Editor’s Choice
So, You Want To Save The World
A friend shared this Twitter snippet, which apparently crossed her facebook feed, presumably shared by a friend of leftist leanings. Her (wholly accurate) rebuttal offered that actually believing this, but choosing to share a meme instead of "storming their houses,"...
Gun Rights Lessons – A Series
The debate over gun rights and gun control stretches back decades, to at least the early part of the 20th century. It should, then, come as no surprise that there are quite a few recurring and oft-argued themes and positions in this long-running debate. Seasoned...
The Only Judge That Matters
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, last of Machiavelli's Five Good Emperors and adherent of Stoicism, (purportedly) offered up a bit of advice regarding life and religious beliefs: Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout...
Poles of the Pandemic
The pandemic has gone on long enough to draw some broad historical lessons. The first is that America's management was not fitting for the leader of the free world. Compared to our achievements in the Second World War, it is hard to escape the conclusion that we...
Has Woke Jumped The Shark?
Georgia and Texas enacted voting reforms in the wake of the mess that was the 2020 election. Quick as you can say "woke," the states' legislators and governors were denounced by the Democratic leadership and by those of a "woke" persuasion, with concomitant...
Break Before You Buy
Millions of Americans recently saw their bank accounts grow by $1400 or some multiple thereof. They have been told that these shekels are part of what it's going to take to help America recover from the economic ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That many of these...
Platform Games
Trump (whom I briefly tagged with the "him who shall no longer be named' sobriquet... read on) is no longer residing in the White House, but he certainly continues to occupy the brain pans of countless leftists, wholly rent free. Given the attitudes the Left has...
Free Riders
America has a free rider problem. Except when she doesn't. Except when she does. Except when she doesn't. Depending on who you talk to, progressive taxation combined with various forms of welfare are either a justified "redistribution" of wealth by the government (I...
Take On Taking
Civics 101 taught me that a "Taking" of property by the government requires compensation. This is a continuation of an English precedent going back centuries, so it's not surprising that a court overturned, as a Taking, the eviction moratorium, in response to the...
Pants On Fire
Let us contemplate, as the Biden administration rushes to cripple the American economy with brute-force carbon reduction measures as part of its "green"/global warming agenda, that nothing America does will make one whit's worth of difference to global temperature...
How Cuomo Might Have Killed Me
As regular readers know, I have worked as a paramedic in New York City for over 25 years. Covid was the hardest challenge of my career, by far. It was the challenge of the century to our healthcare system (and our society). Controversy rages around Governor Cuomo's...
“Their” Truth
Information regarding the Atlanta massage parlor shooter continues to issue forth, and as the picture resolves more finely, we will get a better sense of why he murdered all those people. The earliest reporting (not reports, reporting, as in pundits interlacing their...
The Trotsky Treatment
Students of history know that the original "cancel culture" was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when Stalin and his apparatchiks sent millions to forced labor camps, often based on nothing more than suspicion of unfavored political views (and often not even that). This...
The Peril of Identithink
This past Tuesday evening, an individual murdered eight people in three Atlanta area "spas" (i.e. massage parlors). Six of the eight were Asian women. A suspect, a 21 year old white man, was promptly arrested, and at this juncture it appears pretty certain that the...
Racists and Murderers
"The school can ask you to leave for any reason," said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. "Then you'll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you'll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer. Thus spake a Los...
Grabby Hands And Dead Grannies
Three weeks ago, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's top aide, secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa, had an "oops" moment, wherein she confessed to something that many of us already knew: that there were not only thousands of deaths attributable to a colossally stupid...
GameStop’s Crapitalist Vigilantes
An astonishing story is unfolding, with this aspect of the story getting astonishingly blasé coverage: it seems a vigilante movement developed on Reddit to revenge itself on "Wall Street" for their role in melting down the global economy in 2008 (which went...
BLM and OPM
Where is all that money going? Thus spake Michael Brown, Sr. after he learned that BLM (the organization) had raised $90M by exploiting BLM (the movement) for financial gain. And, thus, the seedy underbelly of all things political emerges once again. It's always about...
