Voters haven’t changed their minds about immigration or manufacturing: They want what Trump promised — and what the latest figures show he’s delivering.
Gas prices are higher than they were a year ago. So are flour, rice, spaghetti, ground beef, sirloin steak, lemons, strawberries, and ice cream prices. And reports from earlier this summer showed that the cost of eating at restaurants and electricity prices are higher than last year.
The gains made by school choice advocates mean that more than at any time in recent memory, public schooling isn’t the only form of education parents can choose for their children. As home schooling has grown, especially post-pandemic, and voucher programs, or education savings accounts, slowly spread state by state, it’s a good time to take a look at the state of our nation’s K-12 education, system by system, heading into the new school year.
As college football gets back underway, it is important to remember all college sports are under the control of an organization that hates its athletes and you, the fans.
Is Charlie Day funny? The sitcom writer and star is obviously successful, having anchored the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for 16 squirm-inducing seasons. Yet even that achievement offers little in the way of proof of concept. IASIP, as its frat boy and nihilist fans have come to know it, is a tribute to human depravity in which laughs are an occasional byproduct. (Sample episode title: “The Gang Finds a Dumpster Baby.”) I won’t say the show has never made me smile, but it’s been an expression of astonishment, not pleasure. Perhaps God chuckled as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
Reports of the rampant violent crime plaguing Philadelphia have been known for years. Larry Krasner, the city’s Soros-funded, radical left-wing district attorney, implemented many criminal justice reform policies that kept criminals out of jail and on the street. These horrible decisions were all done under the guise of social justice. Unfortunately, people like Larry Krasner didn’t suffer from these poor decisions. It was innocent people such as Scott Harris, a Navy veteran who was viciously attacked last month.
“More Americans than at any time in the past two decades now say drinking alcohol [even in moderation] is bad for one’s health,” report the opinion johnnies at Gallup, who have been asking since 2001 whether alcohol is detrimental. More than a third think drink, even in moderation, is unhealthy. That’s a significant increase over 20 years ago. The growing disdain for drink, we are told, is being designated-driven by young adults. A more salubrious alternative, the young prohibitionists tell Gallup, is marijuana.
“Feminism is the new natalism,” David Willetts, a British member of Parliament, declared in a 2004 manifesto. In contrast to those strains of feminism that argue marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood are systems of oppression, the pro-human feminists grabbed on to this idea of “fecund feminism.” For nearly 20 years, many op-eds have echoed Willetts’s arguments.
A president concerned about economic well-being in the nation he leads would look for ways to reduce the price of gasoline as both Saudi Arabia and Russia announced extended cuts to oil production this week.
It is bad enough that California’s Proposition 47 already functionally legalized shoplifting in the Golden State by reducing the penalty for stealing less than $950 worth of merchandise to a misdemeanor.
HBO’s new docuseries Telemarketers is a riveting, charmingly gonzo investigation of the industry by former telemarketers who first began documenting their job with camcorders two decades ago at a New Jersey phone bank later shut down by the Federal Trade Commission. Directed by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern and produced by Josh and Benny Safdie and Danny McBride, among others, the documentary is a scruffy sensation recalling the best early work of Michael Moore.
“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest,” George Eliot writes in Romola, a novel that presents marriage as the latter and charts the eponymous heroine’s efforts to escape a domineering husband. “Marriage is a state of higher duties,” the young Dorothea Brooke says in Middlemarch. “I never thought of it as mere personal ease.” Her marriage to the musty, dusty, cold-hearted scholar Casaubon, “a dried bookworm towards fifty,” turns out to be a trial. If only she had listened to her uncle, who declares marriage to be a “noose.” Gwendolen Harleth, in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, feels a similar constriction in her marriage, imagining not a noose around her neck but rather the “throttling fingers” of her tyrannical husband Henleigh Grandcourt. In Eliot’s 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, love curdles into loathing for Latimer and Bertha, and their marriage becomes such an ordeal that she ends up conspiring with her maid to poison him.
A few years ago, I was in Paris and bought three books in French. Given my mediocre ability to read that language, it was overly ambitious. One of the books has remained unopened since, a second one started but unfinished. I had finished reading the third book, however, by the time I left Paris. It was well worth the struggle through the language of Voltaire, and it remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. Thankfully, that book, The Syriac World by Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debie, originally published in French in 2017, is now available in English translation.
