Our Hunger Games Unfold in Paris

People are outraged by the bizarre grotesquerie of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Many are saying “they’ve gone too far” – They being, perhaps, the French Olympic Committee, or maybe the International Olympic Committee, or maybe…who knows? In any event, they cannot engage in overt mockery …

Is the Tradwife Queen a fraud?

The pioneer dream is deeply engraved in American culture and history. It’s simple but powerful: setting forth into the unknown, with just a few belongings and your immediate family, and creating a self-reliant, flourishing home in an unforgiving environment. As …

The man who defended Orientalism

“As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria,” remarks the writer Robert Irwin parenthetically in an otherwise scholarly essay on medieval Arabic literature, “I once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat.” No further elaboration is …

Welcome to the Taxi Driver election

In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle (“You talkin’ to me?”), a disturbed cabbie who plans to shoot presidential candidate Charles Palantine before chance intervenes to steer him away from irrevocable catastrophe. The film serves …

Australia: erasing the evidence

The Australian Actuaries Institute [1] has published its latest report on mortality.

They are using a “new conceptual framework” whereby they now measure excess mortality relative to 2023, not to “pre-pandemic” years.

They also say:

As our baseline measurement for …