The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this …
A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not; he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless …
What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all, in the material sense, and we know it. But we …
When I was young, like many idealists, I still believed that America was exceptional. I still believe that this country is an exceptional one; there is still no nation that so fiercely enshrines the rights of man in its very foundational document and so vociferously defends them as part of its …
So, I’m not black. I’m able to say that I’m not white, either — ironically, through the very mechanism of white privilege. If you’re white and you choose to reject whiteness, you are able to do so only because you’re white. People of color can never deny their color; they …
That one finds, in the infant days of the 21st century — indeed, if certain overzealous interpreters of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar are to be credited, the very end of human civilization! — a widespread resistance to well-established facts about human behavior continues to surprise. The world probably isn’t …
Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money. All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing …
The state of the nation as Baby 2012 makes its squalling entrance is extremely hard to gauge. The answer to the question of where we are politically, as is often the case, depends entirely on where you are standing, and what sort of filter you are looking through at the …
George Orwell was right about a great number of things, and he was right about them in an extremely eloquent and insightful way. Never was he righter, and never more insightful, than in Chapter III of Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes the stroke of bad …
It is in Ezekiel, near the beginning of God’s crazy-old-man period, when he admits that he deliberately gave his followers stupid ideas and made them follow intentionally bogus rules just to make them miserable and remind them who was really in charge. For all their talk of abortion, homosexuality, and …
As the Occupy Wall Street movement drags on, and law enforcement agencies make the foolish but predictable decision to respond to its persistence with violence, a fundamental contradiction begins to make itself known in our political lives. It has always been a basic assumption of even the most partisan political …
Now, before we get too far into this, let me clarify something: I am not arguing that the lottery is, in and of itself, a good investment. The odds, as everyone should be aware, are extraordinary remote, and the argument that it is a kind of regressive taxation on the …
It’s not that I feel sorry for Herman Cain. I don’t. He is, after all, a heartless rich asshole who couldn’t care less about people like you an me, an intellectual flea who only has one idea and a bad one at that, and very possibly a serial sexual abuser. …
In what has to be the top “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” moment of the week, 24-hour full-service horrible human being Michelle Malkin has penned an article in which she condemns the Occupy Wall Street movement for…being a burden on the taxpayer. Oh, she throws in some other …
So, up until today, the Republic jobs plan has been, essentially, to throw rolled-up balls of newspaper at the President and yell “Sucks to your jobs bill!” But the man who brings them their evening cognac has apparently made them aware of some discontent amongst the rabble, so they took …
