If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.
April 27, 2011 – 10:31 pm
In the wake of the latest massacre of US personnel by our Muslim “allies”, here is a response from Diana West. We’ve lost our minds, and as a result the best among us are losing their lives.
In totalitarian states, you keep your private sentiments and beliefs about the world’s realities to yourself; the penalty is harsh for expressing opinions that conflict with the official line. Example: Khruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so […]
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
April 21, 2011 – 10:55 pm
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all […]
April 14, 2011 – 10:11 am
In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily: Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People The lead paragraph: People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the […]
In the (rambling) discussion thread to Sunday’s post, commenter Dom gave us a quote from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest: He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for ”¦ the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West […]
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 […]
If you’re looking for a tranquil place to live, the Institute For Economics and Peace has published a table of the most and least peaceful U.S. states. The top 10 are: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Iowa, Washington. The bottom 10 are: Maryland, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, […]
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, […]
March 29, 2011 – 11:02 pm
Readers, if this doesn’t get a rise out of you, I don’t know what will:
March 28, 2011 – 10:33 pm
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 […]
This is brilliant, just wonderful. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about it until just now.
David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times. Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent […]
I’m working late tonight, with no time for writing. So I’ll just pass along this shocking item: Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds Here.
February 23, 2011 – 11:49 am
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 […]
February 21, 2011 – 11:48 pm
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the […]
February 15, 2011 – 8:39 pm
We’ve heard a lot for quite a while now about America’s stubborn Achievement Gaps. The stubbornest and most notorious of these is the gap between the races in primary-school education (as mentioned again in yesterday’s Times, where it is fully explained), but another lingering blot on our escutcheon has been the scandalous underrepresentation of women […]
February 7, 2011 – 11:57 pm
In the comment thread of our previous post, we’ve been looking at Sam Harris’s claim that there can be a prescriptive natural science of human morality, one that uncovers objective normative truths. This would rebut, it seems, the idea that there are no “oughts” in nature. People do want there to be absolute moral truths, […]
February 6, 2011 – 6:06 pm
A while back I noted that Sam Harris has a new book out (The Moral Landscape), in which he argues that it is possible to develop an objective, entirely naturalistic science of human morality that would be not just descriptive, but prescriptive as well. From a philosophical perspective this is a hugely audacious assertion, because […]
February 3, 2011 – 4:50 pm
I’m chastened; things are worse than I thought. It seems Paul Krugman, Sherrif Dupnik, et al. were right after all: there really is a lot of racist, violent, over-the-top, “eliminationist” rhetoric out there. At a political rally deep in the Southwest, a cameraman has captured on video chilling footage of this vitriolic, inflammatory hate-speech: people […]
February 1, 2011 – 1:15 am
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 […]
January 31, 2011 – 5:33 pm
Federal judge Roger Vinson, of the Northern District of Florida. has ruled that the entire “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, a.k.a. Obamacare, is unconstitutional. I’ve only just had a quick look at the ruling, but it appears that the reasoning goes like this: The individual mandate — the part of the law that compels […]
January 21, 2011 – 1:17 pm
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. […]
January 20, 2011 – 2:10 pm
According to “a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data conducted exclusively for Reuters by researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston”, it appears that since the beginning of the current recession more than a million U.S. jobs have been taken by recent immigrants, an […]
January 18, 2011 – 7:14 pm
I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more about this.
January 18, 2011 – 5:15 pm
Here’s a scoop, as dispatched by our monocular Bay Area correspondent: Thousands of Sports Fans Drunk After Football, Baseball Games I understand this is the cover story for the forthcoming issue of DUH! magazine, but you heard it here first.
January 11, 2011 – 11:22 pm
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 […]
January 8, 2011 – 2:55 pm
There is horrible news breaking from Tucson, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat and supporter of “immigration reform” has apparently been assassinated in a mass shooting. (As of 3:13 EST it is still not certain that she has died, though several news agencies are reporting that she was killed.) Not only is this a despicable […]
January 5, 2011 – 11:17 pm
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 […]
January 4, 2011 – 9:33 pm
On Boxing Day, the NFL announced that it was cancelling the Eagles-Vikings game. The reason? It looked like it was going to snow. I couldn’t believe it. Tough men playing in brutal conditions is (or, I suppose I should say, was), an unshakable pillar of the football mystique. No matter how bad it gets, the […]
December 23, 2010 – 10:49 pm
With the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, Richard Dawkins raised a lively debate about which level of life’s organization is the right one for understanding natural selection. Previously the assumption had been that selection could only be understood to act upon discrete individuals, but Dawkins shook things up by suggesting that selection pressures […]
December 21, 2010 – 10:09 pm
Once again I’m passing the evening in my little cubicle, fettered to my oar. So for tonight, by way of sharing the gloom, we have two depressing items, sent our way by our indefatigable correspondent JK, about the effect on our military of America’s accelerating cultural untergang. See here, and here.
