My first exposure to Straussian ideas was in college via a photocopy handout of passages from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. It was an eerie experience. The instructor seemed nervous, as if we were Soviet dissidents passing around samizdat literature. It was somewhat ...
This is the time of year when we celebrate the national religion of consumerism. Future archeologists might presume we were propitiating some kind of subterranean god by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of consumer items and burying them underground a few years later. Planned ...
The F-35 is the latest marvel brought to us by the military-industrial complex. It’s presently years behind deployment schedule. It is also the most expensive military procurement program in American history. The projected cost of an F-35 will go as high as $185 million if you believe the ...
The present European financial crisis seems absurdly complicated to the outside observer as well as to some inside observers. But the reality is fairly simple if you look at it the right way: Leave all ideology and economic theory aside, follow the money, and count things. In finance, we have this ...
A few years ago I received a telephone call from a college fundraising creep looking for a handout. I don’t have any money to spare, but I innocently inquired how they’d use my hypothetical contribution. The first thing that came to her mind was their new Hindu Department. Since I’m ...
Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. ...
One of the things I miss about academia is the spectacle of alleged savants fighting like a couple of sandbox toddlers. Thanks to the Internet, such crass entertainments are available whenever I miss working with geeks. Consider the recent Richard Dawkins Elevatordämmerung. Our protagonist in this ...
While I’m all for increased awareness of modern America’s sexual dimorphism crisis, we face a much more serious problem—one from which all other social problems emanate like a nasty bathroom smell. I’m talking about the lack of adults in America today. The concept of adolescence was ...
“Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu.” La Rochefoucauld was right. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. More to the point, virtue deserves tribute. I tire of nincompoops raising a quivering finger at folks whose morality may not be 100% consistent. I grow ...
The Detroit RoboCop statue is a fitting cenotaph for the end of America, a goofy metal monument to everything wrong with the country. Funded by “new economy” Internet nerds and a company which takes its name from the cornball 80s movie, it will festoon the capital of America’s ...
