Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
But only President Obama's left-wing critics: During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough. “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” …
Continue reading "Robert Gibbs Evidently Isn't Worried About the Right Wingers Taking Drugs"
There's been a great deal of press about the campaign by certain Republican leaders to either amend or redefine the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude the children of illegal immigrants from American citizenship. I don't think it's a winning issue politically, but on a more profound level it's based on the a priori assumption that American …
Continue reading "Why the Republicans' "Fourteenth Amendment" Campaign is a Waste of Time"
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"
Positive Infinity 