Today isn’t just a day of space anniversaries. It’s also the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter. Jim Lacey has some thoughts.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Higher-Education Bubble
Thoughts from Peter Thiel.
The Supreme Dumbness
…of wearing a baseball cap backwards. It’s still not quite as stupid as pants with the belt below your butt, though. Each of these fashion atrocities reduces my estimation of the IQ of the offender by twenty points or so.
Thoughts On The Solar System
…and involuntary ant flights.
Black Flight
Thoughts on the abysmal failure of “liberal” social nostrums, and their particularly devastating effects on the urban black community, from Walter Russell Mead. The problem is that they’ll probably take their voting patterns with them to the new locales, ruining them as well.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Jim Crow roots of the Davis-Bacon Act.
The College Application Process
Thoughts on the insanity of it, from George Will. Though I beat Andrew Ferguson to this beat almost a decade ago.
Getting The Incentives Right
Enlightened women honoring gentlemen.
For quite a while, I’ve been thinking that we’ve lost the concept of a gentleman, to the point that the word has lost its meaning. It makes me crazy when I hear a newscaster say something absurd and with no apparent irony, like “…the gentleman who raped the young woman is still being sought by police.” Folks, it’s not just a synonym for “man.”
Battle: Los Angeles
Bill Whittle says go see it.
Blowing Up The Stereotypes
Those who favor big government are more racist than those who favor small government. In fact, the latter don’t seem to be very racist at all.
No one tell Ron Schiller. Or Janeane Garafalo.
The Fragility Of Complex Societies
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain.
Actually, many of them do favor decentralization and “appropriate” technology. But most of them also favor depopulation. And some of those favor it by whatever means are necessary.