September 8, 2015

Consumers against Consumption

A favorite complaint of liberal theologians is that we live in a consumer society.  "Consumer society" is one of those phrases that seem to mean something until you think about them.  No society has ever been without consumers....

August 5, 2015

Robbing the Churches of Mexico

Recently Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, applauded a federal district court that found the Obama administration excessively strict in its enforcement of immigration law....

July 5, 2015

President Francis and Pope Obama

When I was fourteen, one of our cows gave birth, but the afterbirth did not come out.  The men stood around and moaned and groaned about the afterbirth that wouldn't come out until I got so tired of listening to them that I walked up to the ...

June 12, 2015

Lies about Sex

Bill Clinton was right: we all lie about sex. But not in the way he meant it. When people agree always to say something they all know to be untrue, they destroy more than one solitary truth: they form a destructive habit.  Soon they agree on ...

March 9, 2015

Liberals against Perversion?

President Obama says that we are not at war with Islam but with those who have perverted Islam. Since when have liberals been against perversion?  Name one other perversion they are against.  They are certainly all for the perversion of ...

February 11, 2015

The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad

An imam on British television taught me more in a few minutes than any of the books I have read on Islam, some of them quite instructive.  After railing at Israel and America, the imam smiled knowingly and said that if God did not want those sky...

December 9, 2014

The Gods Have Made Them Mad

It used to strike me as impossible for global warming to cause cold weather.  Then I realized that I could chill a soft drink in the oven if there were no room left in the refrigerator to bake a cake.  Up until then I did not know that t...

November 9, 2014

The Problem with Computers

Perhaps it is out of place to decry the stultifying effects of computers in a publication entirely reliant upon them.  Nevertheless, computers do deaden the brains of millions of the most intelligent and industrious of us.  Indeed, computer...

August 30, 2013

Another Misleading Unemployment Statistic

One of my favorite nonsense statistics is the number of first-time applications for unemployment insurance benefits. The government compiles it, the press reports it, and the stock market goes up or down. Zillions of dollars zoom from one person's ha...

September 29, 2012

Islamic Feelings of Entitlement

It has become ever more obvious that there is a deep psychological affinity between liberals and Islamofascists.  On the face of it, this affinity seems absurd: liberals champion gay rights and a so-called emancipation of women, while Islamofasc...

August 10, 2012

Does High Unemployment Really Hurt Obama?

We've heard thousands of times that a high unemployment rate helps the candidacy of Governor Romney and a low unemployment rate favors President Obama.  Maybe so.  That certainly makes sense.  On the other hand, it flies in the face of...

June 14, 2012

The Obfuscation Factor

Obama was raised by communists, he hung out with communists in school, he hung out with communists after he got out of school, he talks just like a communist, and all we can say is that he promotes envy and class warfare.  That's like saying tha...

March 11, 2011

The University of Chicago, The Black Community, and Obama

The University of Chicago has decided to destroy the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan in Hyde Park.   That's the University of Chicago I know and do not love.When I wrote of the violence and corruption my friends and lovers endured in Hyde Par...

February 13, 2011

The Cesspool Obama and I Crawled Out Of

A Memoir of life in Hyde ParkElvin Bishop, a fine guitarist, but perhaps not always the best judge of human affairs, said that he liked Hyde Park because you could piss in the sink there.  I don't remember doing that, though I can't say I didn't...

August 31, 2010

Absurd Lies about Cordoba (updated)

Readers of the American Thinker have no doubt heard numerous instances of the following disinformation about Cordoba, this version coming from Whitney S. Bowman in the Austin American-Statesman: "The name 'Cordoba House' is significant. ...

August 13, 2010

Why We Can't All Just Get Along

It would be nice to be able to just get along with the Muslim world. Unfortunately, mutual respect and tolerance is incompatible with characteristic aspects of Islam.According to Bat Ye'or,  dhimmitude, which Islamists call "protection...

October 13, 2009

Excuses for Lack of Global Warming

"What Happened to Global Warming?" asks Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in its October 2, 2009, issue, before immediately answering, "Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit....

May 8, 2009

Science You Can Believe In

Fresh from saying that Nancy Pelosi “can do no wrong,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which thinks of itself as the world’s most important scientific organization, but is in reality just another Demo...

April 10, 2009

Nancy Pelosi 'Can Do No Wrong', Say 'Scientists'

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) brags that its journal "Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world" and claims to be "dedicated to advancing science...

May 12, 2008

Global warming hysteria reaching new heights

New Scientist, which revealed last year that obesity causes global warming, now tells us that global warming will make days longer, which has been confirmed by NASA. So not only is at least one global warming hysteric worried that efforts to stop glo...

April 24, 2008

The Left's Theft of the Open Society and the Scientific Method

The Left misappropriates intellectual capital for perverse ends, in order to lend itself a veneer of respectability and befuddle its critics. According to the website of the Open Society Institute, the George Soros funded nerve-center of today's...

February 10, 2008

Politicized Science

An editorial in the February 1 issue of Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, begins as follows:We in the United States are sliding down a ramp that will take us, in just 4 days, to the much ant...

December 11, 2007

Robot Liberation Front

Animal rights was bad enough, with its implicit equation of animals and people, but now we have robot rights.  Instead of the Animal Liberation Front equating us with rats, we have the American Association for the Advancement of Science equating...

October 14, 2007

A poisonous book

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, already winner of a Pulitzer Prize, was named a finalist for the National Book Awards on October 10. [link reqires registration] Note that the title says The History of the CIA, not A Histo...

