The Lawyers Have Won
The home improvement chain Lowe's has been running a series of television advertisements, aimed at homeowners during football season, that present a homeowner (male) being congratulated by another, "football," version of himself for getting his household projects done...
Politial Taqiya
Some political issues have short lives. Some tend to linger, or pop up from time to time before fading to the background. Some are timeless, seemingly never resolved to the point where the players and partisans accept that an outcome has evolved. Among those is the...
Trust?
Ever drive down a two lane road, one out in the back country, with nothing in the way of a speed limit and nothing but a line of paint dividing you from oncoming cars that are going just as fast as you are? Ever consider what might happen if you simply twitched the...
Winners and Losers
Last night, I watched my New York Mets battle through another game in the post-season. I sat, heart thumping, as the Mets pitchers faced off against a Chicago Cubs lineup full of home run hitters, hitters that could change the tone of the game in the blink of an eye....
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
Proponents of increased gun regulation have in recent years advocated for changes intended to close "loopholes" through which people who presumably shouldn't be able to acquire guns can acquire them legally. They speak of the gun show loophole and the lack of...
Pournelle’s Iron Law
Jerry Pournelle, a prolific science fiction writer, blessed us with a particular bit of wisdom that the dubbed the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It states: In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the...
Adults or Children?
The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article discussing whether the college fraternity system should be done away with, in a pro- and con- format. I won't discuss the details of the debate, because the question alone is sufficient to raise a broader issue. A...
Mid-September Prognostications
Completely off the cuff and with full expectation that I'll be wrong... Joe Biden will throw his hat into the ring for the Dem nomination. He'll have put on a show of reluctance and careful contemplation. A groundswell of clamoring from his constituents and the urging...
Homogenizing Thought
A recent interesting (and depressing) article over at Reason on the culture of victimhood mentions overstratification as a phenomenon of the modern PC culture. A writer over at The Daily Beast discusses sexual racism, the idea that having a sexual disinterest in...
Global Warming Damages
An Internet friend posted an amusing link this morning, broadcast with the scary headline Researcher: The US Owes the World $4 Trillion For Trashing the Climate. It's a me, me, look at me! bit of self-puffery that latches onto one of the sillier aspects of global...
The Seven Percent Delusion
Lets roll the clock back a few months, say, to May. Libertarianism seemed to be gaining traction with many in the GOP, Rand Paul, running a campaign as a libertarian-ish Republican candidate for the GOP nomination for President, was polling well, and the Republicans...
Gay Marriage and the County Clerk
[Kim Davis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Davis_(county_clerk), a county clerk in Kentucky, recently grabbed national headlines because she refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage legal...
The Law of Jante – A Socialist Dream
An Internet friend recently posted a meme that posited the question Why is Denmark the Happiest Place in the World? and offered up "$20 Minimum Wage," "33 Hour Work Week" and free school, child care and health care as the reasons. This bit of silliness has been...
Crime vs Gun Crime
The recent shootings of a television reporter and her cameraman in Roanoke, Virginia has rekindled the seemingly endless gun debate. As has been the case of late, the various demands for "common sense reforms" have been met with push-back responses from pro-gun-rights...
Ugly Nativism and Crass Tribalism
... Or, the sordid one-two punch behind Trump's popularity Donald Trump burst onto the GOP presidential primary scene with an in-your-face, plain-talking and purportedly anti-establishment/outsider message. He immediately surged into first place, holding a...
Do… Something!
As I read an article regarding the difficulty of actually developing a rational and effective policy prescription in response to the Virginia reporter shooting, I kept hearing in my head echoes of the refrain I've heard more times than I can count: I don't know what...
Privilege Is A Dirty Word
A story popped up today during my Internet perambulations. It involved a teacher demonstrating the concept of privilege to a classroom. The teacher placed a trash pail at the front of a room of seated students, gave them each a piece of paper, had them crumple that...
The Obsolescence of Religious Freedom
About three years ago, Masterpiece Cakeshop, a bakery in Colorado, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple on the grounds that it violated the owners' religious beliefs. The couple, rather than find another baker to hire, decided to file a complaint against...
President Uncle Joe?
Of all the scandals that have dogged Hillary Clinton, the personal email server she used as Secretary of State has shown the longest legs, and may turn out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is running well...
Anyone Can Cook!
This, Chef Gusteau's famous motto, is a quote from the Pixar animated movie Ratatouille. I took an interest in cooking around the time I got into the restaurant business, twenty years ago. In the vein of many 20somethings, I had dabbled before then, and had even taken...
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