- The five “best” drug scares of 2015.
- This year’s weirdest science stories.
- Fourteen — maybe 15 — ways to avoid the Obamacare tax. (Per A.G. in comments.)
- Thirteen things credit card companies know about you that might make you cringe.
- Well, thank heaven it wasn’t “gun violence.”
- Another Darwin Award nominee, courtesy of absorption in mobile device. How embarrassing to die of pure stupid. But hey — at least it wasn’t “gun violence”!
- In praise of Glock.
- Ross Douthat on cracks in the liberal order. Not meaning “liberal” as in that thing that “progressives” don’t want to be called these days, but “liberal” as in some fundamental values of western civ and western gov.
- Forget mere Pastafarianism. In some parts of the world it’s better to be a Zuist.
- Cool photos of small, futuristic houses. Gotta laugh at the assertion that these are all “cheap,” though. The first one pictured starts at more than $300k, and that probably doesn’t include the land. But they’re all fascinating and some of them actually are budget-minded.
I believe old Ross needs to extrapolate his thinking some. A single chaotic avalanche will spoil all his theories.
The man, identified by police as [redacted], 51, was considered “extremely dangerous.”
Uh, no s**t.
One of the graphics on my License to Carry PowerPoint is an iPhone displaying There’s no APP for ‘Aware.’
Mr. Douthat needs to figure out that his “parties of the center” are no longer in the center, and the “basic liberal democratic capitalist order” is no longer liberal, democratic, or capitalist. But he almost got the “elites” part right.
Thanks for the small houses link Claire. I see two in there that I suspect might provide good ideas for converting a shipping container to an attractive cabin. And shipping containers are cheap, so you can do a lot to them if you can afford the project at all.
I think the big crack in the liberal order is not the perceptions of political feasibility, but the fact that it is not economically sustainable to keep a small working class taxed to pay for benefits to increasing numbers of non-productive economic parasites – especially when the parasites descend on your liberal garden like a swarm of locusts.
And what happens when the system is bankrupted generally and no neighbors can afford to bail out your garden because of their own locusts? Social disintegration, class warfare, and authoritarian government enforcement of ‘peace’ on the citizens? With the majority dependent on the bankrupted system, there will be no peace – and no more liberal ‘heaven on earth’ either. The entire paradigm is doomed.
Wealth and production have to come from somewhere in order to sustain the fantasy, and when taxes are too high, there is no ‘wealth’ to encourage risk-taking and production. We all know what Stalin did to the Kulaks to ensure compliance, and the starvation that resulted. But today, most dependent citizens are clustered in cities, without stored food, so 3 days after the groceries stop coming the fires will start.
Liberalism is dying already, and the ‘blame game’ can’t save it.