Category: Zombies
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Bad Manners and Bad Names
My old friend Randy has mentioned, in a post called Aaden. Adan, Aden etc. that he recently got some unwanted, unfriendly comments on a blog entry he posted over two years ago, Bad Baby Names. Randy was caught commenting on people who bestow unique and precious names on their unborn offspring.
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Talking Back to the Hand
Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts & Letters Daily likes Roger Sandall, who publishes essays online at a site or sites called The Culture Cult and Spiked. His most recent essay is called “See Here, Ms Truss, The Civility of Archaic Man”. (The dateline at the end says January 2005, which is wrong – the…
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Underclass
Theodore Dalrymple has produced a steady flow of articles and essays, published in The Spectator, The New Criterion, and City Journal. Denis Dutton has featured many of his essays at Arts & Letters Daily. In 2001, Dalrymple published a collection of his essays in City Journal, over the period from when he first wrote for…
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Meth Scare Stories
Steve sent me a link to the George Mason University’s STATS site which “monitors the media to expose the abuse of science and statistics before people are misled and public policy is distorted”. They issue an annual list of stories that used misleading or false information, the Dubious Data Awards. Their top story for 2005…
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Coming Up for Air
After The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s next book was Homage to Catalonia, which was about the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he published the novel Coming Up for Air, a first person narrative covering a few days in the life, and many years in the memories of George Bowling. Bowling is a 45…
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Another Meth Story
The Free Press has published a couple more stories about crystal meth addiction and the governments’ strategies to restrict supply of meth. Last Tuesday, January 4, 2006, there was a Bruce Owen, “Mom blames crystal meth for daughter’s death”, published electronically at McIntyre’s site. On Friday, January 6, 200, there was a story that pharmacists…
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Cultivating Culture
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (ISBN 1-890318-47-7) makes an argument for high culture and aesthetics as a civilizing force. The author, Roger Scruton, is a philosopher, a conservative writer, and a critic of postmodern ideas in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. His stated purpose, in the preface to the American edition…
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The Discovery of Meth
The Winnipeg Free Press discovered crystal meth this year. There were a few stories, usually tied to the meetings of the Western Canadian provincial premiers, over the last year or 18 months. A few weeks ago, the Free Press discovered the real source of the problem and the government instantly solved it. I am of…
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Elites
Chrisopher Lasch said, in the acknowedgements in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, ISBN 0-393-03699-5) that it was written under trying circumstances. He had cancer and died before it was published. It was based on essays published in several intellectual magazines and journals. In The Gift of Christopher…
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Staying alive
In the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don’t…