The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.

After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.