James Cason, Ambassador, Paraguay Singing Sensation

James Cason, the U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, has achieved rock star status in that country. Literally. [H]e learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. Now, in the final year of his four-decade diplomatic career, Cason has suddenly become the toast of Paraguay, or ...

Dumbing the Presidency

David Broder uses Elvin Lm's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency to argue not only that presidential speeches have steadily dumbed down over the years, which we might have guessed, but that this dumbs down public policy, too. In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the ...

George Carlin Dies at 71

George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71. Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because he could rather than ...

McCain Age ‘Code’ Talk

Some supporters of John McCain accuse the Obama campaign of using "code words" to imply that McCain is old. “It is code; there is no question it is,” Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who helped lead President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, said when age surfaced as an issue. “They are trying to raise doubts.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough repeatedly argued ...

Online Life Rewiring Our Brains

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard "the Internet is giving us short attention spans" meme but eventually gives us much more than that. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has ...

Ireland Rejects Treaty of Lisbon

It's received precious little notice here in the States but Irish voters have rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU's latest move towards reform and greater consolidation of power in Brussels: DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland's voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday. In ...

College For Everyone: A Destructive Myth

A private school professor who is also an adjunct community college English instructor discusses the joys of teaching required composition courses to the latter. Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence. In each of my courses, we discuss ...

Genesis: The Scientific Version

P.Z. Myers posts a video immodestly entitled "I Know More Than God" that's been on YouTube since at least March but that I'd never seen before: Myers notes that the video puts "the actual creation story as revealed by modern physics into the same kind of portentous, simple language that even a Mesopotamian goat-herder could understand, the point being that if ...

Spanish Miami’s Primary Language

Spanish-only speakers have an easier time getting by in Miami than English-only speakers, AP reports. In many areas of Miami, Spanish has become the predominant language, replacing English in everyday life. Anyone from Latin America could feel at home on the streets, without having to pronounce a single word in English. In stores, shopkeepers wait on their clients in ...

Two Blogs that Pass in the Night

Yesterday's exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts based on links ...