I don’t know any of this for a fact, but I would imagine that, if you were to administer a spelling bee to a given middle-school classroom, there would be a fairly significant correlation between success at the bee and overall writing ability. I’d further imagine that this correlation begins to fall apart the closer you get to a country-wide scale, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee. (Perhaps I’m being ungenerous there, but I don’t see too many future Hemingways in that crowd.) The reason I’d wager that these propositions are true is that good spelling is wrapped up with […]

Language transcends rationality. There is little logic to the human condition, yet plenty of emotion, errors, and discord. So we have language, a malleable band of symbols we manipulate to survive. Our lexicon bears the record of countless conquests and revolutions beginning in primeval obscurity when the Indo-European culture advanced West. Human events are embedded in our words like chunks of sediment in fossilized rock. Little fragments of the eccentric kings, strident Norsemen, Roman slang, and Muslim invaders all echo out of the continuously arguing mouths of English speakers. Both Runes and Latin were mystical technologies. The spell of language […]

If we consider liberal policies experiments in social engineering and their media a psychological operations network, we get a structure for postmodern conflict. History, like a Hindu god with many faces: of sex, race, faith, creed, and with unfinished business, inevitably resolves to act on the present. As liberalism wars on the reality of history, a billion tiny fates foil the plot. French leftists initiated the population replacement project, nodding to Arab Muslims. Many of those same leftists, – men who lead this radical liberal experiment, – were executed by Arab jihadists in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. This is […]