Read more

A reader writes: Interesting column from Gene Lyons in today’s newspaper. He says that “To save a lousy $1.4 million (out of a $9 billion budget) Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment system has decreed an end to organ transplants.” This is for Medicaid patients. He wonders why there is not the outcry from the right similar to the death panel comments. Very likely nobody outside Arizona has heard about it. Still, is anybody surprised that beancounters are going to decree... Read more

has some typically wise, insightful, and puckish things to say about Malthus and the Reverse Cassandra Effect. It is truly amazing how, the more frequent and grotesque the sheer wrongness of the overpopulation doomsayers proves to be, the more they are believed as infallible oracles. Wright has great fun with this. Read more

You don’t see a lot of blues cellists: Read more

In which we begin to answer the musical question, “Why Creeds?” Read more

A reader writes: I would appreciate any prayer for my older son’s marriage. He is close to deciding to walk out. The situation is very bad – divorce would be a disaster, but the marriage itself needs a real miracle for it to turn from the present bad situation into what it should be. Father, hear our prayer for the salvation of this marriage and this family through Jesus Christ our Lord. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for all... Read more

Guess again. This seems suitable: DOWNFALL When I saw the ruined cityAnd the walls that would not stand,Broken buildings, rough graffiti,Parodies of what was planned,Scattered books and ruined theatersSchools and churches holed and shattered,Inheritors as useless eatersAbandonment of all that matters Then I knew how thin and fragileEvery cultivated art,How defeat can swing a cudgelBreak the breastbone and the heart,Teach the one who wanders throughDownfall, downfall ever new,Give the lesson of despair:Cities fall and rise elsewhere Pavel Chichikov January 5,... Read more

In which the National Security Bogeyman is properly skewered. Update: In response to my tongue in cheek remark that “When you make fun of this, people, you are undermining our resolve in the unending war on terror and showing that you HATE AMERICA!” a friend of mine writes: Methinks you overstate the case in stating that making fun of the statement shows that any of us “HATE AMERICA.” Rather, I would suggest that it simply shows that we despise the... Read more

Instead of recognizing that Jolliness is a gift from God and my appetites are Blessed, Alstin writes a sick temperanormative diatribe in which he actually expects that we exercise “moderation” by suppressing and denying the way God made us. Instead of urging us to practice safe eating through regurgitation, lap band surgery, liposuction and other forms of technological prophylactics against the dangers of eating, he arrogantly demands that I not experience the full range of flavors available to me. Invoking... Read more

Today, my minions, I bid you go and contemplate the various prognostications about E.T. in this article and ask yourself, “What do these different scenarios for dealing with the utter silence from space tell us, not about the existence, non-existence, bellicosity, godlike transcendence, brutish Darwinian contempt for weaker life, technological prowess, pagan doom, or Kubrick Evolutionary Wonder of alien races, but about the persistent insistence of the post-Christian mind in finding a replacement for Christian eschatology?” The whole article seems... Read more