thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The admiration of the rich and famous for a left-wing tyrant: Critics assail Fidel Castro’s grip on Hollywood celebs. Why is mass-market entertainment and fashion left-wing? In part it’s because pop culture likes the exotic, miraculous and sexy—that’s what pleases the public—and a Caribbean Marxist paradise run by a personally magnetic strongman fits the … More ...
Merry Christmas!
From all of us at VFR
An update on what school textbooks are saying these days, published by the liberal-but-somewhat-populist New York Daily News: Schoolbooks are flubbing facts.
On the occasion of a long-time colleague’s hundredth birthday Trent Lott paid a compliment that suggested that Federally-mandated integration had been a mistake, and that some other way forward would have been better—perhaps one that preserved at least the legality of voluntary separation. The response of many people, including some prominent in the conservative movement, … More ...
Religion is inevitable. A religion is an understanding of what is real, together with conclusions for the basic principles of morality. Any such understanding can reasonably be called a religion, since it provides an account of ultimate reality that is not fully demonstrable but gives answers regarding ultimate questions by which we live.
Each of … More ...
Patty Murray provides a textbook example of the use of divisive rhetoric as a diversion from issues by her denunciation of the use of divisive rhetoric as a diversion from issues. She says something utterly brainless about Osama and gets complaints. Her response? To lecture us about those “on the extreme fringes of society … More ...
Let sleeping dogs lie, be culturally sensitive, and above all don’t rock the boat: FBI investigators were ordered to stop Clinton-era investigations into suspected terror cell linked to al Qaeda. It’s hard to push an investigation forward when the higher-ups, for whatever reason, don’t want it to happen. And it gets even weirder when … More ...
At one time people thought it common sense to distinguish between a Connecticut Yankee and a Southern black and expect very different things from them. Today that kind of distinction is thought outrageous, but people still differentiate a Harvard graduate from a high school graduate who just got out of the Marines. The change is … More ...
There’s only one possible explanation for everything: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) says the reason Osama is so popular worldwide is that he’s into day care centers. In the meantime, the reason “[t]here are crises in every one of our schools in this country” is that there’s not enough Federal money to go around.
Where … More ...
What it’s like to teach literature in multicultural technocratic England: Teachers, targets and theatre trips. Taking schoolchildren to the theater becomes impossibly difficult when there are no standards, so you can’t expect people to behave right and keeping the kids safe becomes an infinitely complex task. So you don’t bother doing it. Back in … More ...