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After virtually ignoring happiness for more than 100 years, social scientists are making up for lost time. They're churning out hundreds of research papers on the subject each year. There are happiness conferences, a Journal of Happiness Studies, a World Database of Happiness. Happy, you might say, is the new sad. All of this cogitating about contentment has revealed much about who's supposedly happy and who isn't. Most studies show that wealthy people are marginally happier than poor ones. People with pets or children are no happier than those without. People with active sex lives are -- surprise! -- happier...

Dear Charles, and Lizards, I've just scanned the 700 comments that followed Charles' mentioning his Mom's situation, and to my surprise, there's been no flood of advice towards therapeutic alternatives. ("Advice is 'useless'" as the Yiddish expression goes - but in hope of not being thought making 'casual comment'...I lost my partner Didi on Sept 8th to neuroendocrine small cell cancer (likely lung primary, never confirmed).) A little quick review to give backstory to what I'm about to link. Here in Canada, in Ontario - state (provincial) medicare, where if a doctor does not practice the strict 'approved for lowest...

Mr. Bowman has something to say and and an early paragraph is: "... Service noted ruefully that, though discredited wherever it has been instituted, “Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife.” Indeed it does. But it didn’t occur to him to ask why. I think it is because Communism was a powerful example of the recurring strain of utopianism in the intellectual life of the West. Communism itself may have failed, but the utopian habit of thought on which it was based lingers on even among those who find Communism repugnant and hateful—even, perhaps, among the dreaded neocons themselves....

You're a liberal. You've identified a problem -- the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States; a net loss of 4.6 million jobs over the last 20 years. You've even done a decent job of identifying the causes of the problem: "Companies lose market share to foreign low-cost producers . . . or move their operations overseas in search of lower wages . . . or apply production techniques that require fewer workers." So, what's your solution? Measures like reducing taxes and regulation to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive, perhaps? Of course not! Remember, you're a liberal. No,...

Horsefeathers has been fascinated by the decline of Liberalism. Perhaps this is because its rise and fall has occurred over the course of his own lifetime. It sometimes strikes us that all the people, now departed, whose opinions mattered most to us were liberals. While they are gone, Liberalism itself lingers, sick unto death, an almost moribund version of its once lively self. Liberalism was a part of the world of ideas in which we lived, part of what we admired in the older generation. It was the air we breathed and the way we thought of ourselves: we were...

The task of educating America on Islamofascism and what it means for our future if unchecked is difficult, because those who do not see are actually ideologically challenged by their dedication to a predefined Liberal Utopia, which they wish to achieve at all costs. This smacks of totalitarianism. They are blinded by their own secret fascination for unbridled authority in the name of THEIR good, but not good as defined by the electoral majority of America. Now Winston Churchill managed to educate Britain, and defeated liberal- Nazi appeaser, Neville Chamberlain to become Prime Minister in 1940. This fact alone probably...

June 19, 2006 The Bolshevik's 'Gay Pride' Disaster and its Lessons for America Linda Kimball By its nature, Christianity is both a patriarchal and hierarchal religious and philosophical worldview. Since it teaches that mankind is ‘fallen’ (has a sinful nature which is the source of evil) it requires as a consequence, that moral constraints (social taboos) be placed on man’s sin-nature to encourage him not to act upon sinful urges, which always eventually lead to suffering and evil. The seven great sins are: pride (self-love), envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed--the source of all manmade social ills and suffering....

DOUG SAUNDERS Globe and Mail Update NATO headquarters, Brussels — The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Secretary General of NATO. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer: I have heard about the axeing of a Canadian soldier, and the death of [Canadian diplomat] Glyn Berry, and the other Canadian soldiers who died in a rollover . . . Question: The axe attack is interesting, because some of the reports indicate that they were visiting a village that had been aggravated by earlier U.S. searches. This is a topic that is alarming the public in...

Horsefeathers had the delightful experience this weekend of meeting a young man in his second year at one of our elite universities. Much to our amazement, he turned out to be conservative in his politics and values. He described the life of such a young person in an academic environment, permeated by political correctness and liberal intolerance. It's not pretty. It reminded us of the life of dissidents in Russia towards the end of Communism. Opinions have to be circulated like Samizdat, the authors taking care not to have their identities discovered by their leftist professors. He laughingly told us...

Today, as is wont to happen from time to time, I overheard a hall way conversation at the headquarters of a major US based multinational that I simply could not avoid hearing. The topic of discussion was the current campaign to "help the poor Africans" being lauded by entertainment figures such as Bono and Bob Geldoff. Those conversing were two low level managers. It got me to thinking about the way in which globalist utopianism truly is a bourgeois, grass roots thing, which affects many highly educated, overall "respectable" and "normal" people across our society. How is it that the...

