Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
It's heartening to see that likely voters have rejected Hillary Clinton's proposal for US$5,000 for every newborn in the U.S. It's been a worry that American voters, buffeted by the wild ride this decade has been and seeing the growing gap between top and bottom of the income scale, would jump at any government entitlement. …
Continue reading "Likely Voters Reject Hillary’s Racist Proposal"
I hope that the New York Times' blog is doing a late April Fools' joke with Christian Conservatives Consider Third-Party Effort. But I'm afraid not. Christian conservatives need to come to a few realisations about their current situation. Evangelical Christianity has been functionally absent from the halls of power for a long time, Billy Graham's …
Continue reading "Christian Conservatives Consider Third-Party Effort. You’ve Got to be Kidding"
Sami Moubayed's article Unveiling men in the Arab world is one of those rare admissions from a (presumably) Muslim source that things are not quite in the altogether within Islam. It makes me think of the following, in this case relative to the Jews: For, if there was a glory in the religion that involved …
Evidently there's not much funny on the Upper West Side these days, as outrage turned to laughter at Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia. After having had the bad taste to invite him, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger proceeded to trash Ahmadinejad, which was rude to do. That kind of "bait and switch" will not go down well …
Continue reading "Ahmadinejad: They Can Laugh If They Want. But Then What?"
I would have commented on the Fed's drop in the interest rates, but the stupidity of a 50 basis points drop both ways (any drop, really, but 25 would at least have been tolerable) was so total that it left me speechless. The subsequent course of the currency bears this out (although sterling is having …
Continue reading "The Dollar: The Pseudosophisticates Strike Again"
Dan Rather Files $70 Million Lawsuit Against CBS, Parent Company Viacom. My only regret is that I wasn't blogging at the time of the Bush National Guard fiasco. I had plenty of samples of IBM typewriter produced documents, a legacy of my family business.
It seems that the Saudi Arabians are continuing their dangerous game by supporting and radicalising Sunni Muslims in Iraq. I noted the danger of their game--advancing their Wahhabi/Salafi style of Islam while trying to contain the blowback of those like Osama bin Laden who don't think the Kingdom is Islamic enough--earlier, and in the context …
The ACLU's Jeremy Gunn and his Evangelical dinner host both show an amazing lack of knowledge of U.S. history in Gunn's piece Accommodating the faithful. The first question was as follows: First, could he identify any country in the world where there is more religious freedom than in the USA? That's not an entirely fair …
Today is the sixth anniversary of the 11 September attack, and this time it's on the same day of the week (Tuesday) as the 2001 original. I've spent a lot of time on this site on the subject of the Middle East, from the 2001 piece When the Sheep Have Anthrax onwards. There's one thing …
Continue reading "The Tricky Part of 9/11 and the Middle East"
George Barna's recent surveys show two things: The future of children is Americans' greatest general concern. The effect of peer pressure is the greatest specific concern surrounding their future. It should be. As readers of this blog are aware, I contend that peer pressure has the rule of law in this society, and this starts …
Positive Infinity 