Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Today is St. Andrew's Day, usually the first major saint's day in Advent. He's also not only the patron saint of Scotland; he was also the saint after which my prep school was named. (It's having problems of its own these days, but that's another post...) In any case, at chapel time we always sang …
Continue reading "St. Andrew's Day: Calling Us O'er the Tumult…"
Four facts to consider: President-elect Trump wants to revoke citizenship for those who burn the flag. Many have promised to leave the U.S. if he becomes President (which he will, Deo volente.) Renunciation of U.S. citizenship is at a high level. Paperwork for same renunciation is slow. Our State Department can work out a nuclear …
It's all the rage these days, in the wake of Trump's victory, to attack (generally conservative) "faux news" sites, even to the point of getting them blocked or banned altogether. This rage (like every other rage) isn't a new as people think: I was accused of this back in 2008, when I posted this piece …
In The Worse Plotting Against the Better, XLVIII, Philo Judaeus observes the following: On which account it seems to me that all men who are not utterly uneducated would choose to be mutilated and to become blind, and not to see what is not fitting to be seen, to become deaf and not to hear …
Continue reading "Avoiding Evil Just Isn't a Top Priority Any More"
And we mean everybody: Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in next month’s re-run presidential elections, wants Hungary to join a new alliance consisting of former members of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The far-right politician believes Central European countries with similar cultures, including Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and …
Way back in 2003, Christianity Today ran an article that began like this: Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited …
Continue reading "Three Sheets to the Wind: Seminary Academics and Orthodoxy"
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku lays it out: “I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence,” Kaku said, as quoted by the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies. “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped …
Glenn Harlan Reynolds laments the way campuses (or campi, really) have reacted to the lachrymose response to Trump's victory: The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food and play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough [sic], positive card-making, Legos …
Now that the tables have turned, the people who want secession have also: Since Donald Trump’s electoral victory was first announced, #Calexit has been trending on Twitter, with distraught Californians looking to form their own state. Liberal Californians who are serious about this should take comfort: you've got many conservative friends east of you who …
Back in January, I made the following observation on a study which showed that American female students tend to give male professors better ratings: Too much extrapolation is always a danger, but if American female college students can’t bring themselves to bump up their faculty counterparts, how are they going to bring themselves to vote …
Continue reading "The Student Evaluation Problem Comes Back to Haunt Hillary Clinton"
Positive Infinity 