No one would mistake Lagos, Nigeria, for paradise. Litter blankets the streets, blackouts occur daily, and traffic moves at a snail’s pace. Yet, in one realm chaotic Lagos performs well above average: fire safety. Despite a dearth of fire-fighting equipment, building fires seem to be relatively uncommon. Why? Lagos’s success in fire prevention isn’t...
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An excellent movie released six years ago, “Amazing Grace,” depicted the life of William Wilberforce and his ultimately successful efforts to abolish, first, the British Slave Trade in 1806, and then slavery throughout the English empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. He did so entirely peacefully, through the British parliamentary system. It...
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President Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk in the White House saying “The Buck Stops Here!“ In this context, it is interesting that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that she takes responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. I am not sure what...
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Whether it was a planned terrorist attack in response to the U.S. interventions in the region, an assault involving past U.S. allies in the Libya war, or a mob reaction to the hateful anti-Islam movie whose actors say they were duped into starring in it, the murder of four Americans, including diplomat Chris Stevens,...
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I would never have been a suffragette, and have rather been disappointed with women choosing to engage in the fundamentally anti-liberal realm of politics. I would have preferred seeing women holding and pursuing the more principled path of securing equal rights for everyone, protected against every infringement by the State. For I am thoroughly...
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Americans need to snap out of it. As recently as Bill Clinton, there was at least some concern when the president of the United States began bombing a country without a congressional declaration of war or national debate. There was a lot of concern building up to Bush’s war in Iraq, but the mass...
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It’s not news that “Global warming” has been morphed into “Climate change” as global temperatures have failed to rise as predicted by climate alarmists of the 1990s. But the quoted reaction by the head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the most recent investigation into the IPCC’s methodology is...
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has never deserved his reputation on the right as a simplistic race-baiter. His book, Colored People: A Memoir, is proof enough of this point. For this reason, and others, my sympathies were generally with Gates when he alleged abuse by the Cambridge Police Department. My main criticism of Gates was...
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Each year, the Darwin awards are bestowed—generally posthumously—upon those who “improve” the gene pool by removing themselves from it through acts of incredible stupidity. Recent Nobel Peace Prize awards increasingly appear to share the criteria that its recipients contribute to “improving” the gene pool by removing large numbers of people from it. Unfortunately, in...
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A new political thriller from PBS, “Endgame,” provides the little-known, true back story of apartheid’s end in South Africa, with credit given to a for-profit mining company. Foreseeing that deteriorating conditions in South Africa would likely result in a total loss of their assets, Consolidated Goldfields initiated secret discussions between representatives of the white...
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