Lawrence A. Uzzell is an independent researcher and former staff member of the U.S. Depart¬ment of Education and the U.S. House and Senate committees on education. This arti¬cle is drawn from a longer study published in the Cato Institute Policy Analysis series. In domestic policy, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education act is the Bush administration's top claim to visionary leadership—its equivalent of the Iraqi war in foreign policy. The administration has used the taxpayers' own money to try to convince them that NCLB has been an unqualified success, draping the Department of Education's headquarters building in Washington in...

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and Wilhelm Reich may have had therapeutic aims to cure the world of its ills. But instead they contributed immensely to the modern sickness that John Paul II has identified as the "culture of death." So says Donald DeMarco, who co-authored a book investigating the dysfunctional lives and theories of the "Architects of the Culture of Death" (Ignatius) with Benjamin Wiker. DeMarco is an adjunct philosophy professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, in Connecticut, and professor emeritus at St. Jerome's University, in Ontario. In this three-part interview, he shared with ZENIT how a...

QUICK LINKS: HOME | NEWS | OPINION | MEETUP | C-LOG | ISSUES townhall.comPrinter-friendly versionPower versus knowledgeThomas Sowell (back to web version) | Send August 11, 2004 Despite clever and hard-working political handlers who have done a masterful job of concealing and distracting attention from John Kerry's voting record in his long Senate career, and the liberal vision behind that record, glimmers of reality still break through now and then. Senator Kerry himself has said that he was for spending more money on education with "no questions asked." The teachers' unions no doubt loved hearing that, but blank checks are precisely...

COMMUNISM IN AMERICA: Ann Coulter recently spoke about Joseph McCarthy and called him an American patriot and prophet who was way ahead of his time. Mr. McCarthy recognized Communist infiltration into our society and political system and the danger this posed to the future of the U.S. He was demonized and discredited. Why? Because he was exposing Communism in America. To those who believe that the threat of Communism disovled with the breakup of the United Soviet Socialist Republic, that is what they want you to believe. Communism is alive and well IN AMERICA TODAY. Our universities have been taken...

COMMUNISM IN AMERICA: Ann Coulter recently spoke about Joseph McCarthy and called him an American patriot and phrophet who was way ahead of his time. Few people paid any attention to her comments while many screamed foul but I give her credit because Mr. McCarthy recognized Communist infiltration into our society and political system and the danger this posed to the future of the U.S. He was demonized and discredited. Why? Because he was exposing Communism in America. To those who believe that the threat of Communism disovled with the breakup of the United Soviet Socialist Republic, that is what...

Since the three female American soldiers initially fell into enemy hands in Iraq, the media have worked hard to quell any backlash against women being deployed in combat. Consequently, a full exploration of the implications involved has been scrupulously avoided.

The latest murderous rantings by Osama bin Laden, broadcast courtesy of advanced Western technology, made me wonder about what new apologetics for Islamo-fascist killers we can now expect from our chattering literary class. As the war on Islamofascism intensifies, growing numbers of playwrights and novelists loudly tell us the primary danger we face is not Islamo-Fascism, and not murderous tyrants like Saddam, nor the alliance between the two; rather it is George W. Bush and Western imperialism, and Israel, that constitute the main dangers. Why do verbally gifted and creative individuals lend themselves to this sort of idiocy? Why do...

January 11, 2003: It is a tendency of the human psyche to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. We all employ the mental mechanism of denial to reduce the everyday distresses of life. And one of the most painful things each of us must contemplate is our own certain death. Entire religions have grown out of the effort to cope with this certainty. However, even more painful than the idea that each of us must die is the idea that there are people, including the people who love us, who want us to die. As Dr. Yale Kramer has pointed out,...

An angry letter to the Atlantic Monthly in its January 1998 issue by Walter Greene of Hatboro, Pennsylvania, protested the "myth of our failing schools," as he called it, on these grounds: We just happen to have the world's most productive work force[sic], the largest standard of living, more Nobel [P]rizes than the rest of the world combined, the best system of higher education, the best high-tech medicine, and the strongest military. These things could not have been accomplished with second-rate systems of education. On the contrary, the surprising truth is they could not have been accomplished to the degree...

The disappearance of Marxism as a force in world politics has not been accompanied by an acceptance of a diversity of political systems. Throughout modern times liberal states have always co-existed alongside many kinds of tyranny. Similarly, the modern world has always contained numerous economic systems -- many varieties of capitalism, planned and guided economies, and a host of hybrid economic systems not easily classified. Diplomacy and international law developed to cope with the fact of diverse regimes. Yet throughout the 20th century global politics was shaped by the project of unifying the world within a single regime. Insofar as...