Nothing To Celebrate, Folks, Please Move Along

As a native South Carolinian, I have not been looking forward to the sesquicentennial of the dumbest, most self-destructive move in the long and checkered history of my home state.I refer, of course, to the Palmetto State’s boneheaded decision to attempt secession from the United States of America on December 20, 1860.  The knuckleheads behind […]

Atheism Kills: Gallup Poll Reveals

Here at Via Meadia we are preparing for the Christmas holidays, and will be firing up the traditional Yule Blog tomorrow for the 13 posts of Christmas in a hallowed holiday tradition dating all the way back to 2009.Meanwhile, in the spirit of the season, the Gallup organization has a new poll out suggesting that […]

Some Theologians Never Die—They Just Wait to be Googled.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, an unassuming and rather pedantic German scholar was at the center of passionate international debates in Protestant theology. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) was a well-known New Testament scholar. Bultmann was a professor at the University of Marburg, which was an important center for historical studies of religion and the […]

Give The People What They Want

In my last post I argued that Blue State Liberalism, the form of liberalism that dominated most of the twentieth century in American life, doesn’t work anymore as a political philosophy.  That argument gets some powerful support from the latest Gallup polls: only 21% of Americans consider themselves liberals; 40% of Americans consider themselves ‘conservative’, […]

Patently False

The email’s subject line was meant to be a grabber: “Surprising results: Does the public support DNA patents?”The link was to an article in the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s December newsletter about a “new survey that points to the general public’s support for patenting DNA-based products.”Public support for patents on genes? That did sound surprising. For […]

Can The L-word Be Saved?

Politically speaking, America may be the most confused country in the world.  Millions of people in this country are conservatives and even reactionaries who think they are liberals; we have millions more liberals and radicals who call themselves conservative.It is an unholy mess and it needs to be cleared up.  It’s time for a language […]

Afrobeat on a London Stage

I was in London last week, for a reason totally unrelated to the topic of this blog entry. Dr. Johnson famously observed that, if you are tired of London, you are tired of life. I tend to agree. Part of not being tired of life means, for me, savoring the rich offerings of the London […]

Bureaucrats Swindle Greens In Cancun

The climate conference in Cancun was a turning point for the world’s greens.  There were two possible outcomes.  One was a total political meltdown in Cancun that would have been hideously embarrassing in the short run but that in the long term would have cleared the way for more hopeful approaches to carbon issues.  The […]

Iraq, China and the Nobel Prize

Iraq, the newest democracy in the Middle East, has turned down an invitation to attend today’s investiture ceremony for the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. It thus keeps company with a litany of repressive governments that have declined invitations to the ceremony, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Saudi […]

The Crisis of the American Intellectual

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.  Figuring out why […]

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