Taki's Daily Blog
Richard hits on an important point when he writes: This is certainly true, but I think that Luttwak might be giving a bit too much credit to the Obamaniacs (not the undeceived Obamacons, like myself). They don’t so much confuse the potential reactions of East Africans with Muslims to an Obama presidency as conflate most all Third World people into one … [Read More]
Journalists covering the primaries in January characterized Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” remark as “injecting” race in to the campaign, as if this was an illicit or improper development. This mistakenly implies that race was not already an aspect of the campaign—how could it not be?—or that it should not be part of the discussion. ~John Hartigan Actually, there’s a much bigger … [Read More]
The recent meltdown of the mortgage bubble illustrates a basic insight of Austrian Economics: cheap money leads to distortion and malinvestment, which can only be resolved through mass liquidation. Liquidation is an anodyne term, but in real life it means lost jobs, declining wages, “upside down” bank notes, bankrupt businesses, and stagnant housing values. The Federal Reserve’s decision after the September … [Read More]
Challenger Joe McLaughlin was half right in describing the stakes of the North Carolina 3rd Congressional District’s Republican primary: It was, as he told Congressional Quarterly, about the future of the Republican Party in his congressional district and beyond. But Congressman Walter Jones’s nearly 20-point margin of victory doesn’t signal the end of the party. It points the way out of … [Read More]
In response to my recent piece on science and religion, one of the commenters, GM, took me to task: “you may want to consider and ask why atheists seem angry. There’s no indication that you understand why.” I have to confess, GM was right: I do not understand why some atheists are so angry. I have no trouble understanding that some … [Read More]
A few weeks ago I attended a most wonderful party, with music, pretty girls, lotsa champagne--and even some people who did not move their lips while reading the labels of the expensive bubbly and scotch whiskey they were imbibing. Namely Tom Wolfe, Lewis Lapham, Graydon Carter, Edward Jay Epstein and other such New York swells. The occasion was Lapham’s Quarterly “About … [Read More]
The realm of prophecy and prediction is a notoriously dangerous territory in which to venture if one takes things too seriously, but I hope you will forgive a light little wander into that domain. The question at hand is the rise and fall of nations. The period since the collapse of European Communism from 1989 to 1991 has witnessed a great … [Read More]
It is indicative of the disastrous social trends that began in the 1960s, that we are now faced with the most odious kind of snobbery, that of celebrity, namely that of Barbara Walters and her memoirs. The fact that someone taught her to act--her mother or her public school teacher--constitutes child abuse to the nth degree. This Walters woman is the … [Read More]
Perhaps the greatest compensation for trading cramped digs in Rome for a spacious house in the U.S. is that I have my beagles back. Susie and Franz-Josef are out back now, sniffing the trails of long-scampered squirrels, and howling merrily for blood. One advantage of living in New Hampshire instead of New York is that “out back” refers to the spacious … [Read More]
How hated are the neocons?—When even sports writers are on your case, you know the peasants with pitchforks can’t be far behind. From a piece headlined “Are the Mariners the Neocons of Baseball?”: “Should we be worried the Mariners are baseball’s equivalent of the Bush Administration? Fiscally undisciplined with negligible positive returns? Check. Marketed as veteran leadership despite any veterans … [Read More]