Thoughts on the current health-care mess from Walter Russell Mead.
The True Bullies
Mark Steyn says it’s time to stand up to them. Well, he showed how it’s done in Canada.
[Mid-morning update]
Don’t retreat an inch in the culture war:
I’ve built much of my career around free-speech litigation. I’ve championed mostly the rights of conservatives, but during my tenure as president of FIRE I also worked on a strictly nonpartisan basis — protecting left and right. By my rough estimate, I’ve personally worked on well over 200 free-speech cases and public controversies. And here’s what I’ve found:
When it comes to law, we almost never lose. When it comes to the culture, we rarely win.
Conservatives — especially conservative Christians — used to treat the boos and the jeers with shock and dismay. Today — especially for the young — there is less shock and more assimilation.
Social pressure can be even more powerful than laws.
What Didn’t The President Know?
…and when didn’t he know it? Some thoughts on President Amnesia.
Creativity
Most people, and particularly teachers, don’t like it much.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think that this is one of the reasons that people can’t let go of the Apollo cargo cult. They see doing it in any other way as too risky, even though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the big-rocket approach is unaffordable.
The Unhidden Anti-Semitism
…of the (un)American Studies Association:
On our troubled globe, where states do truly terrible things to their people, gassing them, slaughtering them en masse, impoverishing and immiserating them, I am aware of only one country whose continued existence has been called into question. Should Zimbabwe exist? Or Sudan? Or Syria? Only Israel is subjected to constant questioning of its right to remain a nation. Israel, a sliver of a country surrounded by tyrannical regimes or perpetually unstable governments, free for the moment from war because of strength and not because of neighborly goodwill, this Israel is the target of the opprobrium of preening academics the world over. The question is not whether members of the ASA are anti-Semites, as individuals. All this is not because the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely evil. It is just uniquely Jewish.
Yup.
You Can’t Possibly Mean That!
Some good advice for the culture war against the original Alinskyites.
Because they can’t really handle their own medicine.
The Lions
Man, they sure imploded at season end. Now I don’t have to care if the Bears win.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, watching the Eagles dismantle the Bears just makes the Lion’s implosion more painful.
Obama’s Average Year
Worse than last year, better than next.
Fountain Of Youth
Wow. Looks like they’re going to start human trials of that mouse-rejuvenation treatment next year.
The societal impacts of this would be enormous.
World War III?
Are we reliving the build up to World War I?
Hard to believe that war was almost a century ago now. My paternal grandfather fought in it.