Repeal and reform will be a winning issue this fall. Democrats are celebrating victory. The public outcry against what they’ve done doesn’t seem to bother them. They take it as validation that they are succeeding at transforming America. But we’ve seen this movie before and it won’t end happily for Democrats. Their morale rose when [...]
Archive for March, 2010
What Republicans Should Do Now
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Politics on March 25, 2010 | Comments Off
A generous dose of caution on health reform
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on March 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The conventions of political pontification do not allow for admissions of uncertainty or ambivalence. Thus, Sunday night’s House debate on health care featured bombastic declarations from both sides about the impending disaster (Republicans) or nirvana (Democrats) being ushered in. In fact, the occasion called for more humility than hyperbole, however unlikely that may have been [...]
Stupak’s fall from pro-life grace
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Religion on March 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Stupak. Etymology: Eponym for Rep. Bart Stupak. Function: verb 1: In a legislative process, to obstruct passage of a proposed law on the basis of a moral principle (i.e., protecting the unborn), accumulating power in the process, then at a key moment surrendering in exchange for a fig leaf, the size of which varies according [...]
Violence in the Land of Sleep
Posted in Living on March 24, 2010 | Comments Off
On the night, several years ago, that I tackled my nightstand, I should have known better. Jolted awake in the dark, my wife Alice peered over the covers to where I lay spread-eagled on the floor. I had lunged with open arms from our bed while still asleep, truly, I later mused, the consequence of [...]
Now, Can We Have Health-Care Reform?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Politics on March 24, 2010 | Comments Off
ObamaCare doubles down on a failing system. A certain kind of person—we get emails from them all the time—understands exactly nothing about the health-care debate, but thinks they know who the villain is: the insurance industry. Barack Obama is not one of them. In the desperate hours he played to public ignorance. But from the [...]
A Soldier’s Story
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Literature on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Life with PFC Cold-Cuts and a stun gun dubbed Cultural Awareness. For an officer, war is all about taking care of your own by balancing risk and reward. You don’t precipitately hurl your soldiers into a fight, but you don’t flinch from one either. American soldiers and Marines are killing machines; the more efficiently they [...]
The Netanyahu Diaries
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Iran, Israel on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
What Israel’s prime minister really thinks. The following note was discovered aboard the plane that brought Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington yesterday. It appears to be the Israeli prime minister’s personal talking points—with deletions in brackets—for his meeting today with President Obama. Handwriting experts are unable to confirm the note’s authenticity. Good to see you again, [...]
Obama’s Legacy and the Iranian Bomb
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, tagged Iran on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Neville Chamberlain was remembered for appeasing Germany, not his progressive social programs. The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy. There are several ways in which Iran could use [...]
Republicans and ObamaCare
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Democrats insisted on the most liberal bill they could pass. In Washington, political defeats always produce finger-pointing, so the conventional wisdom has suddenly turned on a dime and decided that Republicans were wrong to have opposed ObamaCare. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was especially taken yesterday with blogger and Bush speechwriter David Frum’s argument [...]
How to Pay for Your Own Uggs
Posted in Living on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
One of the most intriguing business ideas of the 1980s didn’t come out of Silicon Valley. It sprang from the head of a fictional seventh-grade girl named Kristy Thomas, herself sprung from the (not-so-fictional) mind of young-adult novelist Ann M. Martin. The idea? The Baby-sitters Club, a group of friends who met several times a [...]
Pro-life Democrats, R.I.P.
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living, Politics on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Bart Stupak’s vote for the health bill shows that in the end you can’t count on prolife Democrats. And then there were none. When Bart Stupak announced Sunday he was now a “yes” on the health-care bill, six Democrats stood with him. Even that handful would have been enough to defeat the bill. Instead, they [...]
Pope’s Letter ‘Will Not Dispel Dark Clouds’ Over Church
Posted in Law, Living, Religion on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Over the weekend, Pope Benedict XVI finally issued his letter of apology relating to the sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. German commentators welcome the move, but argue it is not enough. The pope, after all, still hasn’t commented on the abuse scandal in his homeland. On Sunday, the waiting for Ireland’s Catholics came to an [...]
Collateral damage
Posted in Living on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Neither comrades nor spouses Often means having to say you’re sorry “THERE are three ways of being an unfilial son,” argued Mencius, an ancient Confucian philosopher. “The most serious is to have no heir.” The desire for male descendants has had many baleful consequences in China, and in recent years one that used to be [...]
Fair play
Posted in Economy and business, Living, Religion on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
The origins of selflessness It is not so much that cheats don’t prosper, but that prosperity does not cheat FOR the evolutionarily minded, the existence of fairness is a puzzle. What biological advantage accrues to those who behave in a trusting and co-operative way with unrelated individuals? And when those encounters are one-off events with [...]
