http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/derbyshire/ en-us Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:45:47 GMT Focus Forum 15 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2213812/posts March 24, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Will Obama Kill Science? (Cont.)Science vs. political correctness. By John Derbyshire Back in October of last year, I wrote a column titled “Will Obama Kill Science?” arguing that an Obama administration, stuffed as it surely would be with postmodern leftists, would do what they could to kill off some key branches of the human sciences, for fear of what they might turn up. I concluded with: We are about to find out whether our traditional devotion to free speech and free enquiry can survive real, incontrovertible results from the human sciences; and in particular,... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2213812/posts#comment Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:45:47 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2198916/posts You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You... The American Conservative http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2198916/posts#comment Wed, 4 Mar 2009 14:39:43 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2195710/posts You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You... The American CONservative http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2195710/posts#comment Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:17:18 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2192292/posts You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You... American Conservative http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2192292/posts#comment Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:47:57 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2139733/posts I’ve never understood why liberals thought of conservatives as religious fundamentalists. Yes, there are some conservatives who are led to their views by their strong religious beliefs. Yet there are other conservatives who reject liberalism not because of their feelings about faith, but because conservatism simply makes more sense to them than liberalism. These conservatives believe that logic and reason will lead the average person to veto the Obama-Kennedy vision. John Derbyshire, the fiercely brilliant National Review writer, is a member of the latter group. He has started an already-outstanding blog, www.SecularRight.org, that reflects the views of this faction of... Human Events http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2139733/posts#comment Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2090198/posts The conventional wisdom is settling in: It's awful, and terribly un-conservative, to nationalize a big lump of the financial industry, but the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Baloney. It may be politically too awful to contemplate, i.e. hazardous to the well-being of our political class, but that's the kind of short-termism that got us here. Once this thing is done, it's done, and the dollar is a few inches closer to being a Soviet rouble. The conviction that government will always bail out a financial catastrophe will be factored into all future trading and financing decisions. Down the road... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2090198/posts#comment Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:36:15 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2050955/posts The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth: The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day … Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like: The Xbox and the... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2050955/posts#comment Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:44:06 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2019323/posts Derbyshire may have 'oldest' dog Bella's owner says she is at least 28 years old A Derbyshire couple are trying to prove their pet Labrador cross is the oldest dog in the world. Bella's owner David Richardson, 76, said he bought the mixed breed dog from the RSPCA 26 years ago when she was "at least three years old". That would make Bella's age more than 200 in canine years. But the RSPCA said it does not have any records for Bella and Guinness World Records said without the appropriate paperwork it could not be proved. Mr Richardson said he... BBC http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2019323/posts#comment Wed, 21 May 2008 20:38:38 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2011610/posts A reader: John, I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform. Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2011610/posts#comment Mon, 5 May 2008 21:32:33 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2011437/posts In an essay published recently on National Review Online, John Derbyshire has declared that the documentary Expelled contains a blood libel against Western Civilization. His is an exercise of striking vulgarity, the more so since, as he insouciantly admits, he has not “seen the dang thing.” A blood libel, one might recall, refers to the charge that the Jewish people are irredeemably stained by their occasional, if modest, need for Christian blood. Some terms have acquired through their historical associations a degree of repugnance that persuades sensitive men and women not to use them. If Derbyshire has been repelled by... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2011437/posts#comment Mon, 5 May 2008 14:59:31 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2010997/posts ... When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2010997/posts#comment Sun, 4 May 2008 12:49:05 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2009931/posts It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?" I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and... Jewcy - What Matters Now http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2009931/posts#comment Thu, 1 May 2008 22:09:53 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2008202/posts What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2008202/posts#comment Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:01:40 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1982956/posts “In Nature,” said Coleridge, “there is nothing melancholy.” I don’t know about that. I suppose there are lots of people who will greet American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau with joy, but both politics and temperament predisposed me against the book.