Small Arms Fire
George Will reminds us that Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone as “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”
A Culture of Disaster. The Belmont Club remembers the worst sea disaster, involving the Philippine Ferry MV Dona Paz. The lessons of that disaster went unheeded as another ferry sailed into a typhoon a few weeks ago with a loss of 800 lives.
The loss of the Titanic, operating on the Western mind, stimulated the establishment of the International Ice Patrol and mandatory capacities for lifeboats. Except for wartime disasters like the Lusitania and the Wilhelm Gustloff, Western sea travel became permanently safer after the lessons of the Titanic were fully absorbed. But because of the absence of cause and effect in much of Filipino culture, the loss of Dona Paz had no effect upon the subsequent safety of Philippine maritime travel.
Dyslexia Discrimination. Peter Hitchens has this:
A medical student, Naomi Gadian, says she is being discriminated against in her exams because she is ‘dyslexic’. I think she has impaled herself on a very interesting fork.
If ‘dyslexia’ really exists, then surely it is quite reasonable for the authorities to forbid sufferers from practising as doctors, where a written mistake in a prescription or a misreading of a dose could be disastrous.
Such ‘discrimination’, like a lot of other discrimination, is not only reasonable but urgently necessary.
American Casualties of Communism. From the New York Sun’s review of The Forsaken, a book about depression-era Americans who moved to the Soviet Union in search of socialism.
Lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, [they] migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the “building of socialism.” It was, in the words of the author, “the least heralded migration in American history” and a period when “for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the
