Motus Mentis

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 […]

Here’s an entertaining item by “David Kahane”: The Cold Civil War.

Looking At The Left‘s El Marco pays a visit to Occupy Denver, with notebook and camera. Here.

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 […]

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.

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.

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Or perhaps a better title would have been Sauce For The Gander. Here.

Here’s some trenchant commentary on the UK’s oikophobic response to its wave of riots, from Brendan O’Neill at spiked.

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.

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 […]