Public health authorities in California have for years spent many millions of dollars on television commercials that are supposed to help people quit smoking. Perhaps that is better than spending income from tobacco settlements and taxes intended for that purpose on...
Daily life offers us parents many opportunities to strengthen our children ‘s minds. One way to do that is by noticing and taking advantage of opportunities to praise our children’s thought. “Yes, that’s right.” “Very true,”...
Today’s political mix includes liberal and conservative Republicans, and liberal and conservative Democrats. The Republican and Democrat tags no longer accurately identify political doctrine. The designations liberal and conservative have also changed from their...
To plumb the depths at the NY Times: I think David Brooks is worse than Paul Krugman. Krugman is a cynical deceiver, who distorts every fact to fit his lust for dictatorship. Brooks, who represents the worst strain of conservatism, actually believes his views, and...
Today’s Americans, enticed, perhaps enchanted, by charismatic speeches, are ceding so much power to Washington, and like yesteryear’s Germans are building the Trojan Horse for a future tyrant.
In an age that values cleverness over wisdom, it is not surprising that many superficial but clever books get more attention than a wise book like “The Character of Nations” by Angelo Codevilla, even though the latter has far more serious implications for...
Doing nothing might seem to be simple and easy. But there are many varieties of nothing, and some kinds of nothing can get very elaborate and complex. In courts of law, for example, “concurrent sentences” mean that nothing is being done to punish a...
The Fairness Doctrine is not a doctrine that supports freedom or individual rights or free enterprise. The only way to deal fairly with it is to prevent its reinstatement and to repeal it entirely.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students...
As the mainstream media circles the wagons around Judge Sonia Sotomayor, to protect her from the consequences of her own words and deeds, its main arguments are distractions from the issue at hand. A CNN reporter, for example, got all worked up because Rush Limbaugh...
In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification” when people realize what was said. The clearly racist comments made by Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Berkeley campus in 2001 have forced the spinmasters to...
The other day I sought a respite from current events by re-reading some of the writings of 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke. But it was not nearly as big an escape as I had thought it would be. When Burke wrote of his apprehension about “new power in...
Hot off the press is my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell’s 43rd book, “The Housing Boom and Bust.” The book is an eye-opener for anyone interested in the truth about the collapse of the housing market that played a major role in our financial market...
Until earlier this month, this was a nation of laws, not of men, a nation where justice was blind, meaning we are all equal under the law. That changed when President Barack Obama’s extortionate threats against the “holdout” Chrysler lenders caused...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: They say that people mellow with age. However, the older I get, the less patience I have with cleverness....
President Obama’s articulated criteria for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is: “We need somebody who’s got the heart to recognize — the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what...
The media have an obvious vested interest in constantly urging that cameras be allowed in more places where governmental decisions are being made, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Like so many things that are said to be good for the public, this is...
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got it right about a lot of things, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead. “Ten years ago, many people around the world believed that socialism was a viable, even the most...
What to call black people has to be confusing to white people. Having been around for 73 years, I have been through a number of names. Among the polite ones are: colored, Negro, Afro-American, black, and now African-American. Among those names, African-American is...
After virtually every disaster created by Beltway politicians you can hear the sound of feet scurrying for cover in Washington, see fingers pointing in every direction away from Washington, and watch all sorts of scapegoats hauled up before Congressional committees to...
One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about...
Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt is a Harvard-trained geologist, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico, and a former astronaut, the last living man to have walked on the moon. He is among more than 20 elite scientists and economists who will present at the third International...
While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of...
Soon college students will come home and present parents with their grades. To avoid delusion, parents should do some serious discounting because of rampant grade inflation. If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor’s degree will have just as much...
There is a reason why the statue of Justice wears a blindfold. There are things that courts are not supposed to see or recognize when making their decisions– the race you belong to, whether you are rich or poor, and other personal things that could bias...
Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are...
Andy: Andy Clarkson here with John Lewis of the Charlotte Tea Party, April 15, 2009. John: April 15, Taxes are due today. Did you not know that? (Laughter) Andy: Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Yeah, I heard about that. I heard rumors. John,...
As the issue of health care reform builds to a legislative climax, it is important that we not merely parrot the same kinds of proposals we have seen for the past 50 years. A Point of View writer on [the Raleigh News-Observer] lamented that “after a half-century...
Here’s a fascinating quote attributed to online writer Paul E. Marek: “The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to...
A civilized society’s first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages...
It used to be said that self-preservation is the first law of nature. But much of what has been happening in recent times in the United States, and in Western civilization in general, suggests that survival is taking a back seat to the shibboleths of political...
The greatest threat is our own failure to understand the nature of our rights, and to recognize the moral goodness of a nation founded to protect those rights.
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