“But medical consequences, however terrible, do not make a disease. Many mountaineers break their legs or get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease . . . to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it …
And It Would Be Hard to Find Anything Less Original
“In Europe as well as in North America, art no longer creates beauty but is meant to shock. Horror, violence, sexual behavior of all kinds, and even bowel and bladder functions are presented on stage and screen and hailed by critics as brilliant and original” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 240-241).
800 Billion Big Ones
So then, agreement appears to have been reached on the $800 billion 2009 Economic Illiteracy Advancement Act. In times to come, I will be writing in a bit more detail about economics, but let me say a little brief something now. In order to “invest” 800 billion into our troubled economy, the gummint must find …
Open Throttle Abortion Policies
I read about this choice one at BaylyBlog, and commend to you the observations made there. At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama said this: “There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.” This is chutzpah on stilts and steroids. The fact that President Obama …
The Cow With Some Evangelistic Liturature
We arrived in Oxford yesterday, and appear to have brought some Idaho winter with us. It was snowing again here this morning, which is apparently somewhat remarkable here. And of course, whenever it snows in some remarkable fashion, in any kind of proximity to me, I rise to say a few words on the important …
Papers Please
Whenever I travel I am reminded of how clearly and inexorably we are losing our practical freedoms, under Democans and Republicrats both. Even though airplane travel is routine for millions of Americans (at any given moment, 60,000 citizens are in the air somewhere over our country), we, docile sheep all, put up with indignities that …
Spooky Numbers
A friend sent me this link and I almost posted it, and then a few days later I saw it on Mark Horne’s blog and decided to put it up here. The numbers are creepy any way you think about it, but I do wish there were another set of numbers alongside these. I believe …
But Then It Didn’t
“A variant that was not sent down from the top was ‘the revolution of the sixties,’ a sort of Rousseauist hope that by destroying the ‘hypocrisy’ of petty bourgeois, Christian-tinged morality and conventions, a new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would drop down out of somewhere” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 229).
Herod is God Tee-Shirts
This really is an historic day, a day on which a black man will become president of the United States. That doesn’t make it a good day, but it does make it memorable and worthy of comment. Those who have followed my political writing for any time at all know that I have been very …
The Wahoo! Stimulus Package
Well, we are two days away from the Dawn of the Shining One, and so my thoughts have turned naturally to the coming wahoo! stimulus package, that fiscal hot air balloon with a diameter of about two miles and counting. We are talking about about a lot of money . . . actually make that …