The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how
dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of
political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of
1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of
the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about
Communist totalitarianism in allegories too pointed [...]

I’ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no
intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows
through romances the way I read SF, and we’ve been discussing the
conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I’ve
learned that romance fans use an acronym TSTL which [...]

About twelve hours ago I toyed with the idea of writing a satire in
which the Bush-haters blame W. for the magnitude of the disaster
bearing down on New Orleans. I discarded the idea on the grounds that
it’s (a) not funny, and (b) not believable enough. I mean, who could
really imagine that theory even from [...]

In response to my previous post noting that the Flynn effect turns
out to be a mirage, at least two respondents have suggested that average
IQ has actually been falling, and have pointed to the alleged
dumbing-down of politics and popular culture in the last fifty years.
I think both those respondents and the psychometricians are correct.
That is, it [...]

Renowned pychometrician Charles Murray has given us, in The
Inequality Taboo, a concise summary of the most current science on
group differences in IQ and other measures of capability. Most of it
is not surprising to anybody who has been following the actual science
rather than press accounts severely distorted by the demands of
political correctness.
There is some new [...]

In Summer
Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle, a writer for the New York
Times explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking
because the quality of all too many mega-hyped “major movies” has
plunged into the crapper. Well, no shit, Sherlock — what was
your first clue? Pearl Harbor? Alexander?
Mission Impossible II? What’s really news about this story [...]

I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than
the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government
stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face
reality and support war.
Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and
gays, but [...]

Today’s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch
does an excellent job of demolishing the “Bush lied, people died!”
canard so popular among the anti-war left — Greg Djerejian
echoes my own conclusions when he writes: “But if you dig into the
weeds of the investigations that have taken place — one must
judiciously conclude that he didn’t.”
But let’s suppose that George [...]