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Do Yourself A Favor

See if you can find a clip of Senator Ted Cruz taking apart Chuck Hagel today.  Hagel  came off incredibly shifty and dishonest, while Cruz showed that being rhetorically tough doesn’t mean being bombastic or rude.  Something about Cruz’s calm, unforced courtesy made the . . . . Continue Reading »

Economy Notes From A Total Amateur

Consider yourself warned, 1. It turns out we had slow economic growth last quarter. Actually worse than that. It appears that the economy actually shrank a bit - though the GDP estimates are approximations so we might actually have merely had very slow growth. I’ve read somewhere that a sharp . . . . Continue Reading »

The Southern Class War in Higher Education

So someone just send me this . It portrays me as the southern Stoic gentleman opposed to the Snopesy (or the money-grubbing populist) governor. But the opposition is overdrawn, of course. I don’t think anyone should major in gender studies or most stuff ending in studies either. Still, . . . . Continue Reading »

Parents, Let Your Teens Be Adults

Your teenage “kids” are probably a lot more competent than they seem, according to psychologist Robert Epstein. But a raft of laws and regulations (compulsory education, labor restrictions, a separate juvenile justice system) and an ever-growing consumer sector have needlessly delayed . . . . Continue Reading »

The Interbreeding Heaven

My friend Anne Barbeau Gardiner writes in the last issue of the New Oxford Review  about an article by Richard Dawkins, published in the English newspaper The Guardian in 2009, on the ramifications of creating a human-chimpanzee hybrid. It offers the usual anti-humanist dream. In the article , . . . . Continue Reading »

Meanwhile, in Ireland

In a story that seems equal parts Father Ted * and The   Boondock Saints , three young men robbed an Irish monsignor and his housekeeper on Monday evening in a flurry of hammer-waving, cross-signing,   and warm Gaelic hospitality: One of the raiders, who spoke with a Traveller and Dublin . . . . Continue Reading »

Re: A New Conversation

David  and Rusty , I think you’re exactly right about the new IAV manifesto. Because of what you point out—the manifesto says good things but will nonetheless have negative rather than positive consequences for marriage—this could be a fruitful dialogue opportunity. The . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Square Today

Russell E. Saltzman on finding his inner gun owner : I am getting in touch with my inner gun owner, that primal part of my reptilian brain that says “I must weaponize.” Blame it on the Obama administration, I say. The president’s proposals of firearm abatement got me thinking: If I . . . . Continue Reading »

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