There’s nothing that works so right that someone can’t, by some edict, wreck it. The internet as we know it could be wrecked. With SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” being debated in Congress, we have a meta rehashing of the same digital piracy debate we had pre-iTunes. Where once the RIAA was fighting to…
In February I wrote on NRO about the notion of “the free-born mind,” as C.S. Lewis presented it in The Abolition of Man. I’m perennially fascinated by his still fresh insight on the repercussions for a culture that has decoupled the civic and moral aspects of its shared identity into separate, competing arenas. Cultural schizophrenia has been the result, and when the…
Volkswagen shows us the factory of the future, of the present in downtown Dresden. What VW has built serves as a model for how heavy manufacturing can not only survive in industrialized nations, but do so in an environment that supports high paying jobs in the heart (rather than ghetto or near-the-freeway freeway fringes) of…
Today marks the third anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The literary primogenitor to Solidarity, Solzhenitsyn exposed the moral bankruptcy of Soviet rule in Russia by revealing the horrors of the Gulag system. ”One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,” published during the era of de-Stalinization, was a first-hand novelization of the Gulag and…
According to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence now accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. The bit that’s left doesn’t function, not least because it doesn’t need to. How can, say, Helmand develop an economic base when everybody with a whit of sense is making massively inflated salaries as a translator for the…
From Christina Hoff Sommers at Forbes, via Marty Nemko: Over the past decade the National Science Foundation has funneled $135 million into a “gender bias” program called Advance. Its stated purpose: to advance women in science. In practice it does little to help women, but its potential to inflict lasting damage on fields that drive…
Omar Ahmad, vice-mayor of San Carlos, California, explains, perhaps counter-intuitively for digital natives, why “analog” paper-and-pen are more powerful tools for getting through to your politician than e-mails and calls. In a quick, direct, six minute talk, Ahmad outlines his thinking. I’ve created an outline of his key points below, though you can watch the…
Nils Gilman: “[The DEA] thinks they’re in the drug eradication business, they’re actually in the drug regulation business. By increasing the risk for the people who are importing this stuff, they actually increase the ability of those who stay in the business to demand premium prices and actually raise the profit margins. … “So if…
On Mon., Apr. 5 I saw Irwin Stelzer speak on “Conservatism and the New Capitalism” at American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. Stelzer is an economist, business columnist for The Sunday Times of London and was a managing director of Rothschild, Inc. He spoke about “new arguments” in the public policy conversation on how…
Tom Shakely runs Pastoral Media Formation, a media services, content strategy, and consulting service.
