URLs du Jour

2017-02-13

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Proverbs 29:11:

Fools give full vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end.

The US is running short on wisdom these days.

  • Kevin D. Williamson notes totalitarianism in the classified ads: "No Republicans Need Apply".

    One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.

    KDW notes the dispiriting responses he received when he advocated declaring good proportions of your life as politics-free zones.

  • An article from print-Reason now available at their website: "Uganda's Bad Seeds" by Francisco Toro. Asking a simple question: why did the Green Revolution seem to skip Africa. First stop: visiting Uganda's ghost-town National Seed Testing Laboratory and its director, Divine Nakkede.

    Ensuring that farmers have access to good seed should be at the forefront of Uganda's fight against hunger, and a sample of each lot of agricultural seed produced in the country is supposed to be tested here. But the lab barely functions at all.

    Is insufficient funding the problem? Not quite. Expensive-looking machinery is all around us. Yet none of it, I slowly realize, is plugged into the wall.

    "Oh, yeah," an aid official tells me days later. "All the equipment at the Kawanda lab is fried."

    Six-word synopsis: Do-goodism meets corruption, and loses interest.

  • Ah, Meryl. "Meryl Streep Pledges to Stand Up to ‘Brownshirts’ in Tirade Against Trump"

    Meryl Streep, in a fiery speech criticizing President Trump on Saturday night, pledged to stand up against “brownshirts and bots” at a time when she and others are increasingly denouncing his administration’s policies and the president himself.

    The "brownshirt" thing is recycled Al Gore. The self-dramatization and delusion involved in holding oneself up as a brave opponent of modern Nazi scum should be clear to anyone not wedded to that narrative.

    She really is a good actress, though. All those roles where she played a sane, well-balanced individual—had me totally fooled.


Last Modified 2024-01-26 6:52 AM EDT