Rebelling against academic tyranny

A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison rejects the university’s right to subject him to mandatory re-education sessions. It’s encouraging to note that more and more people are becoming inured to being labeled by the Left and are no longer bothering to engage in the popular conservative appeasement dance of “but I’m not, I’m […]

An astonishing coincidence

It’s still so easy. Golf Pro, aka Tad, mocks the idea that Minnesotans have anything to worry about from the Somali jihadists in Minnesota: I’m positive that comparing Minneapolis to Kenya is a bad idea. They aren’t really the same place, same culture, same institutions, same history. Really, there is no similarity. The good folks […]

Never again

In light of the recent calls for gun control in light of yesterday’s lethal shootings in yet another gun-free zone, I thought it was important to remember this particular fact of history: The official phase of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish campaign was opened today with a law forbidding Jews to possess firearms or other weapons. This […]

Why central bankers never learn

Zerohedge reports on India’s central bank digging its hole deeper: With the value of the rupee plunging to new lows, the current account deficit at an all-time high and inflation running at nearly a ten-percent annual clip, India is in serious economic trouble. Indeed many are beginning to wonder whether the country is edging toward […]

Facebook, free speech, and the FBI

Yes, American, you are now officially living in a police state possessed of an all-seeing eye the likes of which even the Soviets and East Germans never managed to achieve: A man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook, he was being interrogated by police and the FBI. Blaine Cooper, 33, […]

Torturing vibrants

Good intentions or not, that’s what collegiate affirmative action does: Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, […]

Lions Den III: Kate Paulk

Along with Dave Freer, Sarah Hoyt, and Chris McMahon, Kate Paulk is a member of the Mad Genius Club. She is also a Mensa-qualified history buff and her take on Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula, Impaler, is based on the actual historical figure and military leader, as opposed to the caped seducer. Please note that we […]

Naked authoritarianism

We appear to be rapidly reaching the end of the grand pretense of liberal democracy: While the much publicized Sunday morning detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda at Heathrow on his way back to Brazil, in a stunning move that as we subsequently learned had been telegraphed apriori to the US, could potentially be […]

Lions Den II: Michael Z. Williamson

The level of interest in the Lion’s Den has been high enough that I’m going to have to post one every week for a while. As it happens, Baen Books author Michael Z. Williamson has a newly released collection of essays and short stories entitled Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocations. It’s eclectic, and as […]

Congress exempt from Obamacare

Just in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear that Obamacare is going to wreck American health care, the executive branch has given the congressional branch an exemption from the law: The White House has approved a deal that will exempt members of Congress and their staff from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, […]