[1] I had agreed to review it in a moment of weakness, but when it thumped down onto my desk—115 extracts from 101 authors in close to a thousand galley pages of almost nothing but text (“80 pages of color inserts” will be included in the finished product, the publisher assures me), melancholy is what ensued.Politics. The presence of that... The New Criterion http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1982956/posts#comment Sun, 9 Mar 2008 19:21:46 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1978332/posts America's voters need to know why Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, praised Barack Obama at the annual Nation of Islam conference as "the hope of the entire world that America will change and be a better place" and Mrs. Obama's thesis suggests why. John Derbyshire, in "The Corner" at National Review Online: "...Mrs Obama's senior sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community"....will... have on the presidential campaign....a moderate positive, offset by a slight negative." If that's so, then Barack Obama will be the next President. Mr. Derbyshire was impressed that the thesis was released, making... Renew America http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1978332/posts#comment Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:57:07 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1962054/posts Oh, stop whining. So what if the likely GOP nominee believes in restraints on free speech, higher taxation, bigger government, open borders, and 100-year U.S. armies of occupation everywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe? Romney believes in those things too — at least, he does when he's in a room full of people that want him to. You already have a genuinely conservative candidate on offer. He's just not slick enough for you. What, he has positions you don't agree with? More than the other guys? Actually, I have heard very little complaining about Paul's positions. What I have mostly heard... National Review Online: The Corner http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1962054/posts#comment Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:47:06 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/594403/posts Make Your Yuletide Gay An olive branch. Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor December 20, 2001 9:15 a.m. At the beginning of Robert Aldrich's 1962 movie Sodom and Gomorrah, Anouk Aimee sets out to deliver a message to the Elamites. Halfway across the desert she encounters a stranger, who helpfully warns her: "Watch out for Sodomite patrols!" Where is that guy when I need him? In Tuesday's column, which was about ballet, I passed a comment on the movie Billy Elliot, expressing the opinion that it was "not bad, if you ignored the ingredient of homosexual propaganda ... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/594403/posts#comment Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:58:17 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1942449/posts December 20, 2007, 6:00 a.m. Liberty! Liberty!Why IÂ’m for Ron Paul. By John Derbyshire You can waste a lot of time in my line of work, noodling around on Internet search engines to not much effect. If the matter is sufficiently pressing (translation: remunerative), when the Internet has comprehensively failed you, you can head to your library. If that fails, you can head to the nearest university library; and if that fails, to some mega-resource like the New York Public Library. If the matter isn’t that pressing, you give up and think of something else to write about. I... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1942449/posts#comment Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:57:20 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1915829/posts Eliot Spitzer, the Governor of my state, has achieved a thing I would have though impossible: He has made me yearn for the days of George Pataki. Spitzer's latest wheeze, to give state driver licenses to illegal aliens, was actually state policy for most of Pataki's term as Governor, until Curious George changed the rules in 2003 (causing 150,000 illegals to lose their licenses). Oddly, under the pre-2003 Pataki rules, illegals could get licenses without showing a Social Security number provided they supplied documentary proof that they were ineligible for Social Security. Under Spitzer's proposed change, an illegal no longer... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1915829/posts#comment Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:03:38 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1899743/posts September 20, 2007, 0:36 a.m. Islamophobophobia By John Derbyshire I boxed a couple of brief rounds with Robert Spencer over at Pajamas Media last month. Robert is the author of a raft of books on the general theme that Islam is a bad religion — not merely bad in some current misinterpretation, but bad root and branch, its badness planted right there in the Islamic scriptures. Spencer himself is a devout Christian, and the Pajamas Media exchanges started when I posted a review of his latest book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. I don’t really... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1899743/posts#comment Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:51:30 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1877735/posts Is 2008 The New 1964? [John Derbyshire] There's a Pro-Ron-Paul meme going around, to the effect that 2008 is the new 1964; i.e. that on the premise—debatable in itself, of course—that the GOP has no chance of winning the presidency next year, conservatives should run a Goldwater-style insurgency to remind the party we're here & set up some influence for 2012. Bruce Bartlett floated the meme here. I got a thought-provoking e-mail along similar lines (one of dozens like it I've had on that Paul column) from Ben Novak, who lists himself as "founder of the Americans in Europe for... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1877735/posts#comment Tue, 7 Aug 2007 19:04:46 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874133/posts That Old-Time ReligionThe Ron Paul temptation.By John DerbyshireGo on, admit it: you have felt the Ron Paul temptation, haven’t you? And it’s not just the thrill of imagining another president named Ron, is it? Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874133/posts#comment Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:32:57 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1863031/posts On “The Corner” the other day, by way of commemorating the centenary of the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, I posted Heinlein's contribution to the 1950s radio series “This I Believe.” Eschewing any religious or metaphysical affirmations, Heinlein laid out his social credo: “I believe in my neighbors... in my townspeople... in my fellow citizens.” He went on to write about his local priest, whose “goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. ... If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him.” (Heinlein was an atheist, by the way.) Heinlein’s next-door neighbor, he tells us, was a... National Review Online http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1863031/posts#comment Mon, 9 Jul 2007 15:08:33 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1860639/posts What a Waste. Steve Sailer said it all. [L]et's stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this. Well, why... National Review http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1860639/posts#comment Wed, 4 Jul 2007 07:58:17 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1848270/posts Well, all right, the beast is not definitively dead yet. Given the unswerving determination of our president — a quality I have admired, under different circumstances — we may see another effort at “comprehensive immigration reform” before the 110th Congress packs its bags in January ’09. Even if the president can’t be deterred, though, the congressfolk can. They’ve been getting an earful from their constituents. I don’t know what they’ve been hearing, but it can’t be too different from what all the radio and TV talk-show hosts say they have been hearing: “Enforce the law!” This past couple of weeks... NRO http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1848270/posts#comment Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:29:13 GMT