December 16, 2010 – 4:53 pm
Well, here’s one scientific result whose robustness isn’t likely to decline with age: it appears that a certain level of corruption in law-enforcement actually represents a sort of societal “sweet spot”. Story here.
December 15, 2010 – 4:50 pm
Victor Davis Hanson, a native of California’s Central Valley, recently spent a few days exploring the area by bicycle and automobile to see how it had been affected by decades of political, economic, and demographic transformation. He summarizes his gloomy findings in a substantial essay at the National Review website. His article begins: The last […]
November 28, 2010 – 10:43 pm
In a recent editorial about the airport-security brouhaha, the Times reiterates the usual liberal cant as regards profiling. We read: Seeing conservative Republicans accuse the Obama administration of trying too hard to protect America from terrorists is a remarkable spectacle of contortion. But many of them are making a far more pernicious point. They want […]
November 22, 2010 – 2:43 pm
Because of our reluctance to take a more commonsense approach to airport screening, fliers now have two choices: groping of their privates by the TSA, or exposure to full-body X-ray scanners that not only amount to a visual strip-search, but also subject passengers (especially those who fly often) to worrisome levels of radiation. We have […]
November 21, 2010 – 10:26 pm
We’re back from our brief getaway, but after the long drive home I’m too pooped to post. So for tonight, here’s a heartening vision of humanity’s future: a legion of adoring fans lifted to ecstasy by a singing hologram in the form of a pubescent, pigtailed puttana.
November 14, 2010 – 7:06 pm
OK, readers, here it is, all in one: what we’re fighting for, and why we’ll win. Have a look. If this isn’t the zenith of human endeavor, I don’t know what is. (Yet another hat-tip to the indefatigable JK.)
November 14, 2010 – 3:13 pm
Writing in The Guardian, journalist Andrew Anthony has just published a recent interview with Christopher Hitchens — who though ravaged by cancer refuses to go gentle, and whose words still fork some lightning. An excerpt: “I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance […]
November 4, 2010 – 10:35 pm
You may not have visited the popular left-wing website The Daily Kos for while; perhaps you have formed the opinion that it was nothing more than a soapbox for unhinged, spittle-flecked, anti-establishment moonbats. If so, you will be pleasantly surprised to read this gracious post, published by ethnic bridge-builder Tim Wise on the occasion of […]
November 1, 2010 – 5:37 pm
We’ve been hearing an awful lot during this election cycle about our aloof “elites” (a demographic segment that generally overlaps what Scott Rasmussen defines as “the political class”). Members of the group in question understandably bristle at the characterization, preferring to imagine that they are the salt of the earth. (“Elite? Moi??”) In case you […]
October 31, 2010 – 11:51 pm
Well, here’s a surprising development, brought to our attention by the indefatigable JK: in this video clip, we see liberal stalwart Bill Maher breaking ranks with party orthodoxy, and expressing public concern about the usurpation of Western culture by Islam. This is not actually an inconsistent position for Mr. Maher, whose scorn for religion he […]
October 29, 2010 – 11:13 am
Listening to Gotham’s news-radio station this morning as I performed my ablutions, I heard the following announcement in the business segment: “Consumers are cutting back this holiday season, but not as much as in recent years.” In other words, consumers are spending more this year than last year. How is that “cutting back”? Who writes […]
October 21, 2010 – 10:35 pm
Everybody’s talking about the Juan Williams firing. For those of you who have spent the past day or two under anesthesia, or held at gunpoint in an al-Qaeda safe-house, Juan Williams is the National Public Radio “on-air personality” who publicly spoke forbidden truths, and was immediately sacked and disfellowshipped for his heresy. Here’s what happened, […]
October 19, 2010 – 10:59 pm
Ah, the many blessings of Diversity. What were they again? It seems lately that all over the liberal Western world, native peoples are developing a nasty case of buyer’s remorse: it is finally dawning on them that the natural friction between dissimilar human groups in too-close proximity is, almost without exception always and everywhere, a […]
October 10, 2010 – 10:53 pm
In Thursday’s post I took the measure of the river of data that my plugged-in life brings my way, and noted that, as much as I like having access to it all, I’m finding it almost impossible to keep up with its ever-increasing volume. (“Drinking from a fire-hose”, we used to say at PubSub.) The […]
October 5, 2010 – 11:38 pm
As a generally conservative sort of blogger, I write a lot about how important it is to defend our traditional American culture against its many foes, foreign and domestic. But in case you’ve forgotten just what it is we’re fighting for, have a look at this inspiring clip, courtesy of the indefatigable JK.
September 29, 2010 – 11:26 pm
In a recent column, David Brooks had this to say about the scope of government nowadays: The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another. Financiers send the world into recession and don’t […]
September 18, 2010 – 2:20 pm
As readers may be aware, the nation’s economy has languished in dark depression for some time now. What can be done? Trillion-dollar Keynsian stimulus packages? A moratorium on government expansion, along with tax relief for the productive? Opinions vary. Branding consultant Richard Smith thinks he may have the answer: redesign the dollar. Here.