Say what you will about them, but my compatriots have brains. A new survey is just out, and though the gentle reader likely shares my own derisory view of social science, I want to use the occasion to vent some national pride. The survey, by the Moscow think tank Levada Center, sampled 1600 adults spread over 134 locations throughout Russia who were interviewed in person in their homes.
Promoting his new book, “How to Prevent a Climate Disaster,” in his blog Bill Gates answers a common question about wiping out good-paying jobs for the middle class. His title: “Don’t forget about coal miners and cement makers on the way to zero emissions.”
A few days ago the President of the United States derided several governors as “neanderthals” because they decided to relax the restrictions on social life that had been imposed in a panic-response to COVID. What has he got against that extinct race of human beings? Neanderthal men, so far as I have been able to gather over the years, were a crude lot but capable of speech and, from the guesses I have read, endowed with an IQ range in the 70’s and 80’s. Since they interbred with members of Homo sapiens, it may be unfair to refer to them...
Across meridian and frontier, the world seems to be shrinking. Like a cheap shirt thrown in the washing machine by a careless teenager, or else by the slovenly and incompetent mother who raised him, it seems to have lost its original color and dimension over the spin cycle of a generation.
In a better world than this, the 10th Amendment to the Constitution would not have been necessary? Why? Because no honest lawyer or politician could have justified the Federal government’s arrogation of powers not enumerated in the document itself.
“Conservatives are waxing wroth over a New York City high school principal who sent anti-white racist materials to parents in which a scale of “whiteness was outlined ranging from Uncle Tom Whiteys labelled “White Abolitionists” to the downright evil “White Supremacists” by way of varying shades of collaboration or resistance to America’s entrenched racist regime.
The Trump Show Trial coincided with my finishing Stephen Kotkin’s “Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power.” The monumental book ends with two events: Stalin deciding that Marxist principles dictated finally collectivizing agriculture, which led to 7 million deaths in the Holodomor. And the Shakhty Trial of mine workers, which Uncle Joe – as American liberals lovingly called him – used to shock any objectors to collectivization into submission.
Reverence for the Holy Name is the positive alternative to the Commandment against taking it in vain.
A friend of a friend asked his friend, a medical student, how many bones there are in the human body. In reply he heard that there is no definite answer. “You mean to tell me,” he pressed on in astonishment, “that since the days of the Victorian vivisectionists nobody’s bothered to come up with the answer?”
In 1945, a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army wrote a letter ridiculing “the mustachioed one,” Stalin. He was arrested by the secret police and given a long sentence in the Gulag. That was Solzhenitsyn. Last week Douglass Mackey was arrested for making jokes during the 2016 election. He went under the nom de comedy Ricky Vaughn, after the character played by Charlie Sheen in Major League,”the 1989 baseball spoof. Tyrannies don’t like comedy. Vaughn’s alleged crime was putting up on Twitter suggestions that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote for her by tweeting to a specific number. Only an...
