James Poulos

As Terry McAuliffe’s lamprey-like campaign for Virginia Governor begins to — pinch me, I’m dreaming — detach from the host as actual politician Creigh Deeds pulls ahead, let the record show what a walking talking dirty $1 bill thinks high office is: As governor, I don’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Rarely does a web piece touting a bad idea prompt a lone comment in which that idea is conclusively dismissed. But sometimes . . . . . . . Continue Reading »

The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. That from a study forwarded along to Richard Florida by Cambridge ‘personality psychologist’ Jason Rentfrow. Dig deeper, and the following . . . . Continue Reading »

The most important theme, I’d say, in the below. . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and . . . . Continue Reading »

Prof. John Hasnas is an excellent seminar leader, and, like Conor , I cheer on his clearsighted reiteration of the kinds of blindness to future or systemic consequences that a viscerally emotional approach to jurisprudence can bring. Yet Bastiat, whom Hasnas cites, seems to me vulnerable to perhaps . . . . Continue Reading »

The skill in desire and aversion is knowing how to preserve the practical self from dissolution. — OAKESHOTT As will one day be elaborated in a dissertation, Machiavelli’s eponymous Prince lived — and killed — by surfeit of this virtu ; Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet . . . . Continue Reading »

So it’s official — GM’s bankrupt. Bring on the PR campaign. Actually, don’t; the agency entrusted with giving Americans “permission to believe” in GM again (as one of the Morning Joe heads just said) is the same bunch of geniuses who embarrassed GM with its . . . . Continue Reading »

I’d been sure I’d had the final word on Mark Levin, but with Daniel and Richard Spencer [UPDATE: and Clark Stooksbury ] now falling on — and firing across — opposite sides of the Levin fallout, the bizarre-o-meter has jumped into the red zone. Past the closing sequences of . . . . Continue Reading »

At the Scene, Dara makes a point I start out being quite sympathetic toward: We allow the people making law to represent their constituents — in fact, we generally encourage them to resemble their constituents and celebrate their own biographies — but we deny the same sort of personality . . . . Continue Reading »