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Benjamin Espen

Link fest 2015-12-11

This conservative wunderkind is taking France by storm Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is the granddaughter of the founder of the Front National, and the niece of its current leader. She is young, and pretty, and so immediately garners a lot of attention in the press, but she seems to be an

The Long View 2003-07-31: God's Idea of a Joke

Twenty years ago, I had a modem fried in a lightning strike too. I still keep surge suppressors on my internet connection. Shipping has gotten much faster since then however. It is probably worth repeating every so often, that at the time, I found most of John's ideas

The Long View 2003-07-17: More on Chesterton & Harry Potter

It is a fun thought experiment to imagine what G. K. Chesterton would have said about the Iraq War of 2003. John was right to note that Chesterton was no kind of pacifist. After all, he wrote a poem commemorating the Battle of Lepanto. However, he also had a fierce

The Long View 2003-07-14: All Uranium, All the Time

One of the things I appreciate John for to this day is explaining exactly why children's literature like J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series really are pretty harmless, in comparison to actual ritual magic. John also had enough empathy to understand why well-meaning parents might be

The Long View 2003-07-08: Neo-Hypochondria

John makes an interesting claim here: that psychoanalysis served the same function for mental illness as health resorts serve for hypochondriacs. That makes it seem less stupid than it otherwise might. Neo-Hypochondria Yesterday I suffered the torments of the damned, if the damned have Canon printers. It was one of

Linkfest 2015/12/04

I haven't done a linkfest before, but I get the opportunity to read a lot of interesting things, so this seems like a good opportunity to start. Astronauts age faster in space. This is a bit of a puzzle. I knew some of this, but the peculiar constellation

The Long View 2003-07-01: The Crisis Builds

In his book review on William Strauss and Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning, John noted that the generational model of that book predicted a crisis in America in about 2005 that would usher in two decades of chaos. We certainly seem to have gotten the chaos. Strauss and