Steve Sailer pierces the veil.

One other reason is to discriminate against African-Americans when advertising for a nanny. Putting in a foreign language requirement is a legal way to state No African-Americans Need Apply.

Interestingly enough, I read an article many years ago that postulated that the classic Southern accent came about because so many Southern white kids were effectively raised by black nannies, and the African-influenced version of English that they imparted gradually mutated into what we know today. This, of course, may account for why Negro dialect sounds ‘southern’ to most non-Southerners.

Steve Sailer pulls no punches.

Four decades into the feminist era, the number one movie at the box office is Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, in which Eighties action heroes blow stuff up. Right behind is Julia Roberts’ Eat, Pray, Love, in which a divorcée expensively feels sorry for herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia. (Iowa, Indiana, and Idaho presumably being all booked up.)

When depressed about the intellectual flaccidity of the 21st Century, I cheer myself up by noting that nobody wholly subscribes to feminist orthodoxy anymore. Most people can now admit that social conditioning isn’t what differentiates the sexes; instead, it’s the only hope of their ever getting along civilly. When allowed to indulge their inner fantasies, however, as incarnated in movies such as The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love, the sexes barely seem to inhabit the same planet.

The glossy lifestyles portrayed in chick flicks always raise the question, “How can she afford that?” Yet, money goes unmentioned as unromantic. That reminds me of the 1970s when I was repeatedly told that free agency would make pro sports unpopular by exposing tawdry fiscal matters. Money talk, though, just made pro sports even more popular.

In my experience, women are extremely interested in how much things cost. I suspect that, just as men like talking about LeBron James’ contract, women would enjoy a romance movie that dishes on how much the heroine is shelling out.

Michael Rubin lays it out.

When Iran develops nuclear weapons, determining their command-and-control will become America’s overriding intelligence objective. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric shocks the West. Would he control the bomb? Not likely. In the Islamic Republic, the president is subordinate to the supreme leader. Khamenei may be the ultimate political authority in Iran, but will an aide carrying launch codes generated daily shadow him day and night? Equally unlikely; the ayatollah allows no aide so close.

Possession is 90% of the law. And in that sense, on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which will “own” the arsenal – will control it. This is no comfort: Not only do the Revolutionary Guards contain Iran’s most radical ideologues, but they also remain effectively a big, black box to Western analysts.

Read it.

What you see there is basically the result of a century or so of “bolting on” new licenses due to changes in the market, rather than any concerted effort to look at whether or not the underlying laws or licenses make sense. It’s the result of massive regulatory capture, as industries unwilling to change just run to the gov’t and demand to be compensated even as their old business models are going away. At what point do people say it’s time to scrap this mess and start from scratch?

Read it.

Career guides try to distill jobs into basic components. “Work hard and get ahead.” “Be your own advocate.” That sort of thing.

But anyone who’s been in an office for a while knows that human interaction undermines those components. The real trick — and it takes a long time to learn this — is realizing the work system isn’t a system at all. It’s an arbitrary and ever-changing rule set that often pushes reason to the sidelines.

Freeberg trudges through the muck of the New York mosque affair.

The problem with that is, that if these people were as good at logical thought as they claimed to be, they’d not only recognize this as ad hominem but they’d recognize the reason  honest people frown on ad hom: It’s all bullshit because it’s all irrelevant. If you’re caught being wrong about something, it means — nothing. Intelligent people are wrong. Decent people are wrong. Honest people are wrong. You don’t have to wait long to see it happen.

Stupid people often turn out to be right. Let’s pause here and carefully define exactly what I’m saying: Glittering personal attributes are not reverse-barometers of good ideas. That would be a silly thing to say. They are irrelevant, or mostly irrelevant.

And so a sound debate will revolve around the ideas. Not the character of the people who are debating them.

Intelligent, honest people do not argue a point by shunning, and that is a primary characteristic of shunning — that it is contagious, that it cascades. This is how you know you are in the presence of an intellectual lightweight. You are to be shunned, whoever does not shun you shall be shunned, whoever does not shun he who failed to shun you, shall likewise be shunned. These are signs of a big mouth coupled up with a weak mind.

Politics have become contentious, because this has become our chosen technique for discussing them: ostracism, alienation, excoriation, derision, all of it spread by contact. And I blame our most strident liberals. I think that’s fair. And the “green light people” at the center of this particular issue, represent the most brilliant example of why I think this way. They have created the situation in which the rest of us are living, and we have been allowing them to create it.

