Rebuilding Ozymandias
It cannot be said enough that one of the more important reasons that democracy has failed to thrive (to put it mildly) in post-Soviet Russia has been the unwillingness to confront the realities of...
View ArticleKoko Wants to Save the Earth!
Koko, the sign-language-talking gorilla, wants to save the earth! From the Daily Mail story:Koko was filmed delivering a 38-word bulletin about how ‘stupid’ mankind is harming the Earth.In the...
View ArticleStar Wars: The Saga Continues
From Fortune:You won’t have to wait long.You just saw The Force Awakens and want more next-gen Star Wars. Well, you’re going to get more. A lot more. Regularly and steadily, for many years to come. But...
View ArticleLife Chez Assad
What better way is there to ring in the new year than to read a column about the Assad family? Fun, fun, fun.At FoxNews.com, I have written about Bashar Assad. Who assumed power on the death of his...
View ArticleTrumpservations, Cont.
1) Donald Trump likes to brag about his Ivy League education — in part because he likes to brag about everything (and bragging, as we all know, is a classic conservative trait). Recently, he said, “I...
View ArticleHillarities
1) For years, we’ve pointed to statements by Barack Obama and said, “If George W. Bush had said that …” “If Ronald Reagan had said that …” “If Dan Quayle had said that …” “If Sarah Palin had said that...
View ArticleClimate Change: Do As They Do
One of the, uh, curious characteristics displayed by some of the more prominent climate evangelists is their failure to behave as if they believe that disaster is truly on the way: think of Al Gore’s...
View ArticleOne Intern and A Handful of Chefs: Omens of Good Times Ahead!
Still, I suspect, desperately spinning to protect its thesis that Angela Merkel, Germany’s worst postwar chancellor, is somehow “indispensable”, The Economist runs a piece describing some of the...
View ArticleThe Saudi Arabia/Iran Crisis Reminds Us -- In the Middle East, Things Can...
A day after it launched its latest decapitation spree — including executing a noted Shiite cleric — Saudi Arabia has severed diplomatic ties with Iran:Saudi Arabia severed relations with Iran on Sunday...
View ArticleParis’s Eerily Familar 1930s Immigrant Problem
The world’s most prolific author, the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, published a mock memoir in 1951, Les Mémoires de Maigret (English: Maigret’s Memoirs), which featured the ostensible recollections...
View ArticleMonday Links
This will get your first Monday morning of the year off to a rousing start: a supercut of people falling and landing on vehicles, set to the cannon-punctuated finale of the “1812 Overture.”What do the...
View ArticleNew(est) Evidence on the Minimum Wage
University of California, San Diego economists Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither released a novel working paper about a year ago in which they estimated the effect of the minimum wage increases...
View ArticleIf Terror Group al-Shabaab Cites Trump in Their Video… So What?
From the first Morning Jolt of 2016:If Terror Group al-Shabaab Cites Trump in Their Video… So What?Yesterday morning, Trump fumed that the media’s coverage of a new video from an al-Qaeda affiliated...
View ArticleRubio: Obama Gave a ‘Despicable Speech’ After San Bernardino
This morning, at an American Legion in Hooksett, New Hampshire, Marco Rubio gave what his campaign called an “address on national security in the 21st Century.” (When your guy talks to an audience,...
View ArticleDr. Bennett Is In
I didn’t intend to record a series, but it has turned out that way. First, Dr. (Charles) Murray was in. (Here.) Then Dr. (Charles) Krauthammer was in. (Here.) Now we have Bill Bennett, Dr. William J....
View ArticleWinter Essays
The new year is here, and with it the Winter 2016 issue of National Affairs, packed with thoughtful essays about policy, political thought, and American public life. Among the offerings in this...
View ArticleDeep into Our Past, and Enduring
In Impromptus today, I talk about Michael Walsh’s new book: The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. This book provoked a thousand thoughts in me. I...
View ArticleHas the FDA Seen the Light on Expediting Its Drug-Approval Process?
The New York Times has a story about how an FDA regulator’s wife’s tragic fight against cancer opened his eyes to the need to speed up the process for drug approval:In her struggle with cancer and...
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Dear 'Male Feminists,' Leftist Women Hate You
Thanks to Instapundit, I came across this priceless cartoon, first published in Feministing and then tweeted out by Planned Parenthood:Take it all in. While some of the panels refer pretty clearly to...
View ArticleRobert Jackson on Sharia v. the Constitution
I’ve been working my way through my friend Steve Coughlin’s invaluable new book, Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad (which I discussed a bit in this recent column on the...
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