Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
...bailing out countries: TUMBLING exchange rates, gaping current-account deficits, fearsome foreign-currency borrowings and nasty recessions: these sound like the ingredients of a distant third-world-debt crisis from the 1980s and 1990s. Yet in Europe the mess has been cooked up closer to home, in east European countries, many of them now members of the European Union. …
Continue reading "Americans Gripe About Bailing Out Mortgage Holders, But Europeans Gripe About…"
The Episcopal Bishop of Western Kansas has a point: Now I read that the "New" Diocese of Fort Worth passed a $632,466 dollar budget for a part-time bishop, a little over 19 priests and 62 delegates who represent way less than a thousand people, and $200,000 is from the General Convention budget!... If I, as …
As I had predicted last year, we have this: Although he says it could turn into a "show trial," Karl Rove tells FOX News he is looking forward to telling the House Judiciary Committee about his alleged role in the firing of federal prosecutors and the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Until now, …
But Bill is, unsurpisingly, against it: Microsoft founder head Bill Gates has banned the use of products made by arch-rival Apple from his house, his wife has revealed. But the blockade could backfire on Gates, 53, after Melinda admitted there are times she feels envious of her friends' iPhones. She told Vogue magazine that the …
Continue reading "Melinda Gates Wants an iPhone: After They’ve Boosted all the Rest…"
In the summer of 1972, I was making my transition from being an Episcopalian to a Roman Catholic. That transition is commonly referred to today as “swimming the Tiber,” but at the time I was also making another water crossing that, for me, was also very significant: we sold our home in Palm Beach and, …
The world has believed this insignificant group of lowly, unimportant, and uneducated men precisely because the divine character of what happened is more marvellously apparent in the insignificance of such witnesses. What gave power to the preachers who persuaded the world was not the eloquence of the words they uttered, but the miracles of the …
Look, now, at the great virtue called fortitude. Is not its very function—to bear patiently with misfortune—overwhelming evidence that human life is beset with unhappiness, however wise a man may be? It is beyond my comprehension how the Stoics can boldly argue that such ills are not really ills, meanwhile allowing that, if a philosopher …
Continue reading "The Ultimate Good in Life, the Stoics, and the New Atheists"
The city of man, for all of the width of its expansion throughout the world and for all of the depth of its differences in this place and that, is a single community. The simple truth is that the bond of a common nature makes all human beings one. Nevertheless, each individual in this community …
If I ever write a "self-help" book, it will be All I Ever Knew About Politics I Learned From the French. (Click here for some of what I have actually written.) Watching the French makes one a cynic, and at times like this it holds one in good stead. My French teacher in prep school …
Continue reading "Barack Obama, the Edgar Faure of American Politics"
Tennessee's Democrat governor weighs his, and the state's, options: Tennessee could reject a portion of the $787 billion economic stimulus package out of concerns that it would force the state to raise taxes on businesses in the future. At the National Governors Association meetings in Washington, D.C., Gov. Phil Bredesen said this week that he …
Continue reading "Maybe That’s Why Obama Didn’t Ask Phil Bredesen to be Commerce Secretary"
Positive Infinity 