Read it.

“My thesis,” Boehm says, “is that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather, egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings” (9-10). A society can have an “egalitarian hierarchy” in which the subordinates use sanctions–such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or execution–to restrain “politically ambitious individuals, those with special learned or innate propensities to dominate.” In every society, there will be leaders in some form. But an egalitarian society will allow only “a moderate degree of leadership” (154).

He’s at it again.

50 years ago, Detroit was a thriving metropolis, the fourth largest city in America. It had no presentiments whatsoever of any imminent disaster. Today it is a burned-out ruin, more or less. This is the sort of objective phenomenon that, if you’re a student of history, you can’t help but try to explain.

When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants’ money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants’ perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.

San Francisco’s public school system, which literally assigns children randomly around the city to aid in the great cause of social homogenization – a cause which makes the war in Afghanistan look like an unqualified success – causes immense headaches, costs or both to the very same social class which sets the public policies of San Francisco. Yet they accept it with hardly a murmur.

Peasants see a patron-client relationship between the gentlemen and the varlets – a relationship not at all unlike the late Roman relationship of clientela, where a patrician measured his social status by the vast army of plebeians that battened on his trenches. Again, what to the gentleman appears as a noble act of charity, compassion, etc, to the coarse and cynical peasant reveals itself as a purchase of political power, with his tax dollars if not his physical safety. Therefore a vision of the gallows arises in his hindbrain.

As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Read it.

It’s struck me in my studies that the Progressives and America’s Founding Fathers are on the polar extremes of two very important issues: the nature of man and the role of government. And if you’re coming from two diametrically opposite worldviews, it of course leads to opposite conclusions. The problems we face today are a direct result of the fact that Progressive beliefs and the Founders’ beliefs, as found in the Declaration and Constitution, are like oil and water: they will never mix.

Read it.

We can’t meaningfully discuss virtue without recourse to ideas of honor, for honor itself is grounded in the recognition of performed excellence. Achilles took the idea so seriously that he was willing to let the Achaeans be slaughtered rather than bear the offense. He was not unjustified in doing so, for Agamemnon’s actions overturned the whole social order. The destruction of the interconnection between virtue as a public excellence and honor as its rightful recognition exacts enormous social costs.

Where honor perfects virtue, it creates deep ties between the participants in a mutual social order. Honoring one’s parents is, after all, the only one of the 10 Commandments that carries with it a promise – in this case, the maintenance of a stable and enduring social order. It need not be thought of in patrician terms, and becomes inordinately difficult to sustain as the size of the social order expands.

The first is endemic to the Dutch immigrant community in which I was raised and in which I live. I suspect a similar phenomenon will exist in other subcultures. It goes by the name of “Dutch Bingo.” Whenever we find ourselves in conversation with someone with an obviously Dutch last name, we immediately attempt to seek out persons with whom we are mutually connected or, barring that, to discuss known public figures of the community and start tracing their various connections through birth and marriage. It is a fun game and fairly innocent. I am not without skill at it, but I recently spent a riveting afternoon in the company of two true virtuosos. One of these virtuosi, a keen observer of human behavior, smartly pointed out to me that such games become more important as group identity becomes more fragile or threatened through assimilation. It holds off anonymity, and perhaps even anomie. The benefits of the game are obvious, and the costs seem low. No one is really harmed by such conversations.

People in the military do this habitually. The first thing one does at a new duty station is start finding out who you know that your new shipmates also know. (If you’ve been in for three our four years, you’ll only be about two or three degrees of separation away from anyone in your specialty.) It even works in civilian life — when I arrived at Indiana for law school I met a guy in the University Science Fiction club who had just gotten out; he had been on the Yarnell, the usual Task Group escort for my ship, the Kennedy, and his LPO had been a First Class ET who had been my LPO on the Kennedy. It’s a small world, if you let it be.

Steve Sailer will discuss anything, anything at all.

For one thing, how much do blacks want to act white?

As far as I can tell, blacks, on the whole, have a blast being black.

They not only like being black, they like to talk about being black with other blacks. They have one of the more homogeneous cultures in the world, in part because they are constantly discussing being black with each other.

Sounds like being black is like belonging to the world’s largest Frat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The reigning theory is that white culture will rub off on blacks by osmosis, but there is precious little evidence to back it up. Indeed, exposure to white people just makes blacks focus more on their blackness.

