by Mark Franke I learned something new the other day in a Wall Street Journal column: the term “cognitive-dissonance reduction,” a form of mental gymnastics used to fit inconvenient facts to the ideology. I know what cognitive dissonance is, having run into the term in my undergraduate business school classes. Think of it as a propensity to always second guess your opinions, a mortal sin in the left-wing catechism. It turns into a vile application…

I LOVE TO TELL HER STORY. She is an inspiration that you can bloom where you are planted, you don’t need a high affirmative-action score or special favors to succeed. Heck, you don’t even need a college degree. Bobbi Ann Mlynar and I had the same English teacher our senior year, an eccentric word fiend who had figured out how to instill in teen-age miscreants a love for Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and a dozen other literary giants.…

Monsters to Destroy . . . TIME SPENT FIGHTING a foreign war, a decade writing editorials on foreign policy and several years as a foreign policy aide to a U.S. Senator have left me with a single insight. It applies to the inflection that we see developing in the Middle East and it is just this: Envy is always dangerous, but when it is institutionalize in a culture, political movement or a foreign policy it is…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. My family has felt the horrors of terrorism. Years ago, when the First Officer of Egypt Air Flight 990 piloted the aircraft into the north Atlantic while repeatedly muttering “I rely on God,” 217 people perished. Among those who were killed in this perfidious act were two of my relatives, an uncle and a cousin. Years after that, and three weeks before he left Indianapolis to do humanitarian work in the Mideast,…

Gaza Perversity at IU IU STUDENTS WHO PROTESTED following the terrorist attack on Israeli homes (do we need to show you the pictures that the terrorists themselves took?) now say they were merely concerned for the lives of innocent children living from whence the terrorists came. Really? So, one morning it is announced that a thousand Israeli men, women and children have been slaughtered in their homes and your first reaction is to grab a…

by Mark Franke This time they have gone too far, so far that even their usual choir of apologists have distanced themselves. The sickening images coming out of Israel are the epitome of pure evil. What compounds the horror is the response this is getting on certain elite college campuses. This should have given everyone pause, including those who generally are sympathetic to Palestinian claims. Parachuting armed terrorists into a music festival for the sole…

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Thomas Jefferson Find someone who will speak positively about our government these days and you will have outdone the cynic Diogenes. He merely wanted to find a wise man; we are looking for a happy and contented one. Fortunately we can let the Gallup Poll do our work for us. That organization conducts an annual survey of a representative group of Americans to ask their level…

Leadership — The Other Kind YES, WE SEEM TO HAVE fallen into chaos, stumbled off a cliff even. The recent swirl around the office of Speaker of the House — a “gyre” is the new Beltway word for it — had me rethinking a decision of a couple summers back. I had chosen to play cards with some friends instead of attend a local political rally. It was the right call. The invitation was sincere. The politician was a…

by Mark Franke Like nearly every other red-blooded American, I have dreamt about get-rich-quick schemes but to no avail. I wish I had been the genius who figured out that he could take free water, bottle it and then sell it at three bucks a crack. I was also too late with hula hoops, slinkies, soap-on-a-rope and pet rocks. Genius is 99 percent perspiration and only one percent inspiration, if Thomas Edison is to be…

Obviously . . . AS C.K. CHESTERTON famously said, every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. This is an apology to our members for continuing — perhaps monotonously — to remind them of those obvious things. But somebody has to do it. A week ago we highlighted an economist’s courageous study showing that, yes, two-parent families have an advantage in raising children. Earlier this week we reminded ourselves that private property matters, critiquing the business…