Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

ROGER SIMON: Jews Should Welcome, Not Revile, the Rise of AfD.

Beneath the rhetoric and the accusations, they may well be fighting for us.

After all, it’s not Jews they are fighting. It’s not Jews who have been driving cars into German Christmas Markets and wreaking other forms of mayhem, from rape gangs to random killings, across Europe and the USA. Everyone knows who has, but we don’t want to talk about it or deal with it, even though we are on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Everyone knows where the West’s problems stem from, though so many want to deny it. In fact, the reverse has occurred. New York City has a mayor who sympathizes with the Islamists, and Texas, of all places, has an epidemic of mosques with a growing constituency eager to adopt Sharia with all its misogyny.

Reading through AfD’s program again, I see people with the courage to face all this and a desire to preserve their country’s and Western Civilization’s traditions. Their fight is our fight.

Indeed.

IT’S BEEN A BAD MONTH FOR WOMEN:

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Bombshell Great Pyramid of Giza Study Retracted. “A scientific journal has retracted a study that claimed satellite radar could reveal hidden structures inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, finding “serious methodological flaws and statistical errors” that undermined its conclusions. The retraction matters because the paper provided a scientific foundation for increasingly extraordinary claims about what may lie beneath one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites.”

ROGER KIMBALL: The Democrats are both cynical and naive.

Which leads me to the political principle a friend summed up in a pithy observation: “To be a liberal is to be unable to learn from the past.” Sometimes experience is a great teacher. Sometimes it is hardly more than a distraction. My friend’s point is that Democrats seem to derive no sustenance from their experience. The failure of their policies does not lead them to adjust their expectations or their actions. It causes them to double down on their mistakes.

The history of America’s welfare apparatus since the time of FDR and, especially, since the time of LBJ and the so-called Great Society programs, is a case in point.

Well, it depends. If the purpose of the Great Society was to make America better and happier, it was a mistake. If the purpose was to enrich a vast bureaucratic parasite class while holding the nation’s poor in government-funded serfdom, then it succeeded brilliantly. Just remember: The purpose of a system is what it does.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Remember when higher education was supposed to have a civilizing influence?