Smash-mouth, In-Your-Face, Blue Collar Football

I like watching the odd ballgame, though I have trouble with the culture of the sport. But it’s getting harder to deny that there’s a real problem with football players, their brains, and the play-through-pain, paramilitary culture of the game:
In a discovery that is bound to reverberate through the nation’s youth football community, clinical [...]

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Irrational Manliness

William Kristol this morning offers a thinking rational person the rare treat of observing someone take Harvey Mansfield seriously:
Lest conservatives be too proud, it’s worth recalling that conservatism’s rise was decisively enabled by liberalism’s weakness. That weakness was manifested by liberalism’s limp reaction to the challenge from the New Left in the 1960s, became more [...]

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A good first week

I’m puzzled, when I read the paper in the morning, at the possibility that I might read about my president and actually approve of his work. His repeal of the ‘gag rule’ yesterday means that many organizations that include abortion in services offered to women can now receive federal funding. These provide not [...]

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Pete Seeger, American

The inaugural concert yesterday was wonderful on many levels, but none struck your correspondent, the 59 year old son of classic old lefties, with more depth and resonance than the appearance of Pete Seeger, singing for a president-elect and 750,000 of his closest friends.
The man’s pushing ninety.  For most of his life, he’s been protesting, [...]

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Splendid Isolation

Stnley Fish, in today’s Times, bemoans the end of higher education as he’d like to understand it, an exercise almost entirely self-referential, ‘distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world’. He applauds what he calls its ‘determined inutility’, decries the substitution of career [...]

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Goodbye to All That

A year or two ago, I bought a keychain countdown clock, which now reads not much time at all until 20 Jan 2009.  As the day approaches, I find myself more and more aware of just how much I loathe Bush, Cheney, their works, their enablers, their philosophies; how much I’ve fought over the past [...]

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Gaza

Israel, which once made the deserts bloom, is now more associated with school bombings, pictures of dead children. They have helped a forgetful world forget the school bus bombing at Ma’alot, the Sbarro bombing, on and on. They are a first-world economic, scientific, and medical power as well as a first-world military power. [...]

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Usual and customary

A couple of months ago, the police raided (‘inspected’) my daughter’s high school. Fifteen canine units, cops in riot gear, armed with pistols and boltcutters, looking for drugs. One arrest. The rationale was to quell persistent rumors of rampant drug use there.
I was appalled. I thought it grossly disproportionate and inappropriate [...]

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London PhotoBlogging

As that’s more fun than writing about anything else this morning.

Like our Leaderz today, Assyrian Rulers loved to celebrate their ‘victories’ in relief, and ignore the consequences of military adventurism. The Neo-Assryian kingdoms eventually collapsed under the weight of their military and imperialism and were conquered by their former client states. They never rose again.

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My Big Idea is bigger than your Big Idea

George Bush’s abject failure requires an exploration of its roots, the better to avoid at least one path towards repetition. It’s common nowadays for conservatives to claim Bush failed because he deviated from their faith. Paul Krugman, amongst others, disagrees, seeing Bush as in continuity with Republicanism since McCarthy and Nixon, and [...]

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