The influential (and generally non-partisan) think-tank The Cato Institute has published an in-depth assessment of the recent health-care bill. It’s a hefty read, and not at all encouraging. Here.
According to a new study, Russians dwell on gloomy thoughts more than Americans, but are less likely to let it all get to them. We read: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy portrayed Russians as a brooding, complicated people, and ethnographers have confirmed that Russians tend to focus on dark feelings and memories more than Westerners do. But […]
Writing in the Washington Post, one Stan Cox, who presumably grew up in the jungles of New Guinea, suggests that we abolish the air conditioner, an artifact of human ingenuity that I consider to be roughly on a par with the invention of the wheel, or the taming of fire. Mr. Cox (rhymes with “pox”) […]
Suppose you were to come round a street corner and almost bump into a person going the other way. Odds are, nowadays, that one or both of you will say “sorry!”. This is new. Once upon a time we would have said “excuse me.” What changed? I think it must be that the primary sense […]
Readers of these pages will know by now that America, along with Western civilization generally, is most likely headed straight down the toilet. But it wasn’t always so. We’ve been focusing so relentlessly here of late on our accelerating collapse that I thought it might be nice to take a look back at a happier […]
103° today. It’s hard to think original thoughts while undergoing massive organ failure, so for tonight I will just add my own to the chorus of voices yelping in indignation over the interview that NASA director Charles Bolden gave to al-Jazeera. Here’s what he said (starting at about 1:11): “Before I became the NASA administrator, […]
This was just a matter of time.
John Derbyshire (who, by the way, if he ever finds himself at loose ends in midtown Manhattan at the end of the workday, should get in touch with me because I will buy him a good glass of whisky), aired a particularly snappy episode of his “Radio Derb” podcast last week. Have a listen here.
In an enormously gratifying decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled that Second Amendment rights are binding on local governments. The decision was close, and split along the usual ideological fissure, but a win’s a win. Story here, text of the decision here.
About a month ago the New York Times ran an aggrieved piece, on its front page, about the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk statistics. The article, clearly intended to tar the police as racists, opened with: Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, […]
From a comment on today’s topic at Mangan’s, here is James Bowery, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Space July 31, 1991: In short, the lack of a frontier is leading us away from the progressive values of the Age of Enlightenment, upon which our country was […]
Following on our previous post about violent ethnic disaggregation in Krgyzstan, here’s an item from yesterday’s paper that I found interesting. It begins (emphasis mine): MOSCOW ”” The violence that has claimed scores of lives in Kyrgyzstan is frequently ascribed to ethnic tensions, but regional experts say the causes are more complex. “I don’t believe […]
Reading today’s paper on the subway to work this morning I learned about a clever new way to cut health-care costs: pay people to take their medication. In a Philadelphia program people prescribed warfarin, an anti-blood-clot medication, can win $10 or $100 each day they take the drug ”” a kind of lottery using a […]
On the front page of today’s Times we read about Kyrgyzstan, which is busy providing intelligent observers, at sanguinary cost, with yet another data-point about the incomparable blessings of Diversity. Meanwhile, Dennis Mangan brings to our attention an outstanding paper on said blessings, by Australian academic Frank Salter (original here, but visit Dennis’s place for […]
Our conversation with Jim Kalb and Kevin Kim continues, here.
I’ve never been much of a soccer fan, but I’ve been watching some of the World Cup games this time around. What made the biggest impression on me, however, was not the play on the field, but the unvarying, awful blare of plastic trumpets that fills the arena. It is a horrible, buzzing drone, and […]
I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as […]
Too pooped to post tonight, so here’s a dismal item by John Derbyshire on the absurdities of our educational system.
Good news from Holland: I’m gratified to see that Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party made substantial gains in yesterday’s elections. Read all about it in this catty little article.
Jim Kalb, founder of View From The Right and author of the Inclusiveness essay-series that we discussed in a recent post, has dropped by to comment. Here.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember that this was once a virile and vigorous nation. Here’s an appalling letter from today’s Times: To the Editor: In “The Hard Sell on Salt’ (front page, May 30), it was said that the food industry successfully persuaded the Food and Drug Administration not to regulate the salt […]
Here we learn that “lactose intolerance” is a racist slur.
Here is a fine little essay by Thomas Sowell on the seasonal tide of self-congratulating commencement speeches by public “servants”. So good is it, in fact, that I reproduce it in its entirety below.
National Review has just reposted a fine, and scathing, editorial published on May 6, 1961, in the aftermath of the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion — which failure NR editors Buckley et al. ascribed to a “failure of will”, and a reluctance to offend “World Opinion”: Have we learned? There is always reason to hope. […]
In yesterday’s paper was an article about how prevalent marijuana use is amongst professional chefs. (According to my wide-ranging observations, they could also have written the same article about professional writers, artists, dancers, musicians, psychologists, lawyers, accountants, etc.). It’s an interesting story, and remarkable for how casually marijuana use, which is after all still illegal, […]
An article in Monday’s Times describes the current state of affairs in Rwanda. It has been a full sixteen years since the challenges of multiculturalism got out of hand there, but for some reason the blessings and benefits of Diversity — despite the vigorous application of exactly the sort of enlightened government measures that always […]
As a counterpoise to the impression I might have given in a recent post, here is what all that Russian “directness” leads to at home.