So much for modern theories of ‘assimilation’. Black people have been in America for four hundred years; if they aren’t assimilating, what are the chances of Latinos doing so? (Of course, Latinos are fond of pointing out that they were here first; which claim I’d take more seriously if more of them spoke Nahuatl or Athapascan rather than, oh, say, that native American language Spanish.)

Instead of blacks competing for white approval, whites today compete with each other over how much they approve of blacks.

Not surprisingly, that doesn’t do much to improve black behavior.

Hey, life is full of hardship.

Read it.

An overweight man, Brian Machin, was arrested for unlawful killing after sitting on and suffocating a carjacker trying to steal his vehicle, an inquest heard.

The case was eventually dropped because prosecutors could not “establish that the force used was excessive”.

On Tuesday Ian Smith, the North Staffordshire Coroner, recorded a verdict of accidental death.

Read it.

A lot of truth here.

Tim Cavanaugh points out some Inconvenient Truth.

A tax system that’s both fairer and better? What’s not to like? Well, here’s one thing: The proper role of taxation is not to promote fairness or equality or social engineering. It is to raise revenue to fund the appropriate functions of government. Nowhere in his argument does Surowiecki ask whether tax hikes on the idle rich actually raise more revenues. It’s a good question to avoid, because they don’t.

Read it.

Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

Read it.

Class warfare is trickier than it looks.

Read it.

A “Potemkin village” has come to mean “any deliberate construct which lacks actual substance, but is cynically designed to fool others into thinking it is real”. As the modern bureaucratic welfare state has metastasized into the gargantuan tumor that it is today, the incidence of Potemkin-like behaviors has increased exponentially. The more labyrinthine the bureaucracy, the more opportunities for its functionaries to set up false fronts to fool their superiors — or the public they ostensibly serve.

Read it.

Pundits, planners and urban visionaries—citing everything from changing demographics, soaring energy prices, the rise of the so-called “creative class,” and the need to battle global warming—have been predicting for years that America’s love affair with the suburbs will soon be over. Their voices have grown louder since the onset of the housing crisis. Suburban neighborhoods, as the Atlantic magazine put it in March 2008, would morph into “the new slums” as people trek back to dense urban spaces.

But the great migration back to the city hasn’t occurred. Over the past decade the percentage of Americans living in suburbs and single-family homes has increased. Meanwhile, demographer Wendell Cox’s analysis of census figures show that a much-celebrated rise in the percentage of multifamily housing peaked at 40% of all new housing permits in 2008, and it has since fallen to below 20% of the total, slightly lower than in 2000.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

When libertarians read Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform, they will frequently nod with approval when Brinkley refers to some faction within the Roosevelt Administration as “statists.” Just bear in mind that for Brinkley, that term is not derogatory.

Steve Sailor discusses White Guilt.

Personally, I don’t think we need particularly sophisticated psychological theories about “white guilt.” I haven’t noticed many people particularly wracked by personal guilt over race. Instead, it’s more an effective tool for people to get what they want from other people, money, power, admiration, or to reassure themselves that they are better than other people. For lots of people, the mentality of white guilt is simply the substance in which they swim, and they are no more inclined to stop and think about it than a fish thinks about water.

Read it.

In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen.

As Reagan so famously said, there are simple answers to these problems, just not easy ones. These simple answer typically boil down to: Keep government bureaucrats away from the economy (taxes and regulations), and people will amaze you with what they can do.

Read it.

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

Read it.

Atom bombs
Can come true
It could happen to you
If you piss us off….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Obviously, the main reason “black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa” is not because Africa isn’t “authentic.” That’s just laughable. Granted, it’s too much to expect Obama to admit that the main reason African American tourists like him are prone to disappointment with Africa is because it is disappointing. They go hoping to see what the black man has accomplished without the white man holding him down, and, well … (For an honest discussion, see the 1998 book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg, who was the Washington Post’s Nairobi-based chief African correspondent from 1991-1994.)

Yet, why did Obama feel compelled to bring this question up and feature Rukia’s nonsensical answer so prominently as the Climactic Insight of His Life? Because her answer, ridiculous as it is, at least validates the central concern of Obama’s existence: to prove he’s black enough. If even Africans in Africa aren’t authentic, as this learned African scholar says, then his being half-white and brought up in a wholly non-black environment doesn’t disqualify him from being a black leader.

Read it.

