Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain
Talk about dodging a bullet. When armed, explosives-laden eco-terrorist James J. Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters ...
September 2, 2010 -- Legal scholars distinguish between behavior that is malum in se (wrong in itself, such as murder, rape, and theft) and behavior that is malum prohibitum (wrong merely because it is against a society’s structural rules, such as driving on the left side of the street in America or the right in Britain). I sometimes wonder if we do not need a third category: malum insanum, behavior that is wrong merely because someone in authority has set down a completely arbitrary edict that declares it to be wrong. That, at least, is the reflection prompted by yesterday’s SEC settlement of insider-trading accusation against two friends, one of whom boasted about his work on a possible corporate acquisition and one of whom traded on the information—for his own benefit, not for their joint benefit.
September 2007 -- Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain fundamental ideas about man and his place in the
The latest morally monstrous proposal out of the environmentalist cult comes from Lord Smith of Finsbury. He suggests that each British...
The government, of course."As I live in British Columbia, Canada, it occurred to me to ask: What would have been the outcome for John Q.'s
May 29, 2009 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently met with Beijing officials to secure international agreement about tighter restrictions
Environmentalists worldwide are urging people to turn off all their lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28 at 8:30pm local time...
I suppose that you can’t judge a film by its previews. But on that superficial basis, I must admit that the Left’s pre-election movie, “Inside Job,” which I wrote about a few days ago , seems far more powerful than Ray Griggs ’s October movie, “ I Want Your Money .”
Ted Frank, of the Manhattan Institute’s Point of Law blog, posts a letter about the Toyota affair that he sent to the New York Times but that (naturally) went unpublished. To the editor: Peter Goodman takes issue with Toyota's public relations but offers no alternative. According to Goodman, it would be a pr mistake for Toyota to blame driver error for the panic over "sudden acceleration." But more and more evidence exonerates Toyota and demonstrates that the allegations of an electronic defect were lies driven by self-interested trial lawyers trying to manufacture hysteria. How precisely should Toyota defend itself when faced with a financially-motivated attack on its reputation abetted by an unskeptical media if the truth is insufficient?
In reacting to the Enron scandal, many cultural commentators have been quick to recur to a favorite theme: the corrupting power of commerce
The Wall Street Journal editorial page today prints the following quotation from Camille Paglia : “We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity.”
David Brooks coined the term “bourgeois bohemian” (BoBo) to refer to those children of the Sixties who exercise the bourgeois virtues of capitalism in their day jobs but affect the anti-capitalist (“bohemian”) attitudes and styles of the academic and cultural elite. Given this combination, the bourgeois bohemians of Wall Street were naturally among the largest contributors to the campaign of Barack Obama, the first presidential candidate with a completely post-Sixties outlook.
This is a collection of essays and reviews by an American sociologist who for some forty years has been slugging it out in academic journals
July/August 2002 -- Graffiti is metastasizing again throughout New York City. "The guys out here now are destroying us," says Bruce Pienkny
September/October 2002 -- Intuition: Its Powers and Perils . By David G. Myers. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. 322 pp. $24.95.) If you wanted to fathom the workings of a complex corporation, with many units, goals, and operations, you would not limit your investigation to its CEO. Although his decisions might be most visible, you would realize that thousands of other employees supported him and gave his decisions effect (and perhaps had their own agendas, as well). This is one of the metaphors that cognitive psychologist David G. Myers uses in describing the relationship between our conscious mind and our automatic mental processes, which he calls intuition. Intuition: Its Powers and Perils probably could not have been written even a decade ago. Its depth comes from relatively recent discoveries in brain science and hundreds of experiments over the last two decades in cognitive psychology--the study of how we think. Myers can refer to brain science to mount a cogent case that certain mental processes are genuinely automatic and nonconscious; and, when he talks about the astonishing capabilities and systematic errors of intuition, he can cite chapter and verse from cognitive experiments. There are fifty-six pages of endnotes in this non-academic book.
Don't miss today's Wall Street Journal Europe profile of the leading Austrian economist Peter J. Boettke : "An Old Economic Theory Finds Converts in a New Age," by Kelly Evans. I had occasion to work with Boettke a couple years ago, in his capacity as editor of The Review of Austrian Economics, and found him to be extremely rigorous.
September/October 2002 -- In Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand laid out the essential values and virtues that a coherent, rational system of ethics
September/October 2002 -- BOOK REVIEW: Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism . By Joshua Muravchik. (San Francisco, Calif...
Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain
Talk about dodging a bullet. When armed, explosives-laden eco-terrorist James J. Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters ...
September 2, 2010 -- Legal scholars distinguish between behavior that is malum in se (wrong in itself, such as murder, rape, and theft) and behavior that is malum prohibitum (wrong merely because it is against a society’s structural rules, such as driving on the left side of the street in America or the right in Britain). I sometimes wonder if we do not need a third category: malum insanum, behavior that is wrong merely because someone in authority has set down a completely arbitrary edict that declares it to be wrong. That, at least, is the reflection prompted by yesterday’s SEC settlement of insider-trading accusation against two friends, one of whom boasted about his work on a possible corporate acquisition and one of whom traded on the information—for his own benefit, not for their joint benefit.
September 2007 -- Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain fundamental ideas about man and his place in the
The latest morally monstrous proposal out of the environmentalist cult comes from Lord Smith of Finsbury. He suggests that each British...
The government, of course."As I live in British Columbia, Canada, it occurred to me to ask: What would have been the outcome for John Q.'s
May 29, 2009 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently met with Beijing officials to secure international agreement about tighter restrictions
Environmentalists worldwide are urging people to turn off all their lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28 at 8:30pm local time...
I suppose that you can’t judge a film by its previews. But on that superficial basis, I must admit that the Left’s pre-election movie, “Inside Job,” which I wrote about a few days ago , seems far more powerful than Ray Griggs ’s October movie, “ I Want Your Money .”
Ted Frank, of the Manhattan Institute’s Point of Law blog, posts a letter about the Toyota affair that he sent to the New York Times but that (naturally) went unpublished. To the editor: Peter Goodman takes issue with Toyota's public relations but offers no alternative. According to Goodman, it would be a pr mistake for Toyota to blame driver error for the panic over "sudden acceleration." But more and more evidence exonerates Toyota and demonstrates that the allegations of an electronic defect were lies driven by self-interested trial lawyers trying to manufacture hysteria. How precisely should Toyota defend itself when faced with a financially-motivated attack on its reputation abetted by an unskeptical media if the truth is insufficient?
In reacting to the Enron scandal, many cultural commentators have been quick to recur to a favorite theme: the corrupting power of commerce
The Wall Street Journal editorial page today prints the following quotation from Camille Paglia : “We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity.”
David Brooks coined the term “bourgeois bohemian” (BoBo) to refer to those children of the Sixties who exercise the bourgeois virtues of capitalism in their day jobs but affect the anti-capitalist (“bohemian”) attitudes and styles of the academic and cultural elite. Given this combination, the bourgeois bohemians of Wall Street were naturally among the largest contributors to the campaign of Barack Obama, the first presidential candidate with a completely post-Sixties outlook.
This is a collection of essays and reviews by an American sociologist who for some forty years has been slugging it out in academic journals
July/August 2002 -- Graffiti is metastasizing again throughout New York City. "The guys out here now are destroying us," says Bruce Pienkny
September/October 2002 -- Intuition: Its Powers and Perils . By David G. Myers. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. 322 pp. $24.95.) If you wanted to fathom the workings of a complex corporation, with many units, goals, and operations, you would not limit your investigation to its CEO. Although his decisions might be most visible, you would realize that thousands of other employees supported him and gave his decisions effect (and perhaps had their own agendas, as well). This is one of the metaphors that cognitive psychologist David G. Myers uses in describing the relationship between our conscious mind and our automatic mental processes, which he calls intuition. Intuition: Its Powers and Perils probably could not have been written even a decade ago. Its depth comes from relatively recent discoveries in brain science and hundreds of experiments over the last two decades in cognitive psychology--the study of how we think. Myers can refer to brain science to mount a cogent case that certain mental processes are genuinely automatic and nonconscious; and, when he talks about the astonishing capabilities and systematic errors of intuition, he can cite chapter and verse from cognitive experiments. There are fifty-six pages of endnotes in this non-academic book.
Don't miss today's Wall Street Journal Europe profile of the leading Austrian economist Peter J. Boettke : "An Old Economic Theory Finds Converts in a New Age," by Kelly Evans. I had occasion to work with Boettke a couple years ago, in his capacity as editor of The Review of Austrian Economics, and found him to be extremely rigorous.
September/October 2002 -- In Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand laid out the essential values and virtues that a coherent, rational system of ethics
September/October 2002 -- BOOK REVIEW: Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism . By Joshua Muravchik. (San Francisco, Calif...