This is several days old, but since I greatly enjoyed David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: The Dismantling of American Culture (Have you not read it? You must), it would be remiss of me not to link his brilliant, hilarious essay for the Daily Beast, “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm.” It contains many useful arguments… Read More Gun Laws and Other Acts of Folly
Excerpt from his upcoming Memoir, Unknown Pleasures (to be released later this month), in the NYT Magazine: That was the thing about Joy Division, though: writing the songs was dead easy because the group was really balanced. We had a great guitarist, a great drummer, a great bass player and a great singer. Ian would listen to… Read More Peter Hook Remembers Joy Division
55. The Rolling Stones — Let it Bleed I don’t remember if I bought this before or after Their Satanic Majesties Request. I feel like it was after, because my earliest memory of having it was living in my duplex after college, when I distinctly remember putting the ticket from seeing the Stones on the ’99 No… Read More Rating My CD’s: Let it Bleed
I never liked Ron Paul. His positions were sound, and I found myself in agreement with many of them. But somehow he just rubbed me the wrong way. He seemed too snarky to be statesmanlike, his past was unsavory at best, and he had a tendency to use leftist arguments that I found frankly offensive.… Read More No, Rand Paul Should Not Skip the Presidential Campaign…
Every week I get at least a few hits from the phrase “how I met your mother jumped the shark.” This occurs because a year ago I penned a post entitled “I Met Your Mother While Jumping a Shark.” and while it doesn’t bring in quite as much traffic as “Why Family Guy Sucks at… Read More HIMYM, Shark-Jumping, and the Lonely End of All Sitcoms
Since I began the process of attempting to read Civil Disobedience, I’ve had in the back of my mind a typically starchy takedown of him by P.J. O’Rourke in his 1996 book All the Trouble in the World. I quote at length: Thoreau took the bad ideas and worse ideals of the primitivists, added the pitiful self-obsession… Read More P.J. O’Rourke on Thoreau
“We had dead Americans! What does it matter if what we said caused it wasn’t what caused it at all? We were too busy saving the people who died!”
The time has come for honesty. We cannot continue as we are, pretending to party unity. The schisms are too obvious. We talk of “establishments” and “purists” as though we all want different things. Let me suggest that this is in fact, because we want different things. Let us first talk of the Union. The… Read More The Union and the Confederacy: the Ongoing Civil War in the GOP
Back in 2008, Jeff Goldstein had a long, ugly argument with Patrick Frey (which started here) about whether Obama was a “good man”. At the time, I found the argument much ado about nothing: what difference can it possibly make if he has a good heart or not? I’m opposed to what he does in… Read More Does it Matter if He’s Eeeeeevil?
I watched Our Lord and Savior get inaugurated again at Wegman’s whilst getting some coffee. He’s graying. He looks smaller. I didn’t stick around for the address. I expected it to be the usual boilerplate, and absent some rather proggie-sounding talking points, I don’t doubt that it was. The whole concept of Obama, which even… Read More Obama is Boring
Content Blues 