The possible discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on the Fourth of July. Confused nerds feigned excitement. I yawned and threw another sausage on the grill. The Higgs boson is inarguably an important idea in High Energy Physics. It is also a deeply ironic idea. The irony requires some ...
In the abstract world of economic thought, certain abstract thinkers have come upon the idea that “stimulus” spending will cure what ails you. This pleasant bromide seems to have originated in the widely held myth that Hoover was an advocate of “austerity,” whereas FDR ...
Mitt Romney has gone on record with the crackpot idea that the Russians are America's “number one geopolitical foe.” To my knowledge, no noted Kremlinologists have bothered to weigh in on this topic, so it is left to me to untangle his curious word-pretzel. My credentials for this task ...
In these dark days of the republic, sourpusses abound. Less than a third of the country thinks it is on the right track. Unemployment is up, confidence is down, and the economy remains a disaster area. Nazis recently got 7% of the vote in Greece. Techno-masturbatoriums such as Facebook are touted ...
I’m not religious, nor am I a proponent of intelligent design (ID). But I am amused by alleged rationalists who think strident disbelief makes them enlightened primates rather than obnoxious atheistic evangelists. It interests me terribly that such people are so unhinged and emotional about ...
The modern age offers no refuge from the state. The world's habitable unpopulated regions are firmly under sovereign nations" regulation. There is still adventure to be had in the world, but there's no frontier, no place to carve out a new way of life free from the state's meddlings. Over the ...
In The Odyssey, Theoclymenus asks of Telemachus, "Among men, who are you? Tell me also of your city and parents." Old-fashioned folks who haven’t been poisoned by the current age will ask similar questions. The answers are generally more revealing than what passes for modern small ...
Intelligent people worry that our new “meritocratic” elite may become a hereditary caste. Charles Murray sees something ominous in the fact that for 25% of modern married couples, both partners have a college degree, whereas only 3% did in 1960. He and others worry that such assortative ...
Across the nation, the question resounds: “Are corporations people?” To a man of strict political principles this is obviously a yes or no question. But I’ve never been afflicted with anything resembling political principles, so I must resort to facts. The court case which ...
From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to ...
