thoughts in and out of season
“Free to be you and me,” or maybe “The Way of the Cross Goes Bad”: Man held for German ‘cannibal killing’. A follower of Jeffrey Dahmer decided the easiest way to get a victim would be to place an ad in the gay press, so he did. Someone volunteered, and after setting his affairs … More ...
Some readers might be interested in an essay of mine on human rights, or what passes for them, just published at FrontPage.
It’s not just libraries that have a problem with the “atypical behavior” of skid row types: in Northampton, Massachusetts it’s the whole town.
A reader sent in the following article by the dean of the library school at Indiana University. It was published in the November 15 Library Journal and gives a sense of how things work out today in public-service organizations. I rather liked the idea of seminars on how to deal with “atypical patron behavior” in … More ...
Quite a remarkable story that’s worth passing on: How I Was Smeared, by Harry Stein. The man gave a talk in which he told a story about his son and an English teacher who thought Huck Finn “a ‘racist’ book … the word ‘nigger’ appearing with appalling frequency.” Because of the presence of the … More ...
New Labour is New Age, at least in the person of their First Couple: Ev’rybody must get stones (neolithic stone circles, that is). Cherie Blair does come off from the story as a bit of a crackpot. Is this a weakness of women in politics? Saul went off to see the Witch of Endor, but … More ...
I love the Tridentine mass more the more I attend it. In part it’s because of its clarity. If someone who had no idea what was going on saw it the only way he could make sense of what was happening would be to assume that everyone there thought there was something enormously important going … More ...
It does bother me that American Catholics won’t sing at mass no matter what the hymn. A priest I know with Polish and German conections blames the Irish. On the Continent, he says, it’s not like that. I dunno—there are lots of Italian-American parishes in Brooklyn, and so far as I can tell they’re the … More ...
The American Law Institute has urged states to update their family law by abolishing the family. Basically, what they propose is to abolish marriage by treating all “living together” arrangements the same, and to redistribute wealth by treating the breakup of such arrangements as an occasion for equalizing the wealth of the parties. The first … More ...
International politics as therapy: U.S. Pledges to Push Democracy in Muslim World. We’re going to work with the regimes in Muslim countries to help them work through their problems. Am I the only one who finds the language in this article bizarre?