No field of human endeavor is so pointless or obscure that somebody somewhere won’t spend time and money on it.

Read it.

One of the best takedowns of modern American culture I’ve ever encountered.

Read it.

In theory a ‘political futures market’ ought to be as accurate as it’s possible to be, but I’ve not seen any in-depth analysis of such markets nor any tracking of their prediction histories. They only show up, as here, when an election looms and the market predicts good news for one side or the other.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I’ve put here on your handout. I’ll just read it. “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.”  The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”

An awful lot of theories in evolutionary psychology, for instance, are tested by giving questionnaires to UC Santa Barbara students.

Read it. And watch the video.

The idea is to make use of the space between regular-size cars and bridges, thus saving construction costs as well as minimizing congestion impact by allowing cars to drive underneath these jumbo buses.

Freeberg nails it once again. ‘Christian In Name Only’ is a beautiful term for a very ugly thing.

And he nails Anne Rice in passing:

One, she’s a revolving-door-slammer. And I think you know perfectly well what I mean by that. “I’m out” means a cessation of interest, and I would expect so accomplished a writer to string together some words more in keeping with her true sentiment. She’s not out. She seeks to use shame to shape and mold something into her way of thinking.

The other thing I don’t like is that it reminds me of Meghan McCain. Yes, I’m comparing a literary giant to a bubble head. Because it fits. Anne Rice is doing to Christianity precisely what McCain has been doing to the Republican party.

It is a destructive thing to say “I love this thing over here and want to be part of it…I think it’s just adorable…and so it disappoints me when it doesn’t tolerate everything like I think it should.” To require an object to tolerate everything, even things that are injurious to it, is destructive to that object. It really doesn’t matter if the destruction is intended or not. Everything cannot tolerate everything. That’s just the way the universe works.

Preach it, brother.

In order to be a Christian:

1. It’s not enough to call yourself a Christian, any more than calling yourself a Navy SEAL or a Congressman makes you one.

2. It’s not enough to talk like you think a Christian ought to talk, if you’re not saying the same things that real Christians are saying (and have said for two thousand years).

3. It’s not enough to believe what you think Christ wants you to believe if that’s not what the people who were taught by Christ  believe.

4. It’s not enough to dress up like a Christian, as the Episcopal Church is demonstrating in painful detail.

5. It’s not enough to ‘be a Christian in your own way’ if your way is not His Way.

6. It’s not enough to pick and choose your beliefs from what you happen to like among the variety of tasty offerings, like ingredients at a salad bar.

Just like creating a simulacrum of an airfield with a mock control tower and fake hangers won’t bring you any cargo, so creating a crude parody of Christianity that kinda sorta looks like Christianity if you close your eyes and wish real hard won’t bring you any salvation.

Read the New Testament. It was written by people who either knew Christ in the flesh or were taught by those who knew Christ in the flesh. Accept that they know about being Christian than you possibly ever could. If what you believe is inconsistent with what was taught by people who knew Christ or were taught by those who knew Christ, then you aren’t a Christian, and you’re not fooling anybody but yourself.

Read it.

Megan McArdle likes to dive deep into a topic that may seem eccentric.

We seem to be in a situation where we are systematically depriving employers of any potential information about employees.  This is both bad for businesss, which end up with unnecessary turnover, and bad for employees, because it results in the use of less accurate proxies that aren’t banned.  As Alex Tabarrok pointed out, banning inquiries about criminal history is likely to result in (illegal, but harder to detect) racial discrimination.  Imposing liability for truthful bad references results in the use of things like FICO scores.  And banning FICO scores–well, it may not be a good proxy, but what are bosses likely to use instead?

Ladies!

If you should have a large piece of furniture, and if that large piece of furniture should have doors with hinges, and if for some good and sufficient reason you should decide to remove those doors, and if the removal of said doors leaves you with a number of loose screws that might be wanted again some day, then the thing to do is to put them in a ziplock bag and store them with the doors, preferably by fastening them to the inside of one of the doors with rigger’s tape, so that some gentleman friend in the future when called upon to re-attach said doors will have the relevant screws near to hand and will not be required to poke around in the four hundred little drawers containing various fasteners that you have cunningly placed in your garage. This will make life easier for all concerned.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

One argument against is that black men are more likely to have criminal backgrounds and thus these criminal background checks discriminate against black men.  Let’s put aside the normative issues. What’s surprising is that under plausible circumstances criminal background checks can lead to an increase in the employment of black men. The reason is that without the background check employers face a risk that their employees are ex-cons. If employers are very averse to hiring ex-cons then they will seek to reduce this risk and one way of doing so is by not hiring any black men. As a result, a background check allows non ex-cons to distinguish themselves from the pack and to be hired. Furthermore, when background checks exist, non ex-cons know that they will not face statistical discrimination and thus have an increased incentive to invest in skills.

