Current Affairs
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This keeps showing up on the Google News page, and I keep wondering: why would anyone want to do this? Welcome to Google News Badges Collect private badges for your favorite topics. The more you read, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges…
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You know how sometimes you run across a news story that is simultaneously surprising and not surprising? You can't quite believe people could do wrong so boldly and persistently, and yet on some level you aren't really surprised. Well, the story of Atlanta teachers cheating on their students' standardized tests is one of those for…
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Sunday Night Journal — July 3, 2011 (I was going to write about something else today, but this is something I’ve been thinking about, and it’s appropriate for Independence Day, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way.) The term “culture war” in this country generally refers to the conflict…
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I said a couple of weeks ago that I thought Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the 2008 convention "served as a sort of test of whether one likes or dislikes middle-class evangelical Christians." (The post is here.) Interestingly, a writer at Vanity Fair has had a somewhat similar reaction to something discovered in that recent email…
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Sunday Night Journal — June 19, 2011 A few weeks ago I was having lunch with some relatives whom I don’t see very often. The conversation turned to politics, and as has been my habit for a good while now when people are discussing politics, I listened but didn’t speak. Eventually someone noticed this. “So…
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Only under conditions which are unlikely to be met. I agree with Simon about the war on drugs. I read the other day that Mexican drug gangs, who are in something close to a full-scale war, killing thousands, now have more or less permanent positions as much as fifty miles inside our border. At least we…
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I've often thought that Palin's speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2008 served as a sort of test of whether one likes or dislikes middle-class evangelical Christians. (White ones, I mean; black evangelicals are treated differently, though they are very much on the same page religiously.) If you basically like them, as I do, your…
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Talk of the English Reformation reminded me that a few days ago my web wanderings (which I really need to cut back on) brought me to this interesting post by a blogger who calls herself Neo-neocon. She's recently compared the 1970 BBC series "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" to a Showtime series about the Tudors. (Not sure…
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Click to read the whole strip. The strip is not political, but those first two frames capture an experience very familiar to most conservatives; if not racism, they’ll be accused of some related form of bigotry in almost any debate of a socio-political nature. The only good thing about the wildly indiscriminate charge of racism…
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Purporting to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, what [liberalism] really gives us is a diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism. This is from Edward Feser, quoted by Graeme Hunter in Touchstone, in a review of Feser's book the Last Superstion: A Refutation of the New Atheism. I gather…
Light On Dark Water 