Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
When the Telegraph's Nile Gardiner says that "the British press...has a far less deferential approach towards the White House," he's not just kidding: What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and …
Continue reading "The Ultimate Insult: Comparing the Obama Administration to France's Ancien Régime"
Like many other things in public education, the New York state Regents' exams for its high school students aren't working as planned: The big story in New York education circles is the further confirmation of what longtime critics have alleged: that the feel-good story of rising student test scores over the last several years is …
Continue reading "To Help the Regents' Exam, Maybe They Should Bring Back the Regents' Prayer"
Oh, yes, it is: In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made "state registration and church consecration" a dual requirement of matrimony. We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn't it about time we freed marriage from the state? Imagine if government had no interest …
Martin Hutchinson is sanguine about the future of Western civilisation, but every silver lining has a cloud: Provided Western government spending is kept under control so private sectors have room to flourish, and interest rates are fairly quickly restored to levels that encourage saving, the Western advantages of capital, education, technology and favourable business climate …
Continue reading "The Tricky Part in Keeping Western Civilisation Afloat"
The fun started when the Export-Import bank nixed Bucyrus International's sale of mining equipment for an Indian power project: On Thursday, the Export-Import Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, effectively wiping out about $600 million in coal mining equipment sales for Bucyrus, chief executive Tim Sullivan said. The fossil fuel …
There are some on the left (like Kevin Drum at Mother Jones) who are having second thoughts on the American obsession of racial racial equality over class equalisation: Class/income-based affirmative action has long struck me as an alternative that ought to get more attention than it does...Class-based program programs might, in the end, provide modestly …
Take a look at the interesting graph on the right that appears in Chan Akya's article on why European countries want to ban the burqa and the US is in no hurry to do so. I have a few observations about this: It's ironic that France, where a larger proportion of Muslims consider themselves a …
Continue reading "Muslim, Christian or Citizen of Your Country First?"
There will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this one: Conceding they can't find enough votes for the measure, Senate Democrats on Thursday abandoned efforts to put together a comprehensive energy bill that would seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions, delivering a potentially fatal blow to a proposal Democrats have long …
Continue reading "The Democrats Don't Need the Climate Bill to Achieve Their Objectives"
A welcome endorsement in a race (TN-3) where the perception has gone with the big mouths: Candidate Art Rhodes, of Cleveland, the CEO of a pension plan with $250 million in assets, also wants to control “runaway spending,” but he has a far better sense of how to grapple with the issue and how it …
Continue reading "The Chattanooga Times-Free Press Endorses Art Rhodes for Congress"
This from, of all places, the New York Times, and Ross Douthat: Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites …
Continue reading "Poor White People and Élite Universities: Beating the Dog in the Water"
Positive Infinity 