009 – 11:25 am
Looking back over my 52 years, I must say I cannot recall anything like the giddy euphoria attending today’s inauguration. Perhaps the mood was something like this in January of 1961, but if so I was too young to remember, and anyway I doubt it. Certainly I don’t remember pilgrims descending on Washington in their […]
January 10, 2009 – 12:37 pm
The appointment of Dawn Johnsen as head of the incoming Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel got my attention when it was announced yesterday; Ms. Johnsen is well-known as a critic of the Bush administration’s efforts to strengthen the power of the Executive Branch. An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal argues that with the […]
December 21, 2008 – 9:19 pm
If only H. L. Mencken were with us today. We do have some gratifyingly caustic talents currently in harness, but when Mencken was feeling the warp-spasm he was incomparable. I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens would go dry for a year just to have lunch with the man. What Mencken would have to say […]
December 17, 2008 – 10:59 am
Reader Court Merrigan, in a comment to last night’s post about New York State’s proposed “obesity tax”, quite rightly calls me on the carpet for likening the Paterson administration’s plan to the public-health policies of the Nazis. As he suggests, I ought to be able to make my case without resorting to such analogies — […]
December 16, 2008 – 10:46 pm
New York’s economy is in big trouble. The state has an enormous budget gap to close, and toward that end the Paterson administration has proposed a measure that is such an egregious miscarriage of governance, as well as being so audaciously stupid, that I can hardly find appropriate language with which to disrespect it.
December 15, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Dividing my time, as I do, between New York City and Wellfleet, MA, I hang with a pretty liberal crowd. In social settings, if the conversation gets round to politics, human nature, economics, religious pluralism, or a number of other topics, it’s pretty much given that at some point I am going to be glared […]
November 25, 2008 – 7:05 pm
Ah, the Clintons. Ah, Christopher Hitchens. In a brief and piquant essay, the latter reminds us why the last thing we need is another stiff dose of the former. Here. Also, if you feel like a longer and deeper mud-wallow, Mr. Hitchens’s piece links to this eight-page article by Todd Purdum on how the former […]
November 20, 2008 – 3:52 pm
Should Hillary Clinton be the next Secretary of State? I’d rather she weren’t, and here’s why.
November 17, 2008 – 12:24 am
With a hat tip to our friend Jess Kaplan, here is P.J. O’Rourke’s wistful assessment of the wreckage of American conservatism.
November 15, 2008 – 10:04 pm
I recently began a careful re-reading of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, a book I had not looked at closely in decades. The work is primarily an argument for Pascal’s Jansenist Christian beliefs, but prepares the soil with a searching review of Man’s transience and wretchedness. The genius Pascal, in his cruelly foreshortened life, acquired wisdom far […]
November 13, 2008 – 10:09 pm
I managed to get home from work by eight-fifteen this evening, which, in the context of the past week, feels like playing hooky. The little grey cells, however, are in weary and mutinous disarray, so I will probably be leaning on the “Shameless Filler” category for another few days. But I do want to direct […]
November 4, 2008 – 11:38 pm
Well! There you have it. The Democratic Party seems to be giving the Republicans a thumping of historic proportions. (They might have managed this four years ago, had they not put forward as their champion that pompous and insufferable windbag, the lugubrious thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry.) I have a feeling I am not the only […]
November 4, 2008 – 7:19 pm
I know I said I would shut up about Sarah Palin, and I will, sort of. But Christopher Hitchens is under no such obligation, and he wrote a tart little item a few days ago. We read:
October 31, 2008 – 10:57 pm
The current presidential contest — which got underway, if memory serves, back in the late ’50s or early ’60s — appears, impossibly, to be in its final days. It has seemed so hyperbolically prolonged, like some geometric distortion of spacetime itself, that I rather suspect that when it is over the world will end in […]
October 29, 2008 – 10:49 pm
I’ve got into a bit of a scuffle commenting on a post over at The Gypsy Scholar; I made some unkind remarks about the Republican vice-presidential nominee, and elicited a snappy rebuke. I will cop to the charge of using fairly strong language, bordering on incivility. I may even be showing symptoms of what some […]
October 27, 2008 – 10:18 pm
We note with grim satisfaction the conviction of Senator Ted Stevens. It has the feeling of justice long-postponed and richly deserved. It’s just a drop in the bucket, though, as Mark Twain reminds us: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.” Celebration would […]
October 15, 2008 – 11:11 am
Two days ago Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, gave a withering assessment of the McCain campaign. I find myself agreeing with every word of it, in particular the last paragraph. Read it here.