Read it.

It is considered something of a rude question, nevertheless I think it fair to ask why 90% of all economists missed the coming of the current disaster. One doesn’t wish to judge too harshly. After all, everyone makes mistakes, even scientists. And if economic science missed this one, it wouldn’t be fair to use such a mistake to call into question the whole science. None of us would wish to be judged by one mistake. Should we not extend the same courtesy to economic scientists?

The problem, however, is that the same 90% of all economists also missed the last crises, and the one before that as well, and before that, and so on. In fact, their record of being able to diagnose and treat economic problems is about zero. And their prescriptions always seem to be counterproductive: the recommendations to limit government always make it grow, their advice on limiting taxation always makes it more, their prescriptions on growing the economy only leads to the illusory growth of bubbles, etc. Put it this way: If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.

Freeberg says it best.

More and more, it looks to me like this: Shirley Sherrod spent 43 minutes lying about her motives and what she’s been learning on the job, and Brietbart unfairly played a few bits out of context, the ones where she told the truth about herself.

I’m tired of the duplicity. I’m tired of being told Sarah Palin is malicious because some stalking pervert moved in next door to her. I’m tired of being told just because someone can be called a victim of something and she happens to have dark skin, and a chestless jackal for a former boss, that her motives must be pure.

In fact, there are other crackpots and nutjobs in the mix as well. I’ve had it to here with the “because”-es. I’m fed up with being told Elena Kagan will be a great Associate Justice because she’s funny. Rush Limbaugh is evil because he’s rich. Dick Cheney deserves to die because he ran Halliburton. The Gulf oil spill is in good hands because Stephen Chu has a Nobel prize.

Read it.

Read it.

Indians have a bit more focus on this problem than Americans do.

Joe Wickert looks at a very interesting question.

I’m buying ebooks almost exclusively now.  In fact, I can’t even recall the last print book I bought for myself.  Although I ditched my Kindle on day one with my iPad, I do most of my book reading in the Kindle app on the iPad.  Although Amazon has a major selection advantage of the iBookstore, Apple will catch up at some point.  Then there’s B&N and Borders.  Both of them have iPad apps and ebook stores.  And don’t forget about Google and their upcoming Editions program as well a host of other up-and-coming e-tailers.

What products and services can an e-tailer offer to earn your repeat business?  Or, with all these stores just a click away, are we less likely to remain loyal to only one or two of them?

Freeberg nails it.

Yeah, that there is pretty much my textbook definition of a bad idea.

Concur. But wait, there’s more.

It’s an abandonment of history. And that brings many perils. It’s a manifestation of a younger generation that is disinterested in what came before — they want all the things that will consume their attention, to be positioned for that consumption behind a narrow selection of avenues. They want comfort as they supposedly broaden their horizons; more comfort than can be realized while one is truly broadening one’s horizons.

Read it. And read it again. You may even need to read it a third or fourth time. Don’t be shy.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

Putting it as directly as I can, I believe we may be living at a time when we are watching Protestantism, at least the kind of Protestantism we have in America, come to an end. It is dying of its own success. Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end reinforced by belief in the common sense of the individual. As a result Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world. Ironically the feverish fervency of the religious right in America to sustain faith as a necessary condition for supporting democracy cannot help but be a strategy that ensures the faith that is sustained is not the Christian faith.

I try to help Americans see that the story that they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story is their story by asking them this question — “Do they think they ought to be held accountable for decisions they made when they did not know what they were doing?” They do not think they should be held accountable for decisions they made when they did not know what they were doing. They do not believe they should be held accountable because it is assumed that you should only be held accountable when you acted freely, and that means you had to know what you were doing.

Of course the problem with the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story is that story is a story that you have not chosen. But Americans do not have the ability to acknowledge that they have not chosen the story that they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. As a result they must learn to live with decisions they made when they thought they knew what they were doing but later realized they did not know what they were doing. Of course they have a remedy when it comes to marriage. It is called divorce. They also have a remedy for children. It is called abortion.

Read it.

