A jury in Florida didn’t think Bryan Santana was worth $9 million, as his parents figured, but half that much: On September 9, a West Palm Beach jury awarded parents Rodolfo Santana and Ana Mejia $4.5 million because they did not get accurate information from Dr. Marie Morel and OB/GYN Specialists of the Palm Beaches. Their son Bryan Santana, now age 3, was born disabled. He has no arms and only one leg. The argument made by his parents was that if the clinic had…
It would be a mistake to blame the technology. As usual, it’s how people use — and abuse — it: Now that the Earbud People have invaded, they’ve taken over subways, academia, buses, and sidewalks from coast to coast and around the globe. They’re passively receiving sounds that they alone can hear. Other than mob violence or criminal behavior, theirs is the most antisocial public behavior one can imagine. Its only rivals are the Bluetooth-enabled cell phone conversations that turn all who engage in them…
How does one explain the efflorescence of the vampire in popular culture? David Solway has an idea: One can’t help but notice the growing prevalence of the vampire archetype in contemporary fiction and film, corresponding to the popular fascination with the Titanic story. The vampire and the Titanic constitute cultural paradigms, aspects of the subliminal awareness of deep social currents, suppressed forces, and nocturnal apprehensions expressed as aesthetic configurations. It used to be “sympathy for the devil.” Now it’s sympathy for cognizable evil: The premonition…
Because of a virtually uncontrolled southern border (thank you, Washington), a bizarre, inchoate collection of rituals — including human sacrifice — might soon be generating headline news where you happen to live (and it would have to be local news — mainstream national media shy away from reporting negatively on the current administration’s “immigration” policies): . . . the [Santa Muerte] cult itself is not an actual religion so it’s unclear who actually belongs to it. The veneration of Santa Muerte is a magical tradition…
Behold the demise of the political “gatekeepers”: “Good” writers generally craft stories that many, many people like. That word “craft” entails a lifetime of hard work, trial and error, self-education, and, yes, native talent. Not everybody can do it. In fact, not very many people at all can do it relatively well or successfully. And therein lies the issue over which the dying world of book-object-story is currently dashing itself to pieces. The commercial structure undergirding our previous method of story delivery – the mass-marketing…
Dr. Kesten C. Green and Tom Harris note how past scares about such things as mercury levels in fish, EMF powerline emissions, and DDT in the environment correlate closely with the alarmism ginned up over “manmade global warming” (AGW): . . . vivid, alarming forecasts, even those based on weak foundations, are persuasive. For a while at least. Unlike “global warming,” however, these scares truly are anthropogenic in origin: In modern times, when we are safer than we have ever been, some activists have become…
David Solway thinks that the West is exhibiting “[t]he symptoms of an imperium in its dotage”: The greatest civilization the world has ever known has lost confidence in itself, infected by a plague of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Having lost its bearings, it is no longer willing or able to think clearly, to make difficult choices, to defend its patrimony and resist demographic subversion, to accept the need for sacrifice, to value the radiant catalogue of its triumphs and achievements in art, science, technology, medicine, and…
The awful truth is that this country has been grossly mismanaged for decades. The Great Recession has exposed the mismanagement, casting a cruel light upon our impending insolvency. One might have hoped that in this national emergency, the politicians we elected to serve us would shelve the posturing and insist on doing the right thing instead of the politically palatable thing. If we are to emerge intact from this crisis, we need two things: First, we need to cut spending, drastically, programmatically. I’m not talking…
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him — perhaps a…
There’s a greater incentive to FIRE than to HIRE: . . . [T]he economy’s most productive participants [are] the businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors who drive commerce, create wealth, and create jobs. As long as Barack Obama is president and his apparatchiks remain in control of their expanding bureaucracies and unaccountable czardoms, fear and intimidating uncertainty will reign. . . . . When the economy is sitting on such a dangerous precipice, unless the goals are to deliver a knockout punch and to take the intimidating…
[T]he old matrix of how we were to understand illegal immigration is extinct. The concept of a largely white privileged class exploiting poor immigrants who simply wished to be a part of the American dream is now fossilized — dead and buried by new realities: the sheer millions of those entering the U.S. illegally, the cynicism and connivance of the Mexican government, the outflow of nearly $30-40 billion in remittances to Latin America, the rise of the multicultural salad bowl in lieu of the multiracial…
By Mike Gray [The record] shows that neither then [during the '60s], when it would have counted, nor later, when it would have clarified, did most mainstream liberals offer up anything as direct and definitive as a stern, unqualified denunciation of the New Left, black nationalists, or other activists inspired by them. The more common response was to try to have it both ways, to suggest that the radicals behaved regrettably, at worst, but that the social evils they opposed explained and to some degree…
Much has been made of the “unholy alliance” between the imperial left and a triumphalist Islam in advancing the cause of the modern totalitarian project. The left wants to see a top-down socialist utopia supplant the international order as we know it and militant Islam is determined to impose a Shariate upon the world. Indeed, as Norwegian scholar Hege Storhaug documents in But the Greatest of These Is Freedom, there is a brisk migration “from left-wing totalitarianism to religio-political totalitarianism.” The totalitarian mind is identical…
Long before the teachers unions ruined their whole profession, liberals made the decision that the goal of racial integration would trump the merits of the individual. Long before busing policies caused white flight and turned truly integrated schools into ghetto ganglands, the outright rejection of objective standards in our public schools was set in policy stone. Cheating administrators and teachers led to cheating students and ‘round and ‘round it went. Long before God was completely removed from public classrooms, liberals decided that lying and cheating…
So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves. Once the individual develops a dependency on food stamps, free medical care, subsidized housing, all sorts of disability or unemployment compensation, education credits, grants, and zero-interest loans…
Recent Comments