The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Scientology Continues Its Unwelcome Encounter With the ‘Streisand Effect’

A week ago, the secretive Scientology cult accidentally invited closer media scrutiny by paying The Atlantic to publish a “sponsored content” article so over the top that it generated a massive backlash. It wasn’t difficult for journalists to figure out why the creepy sci-fi “religion” was trying to buy good publicity: Award-winning reporter Lawrence Wright […]

Furnishing Your Tidy Little Mind

Just wrote a long e-mail to a friend who, in reaction to last night’s 3,000-word rant about the nature of mental illness, described some of the emotional issues experienced by relatives of those usually non-emotive people with Asperger’s syndrome. Depending on the severity of the affliction, what happens in such cases is that people who […]

Not Since Johannes Gutenberg …

. . . published the Bible has any book deserved more enthusiastic hype than does Evan Sayet’s new book The Kindergarten of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks and Why He’s Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss. You will click this link. You will buy this book. You will read it, and your mind will be enlightened […]

Clockwork Angels

— by Wombat-socho Back in February, Smitty mentioned that Kevin J. Anderson would be writing a novel to accompany the new Rush* album Clockwork Angels. Well, thanks to a librarian friend, I got hold of an advance reader copy. It’s not bad. It’s an odd little book, much less Randian than I would have thought […]

The FBI and ‘Fedora’

Wow. OK, I just finished reading Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, a 1978 book by Edward Jay Epstein, and as soon as I finished it, I got on Google to solve the mystery. This is complicated. The mystery at the heart of Epstein’s book is this: Why did Oswald defect to the […]

America’s Decadent Elite

More than 15 years have passed since Robert Bork published Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, one of the most astute analyses of its kind ever written. Bork emphasized that the 1960s were the pivotal epoch. In his introduction, however, Bork made an important point: The remarkably sudden collapse of the “Establishment” under the assault of Sixties […]

Perhaps Not Since Johannes Gutenberg Invented Movable Type …

. . . has any event in the history of Western civilization been more significant than the forthcoming publication of Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds’s The Higher Education Bubble. This 56-page booklet, the 29th in the brilliant Encounter Broadside series, has been breathlessly awaited for months, in expectation that it will revolutionize our nation’s education system. […]

Dreams of My Ghostwriter’s Ex: Did Bill Ayers Use Dead Weather Underground Terrorist Diana Oughton as Model for Obama’s ‘Composite’ Girlfriend?

“I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books.” — Christopher Buckley, Oct. 10, 2008 In 2008, conservative journalist Jack Cashill presented evidence that Barack Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father had been written with the assistance of Bill Ayers, the former […]

« go back — keep looking »