Assistant Village Idiot

Ace of Spades celebrates the collapse of Newsweek in a long but enjoyable essay. I have certainly complained about it here, especially in m...

I have verged on this idea previously, but it never came quite clear to me until this morning. Many of our most heated Left-Right battles a...

"Cost-allocate out to the appropriate funding streams." It took me a minute to figure out. It means to bill the right agency.

The Anchoress over at First Things linked to this article about the Roman Catholic Church moving beyond its scandals. It focuses on the Ir...

Update below: No group, local or national, can define itself in the presence of libertariansim. This is its great strength and weakness. W...

Family devotions in our household were a strange affair. We tried to mix it up with nonstandard evangelical devotions, such as driving up t...

At work, whenever we start hearing that "change is difficult," I know we are cooked. Perhaps we just do it more in human services...

I posted recently on the Palestinian narrative of events, virtually unchanged from 1961 to the present, and its catalogue of resentments. Ye...

19 Assists. I was worried after watching the Celtics uanable to make adjustments in the 2nd half in the first game, eventually reduced to t...

These videos are amazingly typical of the 60's. But being so overwhelmingly representative of an era, with all the humor that attaches ...

In the extended Israel-Palestine discussion, which I imagine not all of you could endure, Gringo linked to an Atlantic Magazine article fro...

I prefer maps. I find them fun. I have had notable difficulties from relying on maps, but others have had notable difficulties with imper...

All good qualities have value in all places. Yet some situations and indeed entire cultures promote particular values for their own continu...

Retriever lets me know she and her family were in Time Square last night. (With photos.) She mentioned that she had grown up in London dur...

I've never seen the movie, but I love Klezmer music, Roma music, Transylvania, and Holocaust escape stories, so this has got it all. Th...

I am even less deep a thinker than I was. What depth of thought I have had is a byproduct of other characteristics of thinking. I can lay c...

This strikes me as an intelligent idea that hasn't been tried here: Forcing bureaucrats to justify their spending. In a court of law, ...

I am quite pro-Israel in my sentiments, and while I don't post on the topic here very often, I get into discussions on other sites. I al...

Nothing new here. It's the March series on adopting the boys, collected in one place in order to put it on the sidebar. Includes an ex...

Kalmykia is a country in Europe. No, really. At least it's a state, a Republic in Southern Russia. I don't think I had ever heard...