Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Turns out David Warren is a Spengler fan too. Especially the latest on Pope Benedict’s previous incarnations
The best short discussion of the subject I have seen is by a contributor to Asia Times Online, who signs himself “Spengler,” I assume after the gloomy German pessimist Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline of the West in 1919, and had the good luck to die in 1936, after predicting the Nazis would not last 10 years. I do not entirely agree with our contemporary Spengler (is there anyone with whom I have ever entirely agreed?) but in passing recommend his column as one of the most consistently interesting that appears today, informed by a breadth of learning and distaste for trivialities that is rare among journalists.
This Spengler refers back to his own arguments, over time: “Underlying the crisis is the Western world’s repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or ‘self-realization’ ahead of child-rearing.” He saw the U.S. banking crisis coming, and connected the dots between demographic developments and financial catastrophe. He affirms the Ratzinger argument, that we must competently analyse mechanisms of supply and demand, and avoid cheap moralizing by recognizing that these are written into nature.
Charles Krauthammer says Obama’s no centrist.
Bjorn Lomborg says Obama is full of hot air when it comes to the environment.
NY Times Op-Ed says Obama will soon see the value of rendition.
Froma Harrop says a Senate seat is not a Kennedy heirloom.
James Taranto on the silliness of computer analogies.
P. J. O’Rourke says journalists need to be bailed out.
Dilbert on what we could do if we were free.