Hydrogen Trumps Lithium
Back in my college days, a good friend and I would theorize endlessly about how the world would change when "cheap fusion" finally gets figured out. Of course, as I sit here, four decades later, cheap fusion is still "just a couple decades away," but some of its...
No Social. No Justice. No Warriors.
"Left" political ideology has more regard for utility than principles. That utility is found in its language. George Orwell, this blog's spiritual father, is the most important teacher of how politics uses the tools of language to serve it, rather than the language's...
A Lousy Nit To Pick
We now have a new national holiday. "Juneteenth," a celebration of the emancipation of slaves in America that has been celebrated informally or at the state/local level since 1866 , was formalized by the government a few days ago, and we just celebrated the first...
Slaves To The State
If you dabble in political sandboxes, you are likely familiar with the term "intelligentsia." It's been around a couple centuries, if Wikipedia is to be trusted for that datum, and it speaks to both a category of people and to disdain for them. Or, at least, disdain...
Why So Twitter?
Twitter is an interesting place. It is a conduit for the id, where people routinely convert their in-the-moment gut reactions into permanent records (the bogeyman of countless school kids of generations past), far too often with regrets and apologia. Despite...
Liberty, Schools, and Critical Race Theory
We are witnessing a growing battle over public education curricula, with parents decrying the adoption of the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and the cultural Marxism that has become de mode in academia and amongst woke-pedagogues, revolts against and...
Conclusion Institutions
Postmodernist "thinking" and metaphysical obstinacy aside, there are such things as facts. A hydrogen atom has one proton. Gravity varies in an inverse-square fashion. The sky is blue and water is wet (and if you want to argue about those two points, just... stop)....
The Woke Rackets
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket. Thus wrote* social philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1967. Its truth could not be more timely, no matter that it was written half a century ago. Regular readers know I've...
The Great Firewall
The Ascendancy of China in American Culture Few people would disagree that the last two years have changed American society more than any entire generation in our country's history. In my opinion, that includes the decades of the Great Depression and World War II,...
Criminal Delusion
The other day, US Marshals attempted to apprehend a man who had a warrant out for being a felon in possession of a firearm. According to reports, the man refused to surrender, and either brandished or actually fired a firearm at the marshals, who shot him dead. While...
Curated Outrage
Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to the end of Israel as a nation, started shooting rockets into Israel a few weeks ago. Israel responded. After a few thousand rockets and a death toll that, depending on who's reporting, numbers from dozens to hundreds, a...
Rights And Their Burdens
A pastor I know of has had to abandon an important sermon, "everything is accepted, while nothing is forgiven". It wasn't because the Deacons found the subject matter too challenging or inappropriate. This does happen, by the way. My dad, who grew up in Virginia in...
Property Wars
Our current cultural clash, the conflict between the progressives (see: moving forward) who see our society as so fractured it has to be torn down en-toto (in favor of... wait for it... a century-old idea that killed a hundred million people) and the incrementalists...
Knowing IS The Problem
Editor's Note: This is a follow-up to Death By Procedure, which explored the adverse impact of our tortious culture on the pandemic response, and Incentives Matter, wherein we see that the pandemic was subordinate to political gamesmanship. New York Governor Andrew...
Gaslighting Capitalists
Our economy is recovering from the pandemic, thanks to human innovation (see: vaccines developed in months, not a decade), and without the need for massive, debt-fueled government "stimulus." Indeed, and as is so often the case, much that government does and has done...
COVID, Candy, Cigarettes, and Choice
Sixteen months ago, the World Health Organization announced a 'Mysterious Coronavirus-Related Pneumonia in Wuhan, China.' We all know what happened next. And by that I mean chaos, confusion, conflicting information, tendentious reporting (in multiple directions),...
Incentives Matter
Editor's Note: This is a follow-up to Death By Procedure, which explored the adverse impact of our tortious culture on the pandemic response. Incentives matter. Since everything in America now seems to be all about politics, it should follow that what is done by our...
Four Decades of Failure
Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently reintroduced HR899, a bill that stated, in its entirety: This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2020. He's updated the year to 2022, but otherwise left it as-is. Of course, the Internet had its...
Policy and Experts
Back when he was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (Best of the Web Today) instead of editing it, James Taranto had a daily feature called "What Would We Do Without Experts?" It, clearly, mocked absurd expert opinions, and reminded us that...
Menthol Madness
It didn't take America very long to figure out that alcohol prohibition was a bad idea. The Volstead Act, which took effect in 1920 to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, was repealed, via the Twenty-First Amendment, in 1933. Prohibitionists being who and what they are,...
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