August 13, 2007

Controlling People, Controlling Weather

China is enacting a high-tech plan to control people,  reports the New York Times.At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software fro...

July 16, 2007

How Many Politicians Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?

During the Energy Crisis of the late 1970s, I worked in a large department store.  When the price of electricity increased, we bought less of it.  By the time the government did anything, we had already cut our consumption in half.  Ab...

June 3, 2007

Immigration Misgivings

I have no reason to doubt the justice of conservative criticism of "comprehensive" immigration "reform."  I do doubt, however, that the criticism is sufficiently, well, conservative.  Conservatives should object to makin...

May 3, 2007

The War of Art

Ask nine out of ten people what the purpose of art is, and they will say, "to express yourself."  In fact, art has many purposes, and self-expression is one of the least important.  No one could mistake "The Star-Spangled Ban...

December 26, 2006

Indulgences for rich, guilty liberals

According to "Carbon Neutrality: A Shopper's Guide," in The Boston Globe, "Many [Web]sites...offer the option of offsetting an individual's entire ‘carbon footprint.'"  ("Carbon footprint" is an expression env...

December 1, 2006

What Islamic Science and Philosophy?

We know that we are being lied to.  Sometimes we just don't realize how much we are being lied to.The more sordid the Islamic present seems, the more we are told of the glories of the Islamic past.  And the most glorious of the glories of I...

August 17, 2006

"Fake But Accurate" Science?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science claims for its journal Science 'the largest paid circulation of any peer—reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million.' Be that as it m...

July 20, 2006

Islam Is Not Medieval

Please do not call Islam "medieval." Islam never made it to the Middle Ages, and if it is stuck in the past, it is stuck in the ancient world from which it arose, the decadent Hellenism it ill understood. Calling Islam medieval is a vicious form of ...

June 2, 2006

Islam, Christianity, Classical Civilization, and Modernity

Western apologists for Islam are wont to say that the Islamic world of a thousand years ago was far advanced of Christendom, militarily, economically, and culturally. This is a curious claim because the implicit standard of judgment is that of modern...

April 29, 2006

Great Mind Warp

Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky are often called philosophical or theological novels. Their subject is neither philosophy nor theology, but human beings, whom Dostoevsky correctly portrays as motivated by philosop...

April 11, 2006

Religions of Freedom

However often Jews and Christians have acquiesced in tyranny or even been guilty of it themselves, Judaism and Christianity are fundamentally religions of freedom. What we call progress is the fitful victory of the freedom at their core over the tyra...

March 23, 2006

Pseudo-Privatization is a Mistake

Conservatives can be wrong about some things, which is not to say that liberals are right about them. A fundamental change for the worse is taking place at all levels of government in the United States with the acquiescence of conservatives, if not t...

February 14, 2006

Natural and Unnatural Man

Why is it tragic when human activities bring about the extinction of a single species, but natural, that is, benign, when scores of millions of species become extinct in the ordinary course of nature? How can the same result be evil when caused by ma...

January 4, 2006

What Police State?

One of the most distressing characteristics of our liberal friends is that they would rather believe propaganda than believe the evidence of their own senses. For instance, the television will tell them that America is running out of room to put its ...

December 14, 2005

Defeatists and the "Cost" of the War in Iraq

We are constantly being told that the "cost" of the war in Iraq has risen to over two thousand deaths and many hundreds of billions of dollars. The hidden, unexamined assumption behind this statement is that if we had not invaded Iraq, our inaction w...

November 30, 2005

Mind Meld

During the Cold War, the "convergence" theory held that over time the Soviet Union and the United States would become more and more alike, ushering in an era of world peace. Liberals liked the theory because it meant that the Soviets would magically ...

November 8, 2005

French Lessons

France invaded Algeria in May 1830, captured Algiers in only three weeks, and issued the following proclamation: The exercise of the Mahometan religion shall remain free. The liberty of the inhabitants of all classes, their religion, their property,...

October 19, 2005

The Wrong Questions

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Luther Powell and Former President of the United States George Herbert Walker Bush have been severely criticized for pulling up short at the end of the Gulf War, and perhaps they deserve the criticis...

October 7, 2005

The Established Religion of the United States

We're like a condemned man who worries about the preservatives in his last meal or its cholesterol content. We'll worry about anything but our real worries. If we lived in Sudan, we'd worry about cell phone radiation or the wrinkles around our eyes. ...

September 29, 2005

Liberals and Islamofascists

What merit is there in not stealing because you fear that your hand will be cut off? In not drinking because you have no alcohol? In not being aroused by a woman in a burqa? An Islamofascist walks the streets of America and sees a man enter a massage...

September 12, 2005

Original American Sin

We wake up in the morning, and our evil deeds begin before we have time to curse the alarm. As we slept, our refrigerators were hard at work giving Chileans skin cancer. We turn on the air conditioner, and amphibians grow extra limbs. We breathe and ...

August 30, 2005

We could lose everything

We must, it is said, 'win the battle of ideas' with the terrorists. In the minds of many people, this equates to 'winning the hearts and minds' of Muslims, which in turn equates to doing what they want. The first battle of ideas we must win is with t...

August 19, 2005

The not-so-golden age of Islamic philosophy

In 'Christianity and Islam,' a chapter of The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, Jeremy Johns says that 'the relationship between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages is usually seen, in the West, in terms of military conflict, an...

July 29, 2005

Hyping Islam 's role in the History of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) claims for its journal Science 'the largest paid circulation of any peer—reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million.' Thus wh...