One of the reasons America is declining in the world is that we (and the rest of the effeminized West) are perceived by our foes and rivals, rightly, as having lost our virile resolve. We are generally more concerned with “being better” than our enemies than actually defeating them, and so we court-martial Navy Seals […]
Our cyber-friend Jeffery Hodges has just published, and posted at his website, a thoughtful article on the intellectual and cultural requirements for productive discourse. The subject is of particular interest to Jeffery, who is a college professor in Korea — where, in keeping with Confucian social tradition, to question one’s superiors is to get above […]
A topic I’ve heard people kvetching about lately is the prevalence of unpaid internships for aspiring youngsters. The complaint is that they violate the spirit of minimum-wage laws, and drive out competition for entry-level jobs. I’ve written about minimum-wage laws before; they seem beneficent enough, but they have a darker side, and darker origins than […]
Today I read, at the new conservative/HBD website Alternative Right, an essay by Jim Kalb called The Effects Of Inclusiveness. A sample: No person or society can realize all human possibilities. We are finite creatures who realize ourselves–become good, happy, productive, vibrant, and creative–by becoming something in particular. Since we are social, that particularity requires […]
Here’s another pointed essay about the Arizona brouhaha: What If Arizona Were Quebec?
In a speech at the University of Michigan on Saturday, President Obama castigated critics of recent government excesses, reminding them that “government is us”. This seems innocent enough, but in fact it is chilling. The Founders saw a powerful central government as an unfortunate and dangerous necessity, the only way to administer certain tasks that […]
I’ve been mum about politics for a few weeks, and in particular haven’t said anything about the controversial Arizona legislation, although as you might imagine I of course see no reason why Arizona shouldn’t act if the federal government simply won’t. Meanwhile, here in New York our own mayor — who, as both New York […]
Our friend Dennis Mangan is a rising star in the conservative blogosphere, and in addition to his continuing work at Mangan’s he has begun contributing articles to the new conservative website Alternative Right. His latest is about the biological causes of the male-female “wage gap”. Read it here.
Unbelievable. Hat tip to Lawrence Auster.
April 17, 2010 – 11:24 pm
Last week my old friend Jess friend sent me, as a birthday gift, a book by Eric Hoffer. I’d known about Mr. Hoffer for years, but had never read him. I wish I had done so sooner. Eric Hoffer, for those of you who don’t know of him, was a most unusual autodidact. Born in […]
February 26, 2010 – 9:50 pm
Here’s a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it […]
February 25, 2010 – 10:37 pm
After working all day, teaching class this evening, staying after to practice a little Iron Wire, trudging home in a blizzard, and shoveling the walk and stoop, I’m whipped. So for tonight, then, here’s a pungent little rant about the sorry state of my former homeland, from Mark Steyn.
February 9, 2010 – 12:27 pm
An article in today’s New York Times describes frustration amongst black activists over what they see as insufficiently preferential treatment from the President. Here’s an example: On Capitol Hill, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed irritation that Mr. Obama has not created programs tailored specifically to African-Americans, who are suffering disproportionately in the […]
February 5, 2010 – 4:30 pm
A commenter here recently said: “Wake me up if Charles Krauthammer ever gets anything right.” Coffee?
February 5, 2010 – 11:56 am
As I mentioned in the previous post, the Kafkaesque trial of Geert Wilders has been postponed while the schedule is worked out for the testimony of the few witnesses he will be allowed to call. It appears the trial will not resume until July at the earliest. A discussion of all this is underway at […]
February 4, 2010 – 5:53 pm
Yesterday the judge in the free-speech trial of Geert Wilders ruled that only three of the eighteen witnesses Mr. Wilders had hoped to call to testify about the true nature of Islam will be permitted to appear, and must do so behind closed doors. There may now be a long delay while these appearances — […]
February 3, 2010 – 10:56 pm
Roger Kimball shares a few thoughts about Howard Zinn. Here.
January 27, 2010 – 11:59 pm
We note that the left-wing polemicist Howard Zinn has died, of a heart attack, at the age of 87. Professor Zinn, in whose eyes the United States of America was clearly the focus of evil in the modern world, was a familiar sight in my adopted hometown of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where he was lionized by […]
January 6, 2010 – 12:12 am
Crime rates are down sharply here in New York, and in other big cities as well. According to conventional “root-causes” wisdom, the hard economic times we’ve had for the past year should have driven crime up, but instead it has fallen off dramatically, and is now at record-low levels. What’s going on? The Manhattan Institute’s […]
December 29, 2009 – 12:07 am
There was an article in yesterday’s Times about friction between European Muslims and their host culture. In it we find the following: Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims […]
November 30, 2009 – 12:46 am
In the comment thread to our recent post about John Derbyshire’s book We Are Doomed, commenter JW asked one very good question: why, if increasing ethnic and cultural diversity lead to corresponding increases in tension and strife, does New York City (where I live) manage to function as well as it does? Why indeed? To […]
November 25, 2009 – 3:30 pm
I’ve just begun reading John Derbyshire’s dour and mordantly funny new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The first chapter deals with our bizarre and destructive obsession with Diversity — a liberal viewpoint, now thoroughly hegemonic at all levels of societal administration, that Mr. Derbyshire sums up as The Diversity Theorem: Different populations, of […]
November 20, 2009 – 6:14 pm
Our recent post on the need for cultures to have, like any organism, an effective “immune system” has led to an interesting discussion with our friend Kevin Kim. It continues here.