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Opinion
Killing Opportunity
What does the Left have against the young? Despite all the 'Science!,' schools remain closed or are opening sl-o-o-o-wly because of massive resistance from teachers' unions. A 'lost year' isn't a particularly big deal to adults from a developmental standpoint, but...
The Oppressor Class
The en-vogue social theory of modern times, when stripped of its various veneers, boils down to a simple concept: that there are oppressors and oppressed. Not individuals, mind you, but groups, aka classes, aka categories, aka "identities," and our only relevance lies...
The Double-Bind
Identity and "woke" politics are, it seems, an endless game of "hold my beer," where every face-palm inducing iteration begets an even more outrageous offering. Yesterday's escalation arrives from none other than the Coca-Cola company, wherein a training video thrust...
Conflict Karma
The fallout from the Capitol riot continues to expand, and we are now being told that the entirety of the Trump-voting populace should be labeled "insurrectionist." With such a label comes, of course, the application of tools the government has at hand in response....
How ‘Bout That Emmy?
Here in my home state of New York, land of the second-highest per-capita COVID mortality rate in the nation, a major scandal is unfolding in slow-motion. Governor Cuomo, the object of swooning adulation this past spring for his supposedly "adult" handling of the COVID...
Capitol Theater
In the wake of the January 6th riot at the Capitol, 25,000 National Guard troops were dispatched to DC, presumably to establish order and protect the Government against other acts of insurrection. Five weeks later, with nary a protestor in sight, 5000 troops remained...
The Neverending Derangement
To no one's surprise, the Senate failed to convict Trump on the impeachment charge forwarded by the House. What was originally put forth as a "save the nation from his lunacy the last two weeks of his term" was flipped on its head to a tepid "keep him from running for...
Rage And Loathing In Wokerica
Nowadays, it is virtually impossible to go through your daily life without receiving some blunt-force messaging about diversity, about inclusion, about multiculturalism, and about justice for the oppressed. That this messaging is being delivered (and often...
War Comes Through The Overton Window
In our political conversations, we encounter ideas that are broadly considered reasonable, and ideas that are considered unreasonable or flat-out bonkers. The latter exist outside the range of the former, with gray areas along the intersections. A couple decades ago,...
Green Energy’s Dirty Secret
A few years back, the phrase "Rare Earth" would most likely elicit recollection of a 70s Motown-soul band, that had a number of hit records (the most remembered, at least to this boomer, is "I Just Want To Celebrate"). Today, however, "Rare Earth" elicits...
…As Long As It’s Mandatory
A political friend shared a quote on social media today: "Liberals, I have heard it said, don’t care what we do as long as it is mandatory." -- Joseph Epstein This echoes a popular meme (and T-shirt, and other merchandise. A thumbs up for free enterprise!). I had an...
Presidents, Monarchs, and Tyrants
Joe Biden became the Democrats' nominee by projecting a "milder" agenda than the balance of the Democratic primary field. His party barely squeaked out a victory against a President who failed to capitalize on the various policy successes of his term, imploded on a...
Revelation By Proxy
As is probably true for most Internet surfers, I sometimes go "on safari" on the Web, letting my nose and the various algorithms take me where they will. Sometimes, those safaris do nothing more than kill time. Other times, though, I intersect something very...
Us, and Them, and Them
Speculative fiction writers, whether they be "science-y" or not, often bring us visions of possible futures. Some are optimistic, some less so. Some fall into the "dystopian" category, defined by the Oxford Languages folks as, "relating to or denoting an imagined...
A Policy of Ignorance
As promised (or as threatened, if you prefer), President Biden has made quick moves to advance the "greening" of America. Or, more accurately, to satiate the green lobby, an unholy alliance of ignorant virtucrats and corporate rent-seekers. He killed the Keystone XL...