1. It is the nature of things that man does not have a legal problem with God. That is to say, the nature of our problem is not forensic. The universe is not a law-court.

2. It is the nature of things that Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live. This is to say that the nature of our problem is not moral but existential or ontological. We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.

3. It is the nature of things that human beings were created to live through communion with God. We were not created to live as self-sufficient individuals marked largely by our capacity for choice and decision. To restate this: we are creatures of communion, not creatures of consumption.

The nature of things is that people die – and not only do they die – but death, already at work in them from the moment of their birth, is the primary issue. The failure of humanity is not to be found or understood in a purely moral context. We are not creatures of choice and decision. How and why we choose is a very complex process that we ourselves do not understand. We can make a “decision” for Jesus only to discover that little has changed. It is also possible to find ourselves caught in a chain of decisions that bring us to the brink of despair without knowing quite how we got there. Though there are clearly problems with our choosing and deciding, the problem is far deeper.

The importance of these distinctions (moral versus existential) is in how we treat our present predicament. If the problem is primarily moral then it makes sense to live life in the hortatory mode, constantly urging others to be good, to “take the pledge,” or make good choices. If, on the other hand, our problem is rooted in the very nature of our existence then it is that existence that has to be addressed.

Read it.

Granted that Australia’s demographics don’t map all that well to America’s, nevertheless certain trends that are working out Down Under may sketch what America’s future looks like, as we slowly catch up. I can certainly see a day when the red/blue divide will not be territorial but sociological, based on urbanization — deep blue city cores composed of Underclass tenements, ‘gritty’ hipster enclaves, gentrified yuppie zones, and near-burb Richistan areas, with layers growing increasingly redder as one moves out into Nascar Country. The Coasts will always be more blue, and the Heartland more red, and how national elections come out will depend on the balance between the Crust and their client proletariat versus the Countryside.

Read it.

As I arrived for a visit, my 90 year old father was perusing ads from his favorite big box store for chicken parts. Seizing the moment that all children savor, I sought to impress him with my declaration: “I buy my chicken parts – albeit at higher prices – at the natural foods store; you know daddy, where the chickens ate naturally off the barn yard floor like they did when you were a boy”? Not missing a beat and dashing my hope for an “at a boy,” he retorted: “I saw what those chickens ate off the barnyard floor and I’ll buy my chickens at Walmart(s)!”

Those who know what the Good Old Days were really like prefer Now, thank you.

Read it.

Perhaps they know something that we don’t.

Seth Godin is one of those business-buzzword gurus who is famous chiefly for uttering trendy oracular aphorisms and selling books to fashionable corporate executives (and those who would be etc.). But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

It’s paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It’s paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.

It’s paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don’t like change.

Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we’ve found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.

If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Read it.

The ceremony, which featured Pakistan Rangers and Indian Border Security Force troops in full dress uniform marching up to their rivals on the border line in exaggerated goose-steps while shouting loudly. These scenes, cheered on by jingoistic crowds on either side chanting pro-Pakistan and India slogans, were shown on Michael Palin’s celebrated BBC documentary series Himalaya.

They have to wear those hats and they decide to complain about the goose step?

The whole damned thing looks extremely silly. What’s the Hindi for “Yo mama!”?

Gates of Vienna is one of the web sites doing the heavy lifting in the effort to keep us all from being assimilated by the Borg of Islam.

Read it. Donate.

‘For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his hire.’ How much more then do we owe those who never cease in their efforts to rouse the somnolent when the wolf is, almost literally, at the door?

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Read it.

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

No matter what Christopher Hitchens’ views or activities might be, the case for a Christian praying for him — as I do — is unimpeachable, starting with Matt. 5:4 and Luke 6:28 and progressing into the rarefied heights of scholastic theology.

Some believers, however, grapple with whether Hitchens’s vituperative contempt for all things religious places him outside the circle of those for whom believers should pray. Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic.com blog, consults a mutual friend of his and Hitch’s, Rabbi David Wolpe, who debated Hitchens on God’s existence.

“I asked David,” Goldberg writes, “what sort of intercessory praying a believer should do on behalf of a declared nonbeliever, or if one should pray at all, and he wrote back with some very wise words: ‘I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying helps, to pray. It is in any case an expression of one’s deep hopes. So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying that he should be grateful for my prayers.”

Exactly correct. And if his chemotherapy turns out not to be effective, he shall (paraphrasing Thomas More) have our prayers to fall back on.