The Power of Faith

Another brilliant post from Richard Fernandez, with an outstanding bit in the comments about the importance of religion and the dangers of materialism:
Like Voltaire and perhaps Pascal, I think it is always in a man’s personal interest to claim he is something more than an animal or the equivalent of a barrel of chemicals. There [...]

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Comrade Obama

There’s increasing puzzlement about Obama’s foreign policy.  A variety of voices are wondering what vision lies behind a series of seemingly inexplicable actions.  It’s beginning to dawn on people that, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, a replay of the Carter administration is the best case scenario.  For example:
I have suggested, in connection with President Obama’s [...]

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Texas over California

William Voegeli compares California’s left-wing, high-tax/high-benefits model with Texas’s right-wing, moderate-tax/moderate-benefits model. People are leaving high-tax states for low-tax states:
One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 [...]

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What Is This Creature?

Observed at First Presbyterian Church this morning:

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“You Can’t Handle the Truth! No Truth Handler, You! I Deride Your Truth-handling Abilities!”

Don’t miss Richard Fernandez’s brilliant reflections on truth, civilization, and perception:
In recent years management literature has talked extensively about the “servitization of the products” The modern economy no longer produces “things”. It produces intangibles called services. Insurance, banking, government, tourism, retail, education, social services, franchising, news media, hospitality, consulting, law, health care, environmental services, real [...]

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Why Government-run Health Care (or anything else) Is a Bad Idea

Let’s say you have a good idea for serving new customers, or old customers more effectively.  In a private setting, that’s great.  You benefit your customers, and you make money doing it.  There’s every incentive to develop your idea and implement it.
In a government setting, however, that’s not true at all.  Customers don’t make you [...]

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National Cultural Sabotage

The truth is out.  The British Labour party has intentionally permitted—indeed, encouraged—very high levels of immigration to ensure itself a permanent electoral majority and to undermine the “British” character of British society.  Melanie Phillips:
So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot [...]

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Smart Diplomacy

First President Obama gives up missile defenses in Poland the Czech Republic in exchange for. . . well, evidently, nothing.  Now, it turns out he declined to press Iran’s leadership on its phony election because he had a deal in the works—a deal on which he’s now been double-crossed.  What ever possessed him to think [...]

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Abusing Aristotle

Okay, enough already.  You can go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao; you can offer to help establish houses of underage prostitution; you can make up quotations and attribute them to Rush Limbaugh; but when you make up quotations and attribute them to Aristotle, I get mad.  Aristotle is supposed to have said,
If we believe [...]

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Global Warming Debunked

Here’s a story that came out more than two weeks ago but has received little attention.  The data underlying the global warming hypothesis turns out to have been cooked.  Richard Fernandez explains:
The most amazing part of this story from my point of view was the way in which a dogged Canadian mathematician, acting practically alone [...]

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