Escalation, Not Equivalence
A libertarian site needs another article on "homo sapiens good," "homo politicus bad" like a fish needs a bicycle. Yet, here we are again, with obvious points of morality for individuals twisted beyond recognition as they grind through the mind of homo politicus:...
Social Corrosion
While looking for the exact wording of a Stalin quote, I found this nugget on a Wikipedia page: [E]specially in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in "the...
Science!… When Convenient
I'm sure you've heard it time and again: Biden and his people asserting that they're going to 'follow the science' and 'listen to the experts' in setting policy and making decisions. To those who've been paying attention, this is pretty clearly a dig at the previous...
The Headline Is The Tale
Two headlines caught my eye this morning: "Why Vaccines Alone Will Not End The Pandemic" - The New York Times "COVID-19 will likely be with us forever. Here's how we'll live with it." - National Geographic Both articles were pay-walled, which means that most of those...
The Problem With Fascism
Fascism. It's a word that's becoming more and more common in the political sandbox. I see it used by people on the left side of our political aisle, and by people on the right side of our political aisle. Therein lies a problem: people cannot agree on what, exactly,...
First Impressions
Biden inaugurated his presidency with a bang, or more aptly, a torrent of executive orders, and in doing so, established a particular tone of governance. Sad to say, it's not what I had hoped, although I can't even remotely say I'm surprised. First off, he set about...
He’s Gone. Move On
Yesterday, Joe Biden got sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. In his acceptance speech, Biden spoke the word "unity/uniting" eleven times, and he declared that, We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative...
Power and the Purge
The Capitol riot is quite possibly the biggest gift the Democrats could have wished for, ahead of Biden's inauguration. It will be used to vilify the entirety of the Republican Party and its voters, no matter how horrified they were at the riot, no matter how overtly...
The Great Social Media Crackup
There was a man, of libertarian leanings, who found that he enjoyed talking politics. His business being business, he was a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, and in time found himself drawn to the editorials published daily therein. He soon discovered that the...
Cutting the Rungs
Way back in the day, which in modern measurement means the previous Presidential campaign, Democratic candidate were all of a mind on doubling the national minimum wage. That there is a mountain of scholarship explaining why this is a Bad Idea from an economic...
Mandated Moderation
I recently listened to a snippet of a Ben Shapiro interview with Amy Peikoff, Parler's chief policy officer, wherein the de-platforming of the site by Amazon was discussed. This, on the heels of listening to a legal-issues analysis that affirmed my belief that there...
House-Cleaning 101
As the Trump-impeachment movement gains steam, I am prompted to recall some relevant history. A bit of it older: The Republican Party basically telling Nixon "resign or we will impeach you." A bit of it more recent: my multiple blog posts this summer...
Striking a Blow For Liberty
A few years ago, the popular political narrative was all about Russia, Russia, Russia. Meanwhile, Trump warned us all of China. Turned out, despite the urge that many have to simply gainsay anything that came out of his mouth, Trump was right. China has proven to be a...
Big Tech’s Big Mistake
The political and cultural aftermath of the Capitol riot is already upon us, with Big Tech opting to 'cancel' the Parler social media platform that has become a go-to refuge for conservatives and Trumpists unhappy with Twitter's increasingly censorious ways. That I...
Fire Him!
The case for firing Donald Trump is an extension of an argument I've long made in these pages: impeachment should be "normalized." It should seem incredible that a man with control over nuclear weapons has less job performance accountability than a Starbucks barista....
Conservatives Against Liberty
Twitter's editorial bias in policing the content that flows through its service has been ruffling the Right's feathers for quite a while. The market responded, and Parler emerged as an alternative, with a promise of more freedom and less censorship. Google was...
One Failure To Rule Them All
The doer and the thinker, no allowance for the other - Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock A disinterested observer might conclude that there have been two Donald Trumps. There is the doer, someone who had some significant accomplishments during his Presidency. Some good,...
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COVID Mask Follies
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War Comes Through The Overton Window
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A Policy of Ignorance
Whence Morality?
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