As I have thought about how best to respond to this Occupy Wall St. business, it seems to me that it really should be treated with the seriousness it deserves. It is not every day that the body politic gets covered with economically illiterate pustules. We are trying to make out their demands — for …
Said the Spider to the Fly
When the Constitution first came out of the convention, the opposition to it (as it then was) was identified with the anti-Federalists, led by men like Patrick Henry. The support for it was called Federalist, led by men like James Madison. In the resulting clash between the two factions, the Federalists compromised enough to agree …
A Headache That Starts at the Ankles
I want to modify a thought experiment that David Mamet suggested in his fine book The Secret Knowledge, and do so as my own response to the risible proposal coming before the U.N. this week. Excuse me, I see that “risible proposal” doesn’t narrow things down enough. I am referring to the idea that the …
Lollygaggers at the Somme
After the clowns-on-tiny-bicycles show that we have all just witnessed, which clown show obtained for us our debt ceiling deal, it would be easy for conservatives to think that it all was, in fact, just a show, just for show. Since there was so much fuss and bother, with so little result, it is easy …
Where Our Real Shortage Is
As we are seeking out categories to help us understand the debt crisis our nation is in, there is a basic distinction that has gone missing. I mean the distinction between money past and money future. I mean the distinction between money that exists and money that doesn’t. Now everything we have is in the …
Another Plate of Sausages
I don’t often commend Republicans, so let me do so here. Throw in all of the qualifications — not all of them, they could still flake, and so on — and yet a commendation is still in order. There are times when countries run out of money/credit absolutely. The cash is simply not there anymore, …
Calvinism and Conspiracy
We live in a time when conspiratorial theories abound, and when tracts, screeds, and web sites advancing such theories proliferate. If you have the time, you might want to research and answer every box on the flow chart (the one with the Masons, the Illuminati, and the Bilderberg Group on it). But if you don’t …
Fatherless Under the Fig Tree
Hard libertarianism and/or anarchy is a function of what might be called civic fatherlessness. Just as the antitheist regards the eternality of the Father as tyrannical on the face of it, so also the hard libertarian regards any civic authority whatever as something to chafe the soul. Within this paradigm, all political authority is based …
Slopehead Country
This morning I went to check out the Huffington Post, and saw a dire warning there about Michele Bachmann’s “Jeremiah Wright,” a preacher named Bradlee Dean. The HPost had put together a little montage of Dean’s homophobic rants n’ stuff, and when I put Dean and rant together in the same sentence I need to …
You Play the Hand You Hold
If you have any opinion at all about the Israeli/Palestinian situation in the Middle East, then your opinion, if implemented, could result in three possible outcomes. It could make things better, it could make things worse, or it could keep things pretty much as they are currently. Given the knife edge that everybody in that …