Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career– and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding.
One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them.
Does access breed obsequiousness? One would be hard-pressed to come to another conclusion with regard to Sunday night’s chat-fest between Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and president Barack Obama. If that was an example of Mr. O’Reilly’s contention that his TV domain is a “no spin zone,” one might consider such a contention to be utterly laughable. Yet the exchange revealed something immensely troubling about the president which, once again, was ignored by the same mainstream media which has largely ignored the troubling revelation that this president sold out Britain to Russia to get the START treaty ratified. Who got sold out this time? Israel, and by extension, Jewish Americans as well.
Jamie Glazov’s new book, “Showdown with Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror,” is a fascinating collection of 29 interviews that he has conducted as editor of Frontpagemag.com. The interviewees are leading intellectuals and newsmakers who have devoted considerable brainpower to the issue of modern terrorism, including Victor Davis Hanson, Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens, Phyllis Chesler, Andrew McCarthy, Theodore Dalrymple, Kenneth Levin, Robert Spencer, Andrew Klavan, David Horowitz and William F. Buckley, Jr.
The secret to instant wealth is to spot a mass delusion and bet against it. The Tulip Craze. Florida swamp land.
Getting the timing right is tricky, but we are blessed with an overload of mass delusions. You can pick your own favorite. Delusional bubbles have to pop at some point, because the people who are paying for them eventually figure out that they’ve been had.
If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.
It was a weekend of great sorrow. On Saturday, January 8, an insane young man tried to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, injuring her horribly. The man then fired his gun into a small political gathering, murdering a nine-year-old girl, a federal judge, a congressional staffer, and three of Giffords’s constituents. Thirteen other people were wounded. In the midst of life we are in death. There is, in this world, no making sense of such events.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” in National Review Online, ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere– and is a slow poison that is being largely ignored.
Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today– and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.
The legendary PBS TV series “Free to Choose” (1980) by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is now available on Google Video for free (by courtesy of the Palmer R. Chitester Fund).
Finally, here is an edition of Road to Serfdom that does justice to its monumental status in the history of liberty. It contains a foreword by the editor of the Hayek Collected Works, Bruce Caldwell. Caldwell has added helpful explanatory notes and citation corrections, among other improvements. For this reason, the publisher decided to call this “the definitive edition.” It truly is.