I thought John Kerry did a beautiful job, a presidential job, trying to convince the American people and the world that we ought to go to war against Syria. Really brilliant, save one problem, that we would be siding with Al Qaeda in the conflict. Or rather, not siding with them as much . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the consequences of the inner city violence that Peter mentions in the previous piece was the rise of the SWAT team. The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According . . . . Continue Reading »
One of my astute sons has been trying to persuade me that the current idea of progress is actually regress; we seem to moving away from civilized behavior to get back to our roots or something, forgetting the long slog of mankind away from them to gain something better and cleaner for human . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday, I read Juan Williams in the WSJ, Race and the Gun Debate. Williams is looking at where the gun problem is in the United States. He notes, “Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 . . . . Continue Reading »
Today marks the fifteen year anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing and I emailed an old friend, Jayna Davis, whose book, The Third Terrorist is by far the most accurate record of that horrific event. I reviewed her book for an old website some years ago . The review is here . . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m delighted to see that Freddie deBoer and Led-the-commenter have delivered excellent pushback on a weak point of my previous post . Their point in brief is that the mere fact that our contingent minds have had remarkable success in explaining the universe so far is no guarantee that they . . . . Continue Reading »
Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds: For . . . . Continue Reading »
Via Julian , I see that Yglesias has spun a narrative : For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is . . . . Continue Reading »
Longtime readers know of my obsession with mathematical beauty, so it should come as no surprise to find me hopping up and down most eagerly and pointing you towards Matthew Milliner’s very immodest proposal in Public Discourse. My only quibble with the article is that the proportion of . . . . Continue Reading »
Exciting news from the Bayside City Council elections : the Queens Tribune reported that a conservative Republican was running a strong race in the 19th district and had a chance to win in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. But this was a conservative Republican with a difference: Dan Halloran is . . . . Continue Reading »
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