Tag Archive for ‘Cultural Revolutions’
More Cultural Revolutions
A military friend told me that General McChrystal was among the most highly regarded senior officers in the American military. Now, according to a Washington Post story, it seems he has to play McClellan to Obama’s Lincoln, that is, an intelligent and effective officer forced to work with immoral and incapable political leaders.
Good For You, Joe Barton
Congressman Barton, sir, never mind what the party leaders made you say in riposte to your own verbal thrust last week. You were right the first time—right to call out the White House for tactics extralegal at best, embarrassing to many who continue for some odd reason to look to the Oval Office for moral leadership.
Still the Metric System in Short Pants
Yahoo has decided to promote the World Cup by prominently featuring scores to games on its home page. Last night, I saw a World Cup game playing on some of the TVs at a local sports bar. Thus does an event that used to receive as much coverage in America as spelling bees in Uzbekistan creep slowly into the American consciousness.
The Sound and the Fury
“Never let a crisis go to waste”—a watchword of the present administration—finds its deepest, as it were, meaning in the offshore oil rig crisis. There, the idiocy of modern politics impatiently waits discovery.
What Rand Paul Got Right
The question Rand Paul forces us to look squarely in the face is a sensitive one: when, in human affairs, does pragmatism trump principle? Fairly often, is the answer. It is what we learn at a Certain Age. The world has its own ways of working; nor do all the consequent results interlock in satisfying ways.
Home School, Sweet Home School
Once upon a time, the great majority of us attended public schools. In the 21st century, their widely advertised shortcomings and deficiencies are driving out, or keeping away altogether, people whose presence in the classroom every half-sensible educator should crave.
Who Controls the Past Controls the Future, Kent State Edition
Try as I might, I was not able to avoid entirely the media coverage surrounding the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, coverage that was particularly intense here in nearby Cleveland. I am too young to remember the shootings, but I do remember the civil trial of the National Guardsmen who fired on the student protestors, and the reactions to that trial.
The Harvard Way of Life
She’s more likely than not to win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thus, the really big question about Elena Kagan is blunter: How and when does the United States as a whole get out from under the sway of an alien enterprise such as her university, Harvard?
Oil Spills and the Big Picture
The Little Picture—the picture of what’s happening right this minute—is what you get from the media, and that’s to be expected. But the Little Picture has to fit inside a bigger one for news consumers rightly to appraise all the stakes and angles.
Volcanoes, Climate and the Limits of Computer Modeling
Scarce a week goes by without some scaremongering headline about climate change, premised on apocalyptic conclusions drawn from a computer-generated climate model. Modeling lies at the heart of the whole vast climate-change industry, an industry sparked by the big government-backed computer modeling centers in the U.S. and U.K.
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