Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Culture

Europe Needs Doughnut Shops

Europe is at a crossroads of slow economic growth from a post war period of regulation and high taxes and the creation of a new growing underclass of immigrants that are not being absorbed. Avoiding the ensuing financial, social and political costs is unimaginable. England embraced Brexit for several reasons; most often stated was the loss of sovereignty and control of their destiny. They may simply be the first to leave a sinking ship.

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The Complex and the Difficult

College has largely become an over priced trade school.  Demonization has been substituted for understanding; virtue signaling has been substituted for humility.

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Should the Religion of a Supreme Court Justice Matter? 

The American Catholics did not look to the government to be the center of their religious mission. This made them less likely to look to the government to enforce their religious codes on others. This was not due to a superior loyalty to a foreign papist monarch, but to a local community cohesion. The Catholics felt stronger about the separation of church and state than the Protestant pietists. Their parochial schools relied less on public education and government support.

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The Limits of the Meritocracy

The meritocracy sounds good but like all centralized policy is subject to overemphasize some objectives and disregard ingredients that have more influence than they realize.  Intelligence may be an important attribute but there are other character traits that may be  responsible for the outcome we attribute to intelligence. Steve Jobs was not the result of an IQ test.

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Targeted Resentment

How the Democrats Lost the White Working Class– Book review of White Working Class by Joan Williams- reviewed by Joe Queenan in Barron’s: “The working class…has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain, while elites have focused on

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Generation Z

from Selena Zito,  Why the generation after millennials will vote Republican “They are not as impressed with fame — celebrities, athletes, politicians — as are their predecessors, since fame in their lifetime has become rather easy to obtain with social media

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Competition Trumps Meritocracy

From The Washington Post Ana Swanson writes Why The Industrial Revolutions didn’t happen in China The article is mostly an interview with Joel Mokyr about his new book , A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.  It

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Deserting Our Better Nature

from Kevin Williamson at the National Review, Bitter Laughter A nation needs its Twains and Menckens. (We could have got by without Molly Ivins.) The excrement and sentimentality piles up high and thick in a democratic society, and it’s sometimes

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Suppressing the Oddballs

from Mark Judge in The National Review, Is Contemporary Liberalism Creating a Soulless Monoculture? Legutko’s thesis is that liberal democracies have something in common with communism: the sense that time is inexorably moving towards a kind of human utopia, and

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The New Robber Barons

From Joel Kotkin at New Geography, TODAY’S TECH OLIGARCHS ARE WORSE THAN THE ROBBER BARONS Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media,

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Best Rebel Yid 2016 – First Six Months

These are some of the best articles that stood out to me so far this year- and a few of mine . America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem; It Has a Democrat Problem from Sultan Knish Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09

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Knee Jerk Gun Control- Part II

America has a gun problem. We can argue if the guns are a symptom of a crime problem, a cultural problem or a terrorist problem; or if they are a cause.  But we can certainly agree that we would like

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Knee Jerk Gun Control

For my liberal friends who do not understand why  anyone needs an assault rifle or why anyone with basic common sense would object to banning them, allow me to try and explain and offer some other solutions that may actually

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The Difference Between Florence Alabama and Florence Italy

Inequality in American Life is not as easy to measure as you would think and probably even more difficult to make relevant. The common solutions from the left point more to reducing the wealthy than raising the poor, as if

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Racism Without Racists

from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Time, When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 6 Why do we discriminate? The big factor isn’t overt racism. Rather, it seems to be unconscious bias among whites who believe in equality but

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The Class War

from The American Conservative Rob Dreher writes  Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont: The Davos elites of the Democrat and Republican parties didn’t get the teenage daughters of Fishtown pregnant, or didn’t get the Fishtown sons busted for possession or fired from his

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Rights and Privileges

from Wall Street Journal, Notable and Quotable: John Quincy Adams But there is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This

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Decadent Risk

from Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, A Tour of  Our Decadent Civilization Excerpt: Vigorous civilizations pursue meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment. The

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Snark

from David Daley in Salon, Camille Paglia takes on Jon Stewart, Trump, Sanders: “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” excerpt: I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand

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Politics as Performance Art

from David Daley in Salon, Camille Paglia takes on Jon Stewart, Trump, Sanders: “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” excerpt: Politics has always been performance art.  So we’ll see who the candidates are who can

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