Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
Sometimes the best way to move forward is to look back. That’s a lesson Catholic schools can learn from Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2013, Sacred Heart was on the brink of closing. Enrollment in the K–8 school had plummeted to fewer than 70 students. Fr. Robert Sirico, who became a pastor at Sacred … Read more
With a full week’s perspective on the Nov. 8 elections, one can see the U.S. constitutional system, in a macro sense, again worked exquisitely well. The results provided rough justice (and roughly balanced) for two major parties that both failed to earn governing trust. Moreover, the final balance of power is a very good approximation … Read more
Using a mix of electrical stimulation and intense physical therapy, nine people with chronic spinal injuries have had their ability to walk restored. All suffered from severe or complete paralysis as a result of damage to their spinal cord. Incredibly, the volunteers all saw improvements immediately, and continued to show improvements five months later. A … Read more
New York can’t teach kids to read on $30,000 a year Related PostsWhat the Rancorous First Presidential Debate Says About Us Brian Thompson, Jews, and the Left’s ‘Legitimate Targets’ Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote! Liberalism’s ‘cesspit’?: IAN BIRRELL says tech giants have turned … Read more
How else to explain the surge in gender dysphoria among American youth? Since 2017, cases of gender dysphoria among 6-year-olds to 17-year-olds have increased by over 170 percent. How permanent will the rather sudden embrace of transgenderism be? No one knows. But the longer it lasts, the more powerful the transgender movement will become. And … Read more
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has released the scores for this year’s reading and math evaluations. And it’s not flattering. The Nation’s Report Card revealed that math scores for fourth-graders fell five points since 2019, while those for eighth-graders tumbled eight points. This is the steepest decline since testing began over 30 years … Read more
On the eve of the midterm elections, in which voters will hand President Biden his report card, the White House has settled on a message: Shut up and take whatever we give you. You don’t get to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in pandemic loans and then attack my Administration for helping working folks … Read more
You’ve probably seen it on lots of apps and websites: buttons urging you to sign in with your Google or Facebook account. Sometimes it’s to let you share files, photos or emails. Other times it’s to use Google or Facebook as a quick way to log in somewhere new. My rule of thumb is to … Read more
The budget airline AirTran used to air a funny commercial about a couple of grandparents visiting their progeny shortly after the birth of their grandchildren. The grandparents were expecting a week together with the whole family. Instead they were handed the babies at the door, while the new parents jumped into a taxi and headed … Read more
The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats. Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the … Read more
Actress Anne Hathaway appeared on ABC’s The View this week to promote her films, including The Devil Wears Prada, a movie that is now 16 years old. The discussion quickly turned diabolical as Hathaway mused about the importance of killing unborn children to young career women in fashion and other industries. Illustrating George Orwell’s observation … Read more
A zombie is shambling down the street, one leg dragging, arm waving at the sky before collapsing on a discarded cardboard refrigerator box. A thin trail of blood can be seen on the back of his dirty shirt. It’s not Halloween yet. It’s just Thursday. But in the America of Drag Queen Story Hour, of … Read more
No one who has worked in Washington for more than four decades, as I have, can possibly imagine Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. as one of the sharper knives in the drawer. Even in the retrospect of thirty-one years, his attempt to instruct future-Justice Clarence Thomas in natural law theory during Thomas’s confirmation hearings is still … Read more
Despite decades of urban legends and rumors about razor blades in apples or weed in candy, sociology and criminal justice researcher Joel Best has yet to document a single instance of children being seriously injured or killed by goodies they collected while trick or treating. After an August warning from the Drug Enforcement Administration, brightly … Read more
A zombie is shambling down the street, one leg dragging, arm waving at the sky before collapsing on a discarded cardboard refrigerator box. A thin trail of blood can be seen on the back of his dirty shirt. It’s not Halloween yet. It’s just Thursday. But in the America of Drag Queen Story Hour, of … Read more
New details raise questions about how officials handled abuse allegations at Franciscan University. Both Franciscan University of Steubenville and its sponsoring religious order said Friday they would not comment on newly surfaced allegations, which claim that officials mishandled spiritual, psychological and sexual abuse reports from the victim of Fr. David Morrier, a former university chaplain … Read more
A while back, I wrote a piece arguing that the right had entered its “hippie phase,” that the radical anti-government stuff and FBI conspiracy theories and sundry political kookery going hand-in-hand with various strains of anti-vaccine and alternative-medicine kookery followed a familiar template—one that did not magically appear in the 1960s but was expressed in … Read more
Since teacher unions care more about lining their pockets and protecting their privileges rather than improving education, I’ll never feel any empathy for bosses like Randi Weingarten. That being said, the past couple of years have been bad news for Ms Weingarten and her cronies. Not only is school choice spreading – especially in states … Read more
Americans without bachelor’s degrees outnumber college grads 2 to 1. But if you and most people you know and have ever known are college graduates, you might not realize that most Americans are not like you and your cohort. As a result, you’re likely to think your class of people is much, much larger than … Read more
Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule is capo di tutti capi of the mob calling themselves Integralists. The Integralists argue that of the two powers that rule man—the temporal and the spiritual—the temporal must be subordinate to the spiritual because political rule must be ordered to man’s final end. Therefore, according to Vermeule, man’s final end … Read more
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. G.K. Chesterton Related … Read more
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them,” wrote the satirist P. J. O’Rourke. Perhaps this is why Catholic parents are wary when activists, almost always childless, come to their child’s class to lecture on diversity, sexuality, or any other obsession of the postmodern left. A maxim ought to be written … Read more
Are there enough construction workers to build the housing we need in the U.S. and Canada? According to The Globe and Mail, the Ontario government has stated that the province will need 100,000 new construction workers and 1.5 million homes over the next decade. However, a current shortage in skilled trades and labor means that … Read more
‘That’s a form of lying. Mr. Biden is not in communion with the Catholic faith. And any priest who now provides Communion to the president participates in his hypocrisy.’ ARLINGTON, Va. — Archbishop Charles Chaput said on Saturday that Joe Biden “is not in communion with the Catholic faith” and that “any priest who now … Read more
Our demographic picture is bleak not merely because people are having fewer babies than ever before. It is so bleak because the childless mostly do not want children, and the reasons they give do not seem terribly easy to overcome. Nearly two-thirds of childless women in a recent Harris poll said they have no desire … Read more