OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Search Results for: CRT
Yes, Fani Willis is a COMPLETE trainwreck
Let’s assess the best case scenario for what went down after Georgia district attorney Fani Willis brought “wide-ranging” (and undoubtedly true) charges of criminally corrupt electoral misbehavior in the 2020 presidential election on the part of then President Donald Trump and a host of other political pluguglies: Immediately after bringing indictments for one of the…
Israel versus Palestine: When Dreams Collide
“What a dreary compromise is life!” exclaimed the hero of Norman Mailer’s abortive magnum opus, The Man Who Studied Yoga.1 And so life is a dreary compromise for most of us, which is why we go to films to see people who do all the things we don’t do in real life, like punch out…
OMG! I’m turning into Larry Summers! But not all the time!
The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…
Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?
As a matter of fact, I I didn’t flunk Econ 101, because I never took it! So what? To quote Mel Brooks, I’m an old man and I’ve got a right to talk. And, to quote another old man, Richard Nixon, “I am not an intellectual, but I do read books!” Well, I do and…
How to improve kids’ reading: First, do the math
A couple of weeks back I read an article in Reason by Emma Camp, More States Are Using Science-Backed Reading Instruction. It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Long., touting “science of reading” instruction methods, which stress training in phonics—mapping letters to sounds—as opposed to “balanced literacy”, aka “whole language”, aka “three cueing”, which, Emma says, was…
Who’s stoopider, Noah Rothman, the New York Times, or the U.S. Treasury? Tough call!
Damn right it is. Over at the National Review, hot shot author Noah Rothman, whose best-selling book, The Rise of the New Puritans, trashing those damn West Coast hippies grown old and rich and censorious, which, if I read it, I’d probably agree with more often than not, is on a tear, tearing into those…
Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Ist es deutsch? Ja, allzu deutsch.
Peter Watson’s massive (996 pages) study, The German Genius, is one of the most confounding books I’ve ever read, “impressive” for most of its great length, often “brilliant” in its discussion of 20th century Germany, but then lurching downhill drastically in places, descending to the level of Nazi apologetics at its worst—plus one whopping mathematical…
Political Notes from All Over
“Anyone but Joe,” anyone? Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? Spending the last few weeks laughing at the Republicans over their self-inflicted imbroglio/embroilment trying to elect a speaker for the House of Representatives was a treat. Well, now it’s our turn to suffer, as Uncle Joe’s Corvette winter plus the upcoming Hunter Biden follies, which…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 1: Tim Miller’s Why We Did It
A couple of years back, when, it seems, I was feeling particularly down in the mouth, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, a couple of actual Republicans have written books asking themselves the same question, viz. Matthew Continetti (The Right The Hundred Year War for…