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Steven Yates at LewRockwell.com has put together a long and rather rambling (but info-packed) account of the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development and the movement for “global governance” generally. If you’ve felt you should know something about it but haven’t wanted to try to dig into the swamp it’s well worth a look.

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About 10 years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professional sociologist as well as politician, noted that as deviancy grows beyond the bounds of acceptability it is redefined so life can retain the appearance of normality. (See his American Scholar essay “Defining Deviancy Down”.) In fact, however, what we have been seeing around us for … More ...

Here’s an informative review by one theoretician of the managerial state, Paul Gottfried, of two biographies of a second: The Disputed Legacy of James Burnham. One of the biographies was written by a third theoretician, Sam Francis. It’s possible Burnham, Francis & Co. emphasize power in itself too much at the expense of the … More ...

Times are tough all over: the U. S. bishops’ board which is supposed to monitor clerical sex abuse includes some dodgy characters, and the Anglican church continues its long day’s journey down the tubes with an attack by a senior Anglican bishop on the masculinity of God. The latter incident can also be … More ...

Legal trivia: in Florida you can get 5 years for notorizing your own signature. Since it’s not clear why notorizing should matter, the law doesn’t seem to be enforced much except in special cases like anti-gay rights petitions. So in Miami two people involved in a campaign to overturn a local gay-rights ordinance … More ...

While visiting in-laws in suburban Columbus I looked at some of the publications they read and was struck by the continuing mainstreaming of cultural radicalism. The Columbus Dispatch ran an article on reparations in their Sunday supplement by “Harvard legal expert” Charles Ogletree, and devoted half their front page Monday to an enormous photograph … More ...

There’s something very odd about this: ‘Cruel’ mouse music study blasted. Several of the mice involved in a Cambridge University study of the effects of amphetamines and loud music suffered brain damage and died, it seems, resulting in outrage from activists and disciplinary action by the Home Office.

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An interesting article on press coverage of partial-birth abortion: Abortion: partial truths. There’s a ferocious national debate, the factual claims of the two sides are radically opposed, and it takes fifteen months for anybody in the mainstream press to call a local clinic and try to find out what’s going on.

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One year to the day after the attacks the Justice Department gets on the case, fingerprinting and photographing high-risk visitors. The security system will target nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Makes sense—fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis, so it would be grossly simple-minded to check them out. And Shiite non-Arab … More ...

I’m OK you’re OK as theology: Catholics reject evangelization of Jews. According to the journalist at the Boston Glob, who plainly has some axes to grind, “the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared unequivocally that the biblical covenant between Jews and God is valid and therefore Jews do not need to be … More ...