Obama shows a president can be both strong and wrong
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
At any given political moment, the most important public judgment made about a president is not “liberal” or “conservative”; it is “strong” or “weak.” A verdict of weakness tends to be self-reinforcing. Every stumble proves the narrative, while achievements that contradict that narrative are downplayed or ignored. (See Jimmy Carter.) But the converse is also [...]
A battle won, but a victory?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on March 23, 2010 | Comments Off
“And everybody praised the Duke, Who this great fight did win.” “But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory” – Robert Southey, “The Battle of Blenheim” Barack Obama hopes his famous health-care victory will mark him as a transformative president. [...]
Think Globally
Posted in Mathematics on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
The most familiar ideas of geometry were inspired by an ancient vision — a vision of the world as flat. From parallel lines that never meet, to the Pythagorean theorem discussed in last week’s column, these are eternal truths about an imaginary place, the two-dimensional landscape of plane geometry. Conceived in India, China, Egypt and [...]
The whiff of justice
Posted in Law, Weird cases on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Cleopatra’s sails were so exquisitely perfumed that “the winds were lovesick with them”. Exquisite perfumery, though, isn’t necessarily a good thing in law. Following a recent legal action, public office workers in Detroit will have to avoid the use of fragrances. Michigan winds will have to love the natural odour of the workforce. After the [...]
A Pretty Dumb Hypothesis About Good Looks
Posted in Living on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Word to the wise, guys: Give a girl the eye and you might not just be committing an unwanted advance; you might be denting the co-ed’s capacity for cognition. So say a pair of psychologists trying to prove the feminist theory that the experience of being sexually “objectified” overburdens the female brain. In a paper [...]
The 1990s precedent for a Democratic bounce-back
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
As congressional Democrats plotted their endgame strategy for health-care reform, the question looming in their minds was: How do we reduce our risks in the November midterm elections? What outcome and what procedures will the voters find least objectionable? The widespread assumption is that the worst-case scenario, the outcome that would be most damaging to [...]
Family Matters
Posted in History on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Can World War I be blamed on the ineptitude of three emperor-cousins? According to popular mythology, World War I broke out largely because of a decadent, inbred cousinhood that ruled over the Old World’s dynastic empires in a way that was undemocratic but also competitive, promoting an arms race that their pacific European subjects could [...]
Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Politics on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak sold his anti-abortion soul for a toothless executive order. Last week Republican Rep. Mike Pence posted on his Facebook site that famous Schoolhouse Rock video titled “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” It’s clearly time for a remake. Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view [...]
US Health Care — Good for America, Bad for the World
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Politics on March 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Obama has made history. His health care package is the most important reform America has seen in decades. But what is good for the US may not be a positive for the president himself — nor for the rest of the world. Germany’s Iron Chancellor, as Otto von Bismarck is known, was never a huge [...]
Uncommon Knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged March 21 2010 on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
How to stop procrastinating Recent research has suggested that forgiveness is good for your health. But it may also be good for your study habits. Students who procrastinated in studying for an exam — but forgave themselves for doing so — procrastinated less and got a higher grade on a subsequent exam. One might normally [...]
The dark forest of childhood
Posted in Literature on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Modern fairy tales return to their roots Recently, on a visit home, I was rifling through a box of old books in my mother’s dank basement when I came across a childhood edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. I hadn’t thought about the book in years, but sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking at [...]
Hey guys!
Posted in The Word, tagged March 21 2010 on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Yes, ladies, this means you In the study of peevology, language subdivision, one of the more fertile areas of inquiry is the long list of things that people are annoyed to be called. Not the truly offensive terms — none of which can be printed here, and all of which have a level of discomfort [...]
The week ahead
Posted in The Week ahead, tagged March 21 2010 on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Italian regional polls will show if Silvio Berlusconi’s popularity is waning • THE prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, will be able to assess the damage that a string of scandals has meted out to his government when Italians go to the polls for two days of voting in regional elections starting on Sunday March [...]
Talk Deeply, Be Happy?
Posted in Living on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Deep conversations made people happier than small talk, one study found. Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather? It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and [...]
Texts Without Context
Posted in Literature on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in [...]
Prison, Day 1
Posted in Living on March 21, 2010 | Comments Off
On a dreary February morning in 2004, my fiancé, Larry, and I pulled into the parking lot of the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn. After years of legal proceedings and more than a decade after I committed a reckless drug-related crime, I was there, at age 34, to surrender myself to the federal government. [...]
