(via New York Daily News)

He’s dazed. His brow furrows. His blinks are slow in coming. At times his head rolls around. His eyes are vacant. He doesn’t focus—doesn’t appear to, anyway, though at times he seems to be trying to. James E. Holmes appears in court. He looks lost. ”Ordinary” is one word for him. “Unprepossessing” is another. In some moments he seems unfathomably sad. What does he know? What does he think? Does he have any idea where he is, and why?

What does an alleged mass murderer look like? This one looks like this. Nothing extraordinary shows.

There is evil in the story, but none of it is visible. Take away the guns from James E. Holmes and he’s another suffering soul. You could say just another suffering soul.

Take away his guns.

Take away his guns.

For years, I’ve opposed calls for academic boycotts of Israel.  (Here’s one sample and here’s another.) I won’t rehearse all the arguments here. Suffice to say that the life of the mind in universities is irreducibly precious for a deeply challenged civilization that is in so many ways hostile to intellectual life. For all the challenges that universities impose for free thought, all on their own, any decision to restrict academic contacts on any political ground is a case of cutting off a lobe of the brain to spite the face. In a world where many nations impose onerous political conditions on intellectual autonomy, choosing one particular nation’s universities for special opprobrium—especially when discussion in precisely those universities is rambunctious and unimpeded—is flatly wrong.

The State of Israel has just (again) kicked the Palestinians in the head, and demonstrated …

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(Photo by Austen Hufford via Flickr/CC)

The subject on which Bill Clinton kept secrets and lied was sex. The subject on which Mitt Romney keeps secrets and lies is money.

There is, first of all, the matter of Romney withholding all his past tax returns but one. Then, in recent days, there is the matter of the degree of responsibility he did or didn’t hold for actions by Bain Capital, which he headed (a fair characterization of a man who was simultaneously Chairman, CEO, and President), between February 1999 and March 2002, when he declared his candidacy for the governorship of Massachusetts. As of this morning, he’s still begging questions from the Boston Globe, including this:

The firm did not respond to Globe questions about why SEC filings show Romney in control of five Bain Capital business…

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The foolish and infuriating thing about the American political system is that it is reduced to debating 21st-century problems in an 18th-century vocabulary that has been only modestly modified since then.

The republic was founded by 18th-century minds working with eighteenth-century materials, including eighteenth-century terms and concepts, themselves distilled from the work of earlier minds. They did not yet have 19th- or 20th-century experiences. This is not to find them guilty of anything but human limitation. With the very major exception of slavery, they weren’t especially sinful or stupid. (Of course, it took a bloody civil war to correct that very major exception, as a result of which a series of Constitutional amendments were passed, one of which severely limited the powers of the states forever after—a 19th-century recognition of what was already evident to part of the…

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David Brooks, self-hating cosmopolitan, could visit Disneyland and report back that it goes to show that small town virtues are alive.

In the latest installment of his ongoing series on the worthlessness of left-wing cosmopolitanism, the NYT columnist reports today that ”In Europe, the fans are much younger” than in the U.S. In Madrid, they went nuts for Bruce Springsteen. But how could it be that a bunch of Spaniards are screaming themselves hoarse for “Born in the USA”?  Madré de Dios! Perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that youth unemployment in Spain is more than 50 percent, and that Springsteen consistently sides with people who live on the wrong side of the tracks, and that he delivers almost four hours a night of nonstop intensity and a power of empathy, solidarity, and universality? But read on. Brooks’s punchline is that the fans of old Europe are cheering…

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I have no idea whether the three young men in Chicago charged with terrorism-related felonies are guilty as charged. Prosecutors say they are “members” of “the ‘Black Bloc’ group,” which is not so much a group that has members as a shifting population of enragés who take advantage of large demonstrations which they haven’t organized to break things. These are, in general, careless people, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Such people exist.

It’s possible that the three being held in Chicago on $1.5 million bond apiece really really intended to throw Molotov cocktails at police stations, police cars, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house and Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, and…

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user DJ-Dwayne)

After the least wintry winter in memory, Tennessee seems to have been brain-fried into cloud-cuckoo land.

On March 19, the legislature in its wisdom mandated climate-change denial in the state’s K-12 science education curriculum.  The Assembly voted 70-23 and the Senate, 24-8.  The Tennessee law matches a model called, of course, the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, promoted by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council to

• Provide a range of perspectives presented in a balanced manner.

• Provide instruction in critical thinking so that students will be able to fairly and objectively evaluate scientific and economic controversies.

• Be presented in language appropriate for education rather than for propagandizing.

•…

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The front page of today’s Times, in one of a series of fine analytical reports that have cropped up in the wake of Occupy Wall Street (but, to be fair, might well have been in the works anyway), points directly to the dishonesty of the You’re-On-Your-Own, Social Darwinist orthodoxy that wholly owns the Republican Party and buffaloes non-Republicans too.  The headline:  ”Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It.”

This piece is full of illuminations.  A few are here:

[T]he poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

So …

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