Recently unearthed time capsule of a more corrupt and innocent time.

I have a new website.

Go there for links and remarks on columns, posts, published pieces, and the occasional slice of ‘original content’.

Increasingly, I think, this Tumblr will offer things more or less unrelated to politics and ‘professional’ stuff.

Which, to some readers, may be a relief.

The Atlantic has my big-picture take on the Zuccotti-driven return of law and order presidential politics.

The Romney Principle is that we make a mistake when we indulge in the sweeping-history approach to understanding the world we live in. The Romney Principle is that philosophy is not the master science — that it leads us foolishly away from the all-important “weeds.”

The Romney Principle, in short, maintains that since only a master technocrat can get us out of our mess — what with his supremely focused and disciplined command of the machinery of government in all its granular detail — Gingrich and his Proposition are more likely to lead our civilization to ruin than to save it. While Newt beholds the vastness of its challenges, Rome burns. While Mitt only appears to lose us in the weeds, he’s really saving civilization by refusing to let it entrance him.

The week’s column at The Daily Caller.

DEA Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Team patch. Foreign Policy has my critique of the new push to militarize the drug war in Mexico.

Money, power, even status — none of these things, Nietzsche suggests, are really enough to instill true resentment. Instead, he argues, those who are resented are the ones so inherently well-constituted that they don’t measure their self-worth in comparison to others. Instead of a resentful worldview that sees the successful other as evil, Nietzsche’s naturally endowed have a “truly” elite worldview that starts from the premise that the self is good — and ends with an attitude that’s all pride and no pity.

Today’s elites, in stark contrast to the ones of Nietzsche’s imagination, are living monuments to self-pity. Perhaps never before have so many elites been so bummed out — about the world they’ve made, about their failure to make it better and about the prospects for turning things around.

My column for the week at The Daily Caller. *link fixed

Read it against Ross’s latest for extra fun.

Continuing conceptual coverage at Ricochet.

Extra at The Daily Caller.

If the aim of Cain’s candidacy was a cheerful, dynamic insurgency, free of the burdens of a typical campaign, the result has been an all-too-predictable circus, completely captured by politics as usual — and increasingly indistinguishable from it.

As if that weren’t bad news enough, here’s the kicker: We’re all to blame.

In any presidential contest, there’s no escape from the so-called “silly season.” The time of great and noble virtue in democratic politics is long past, if it ever really existed. But the ridiculousness surrounding the Cain campaign is unforgivable — especially given this election’s high stakes, and the profundity of crisis faced by the country and the world.

Tally up the mounting absurdities and try not to be flabbergasted…

Your weekly Poulos at The Daily Caller.

Like Neil Young? Shoegaze? Then perhaps you’ll enjoy “Lads”

My Sunday appearance on UP with Chris Hayes, Hour two.

I remind the panel that no talk of jobs is complete without hating on Dodd-Frank, a competition Buddy Roemer wins by calling it “BS.”

I was on UP with Chris Hayes on Sunday.

Hour one: I tell the president of the SEIU that government can’t create jobs… and make Sen. Blumenthal (D-CONN) agree.

[…] the administration’s heavy reliance on drones and kill teams abroad symbolizes our fear at home that, today, the maintenance of order anywhere, at any time, requires the use of brute force.

This sentiment is especially painful given the general political realignment of Americans toward a more libertarian set of ideals. Yet it prevails — leaving the electorate more favorable toward cracking camped-out skulls even as support for the legalization of pot tops 50% for the first time since polling began.

Today’s stewing new breed of pessimistic populists are increasingly permissive on social issues — from abortion to immigration to sex and drugs — while growing increasingly dismissive of those whose choices lead to costly disruptions of basic social order.

From the perspective of communitarians left and right, pessimistic populism is a crisis all its own — a scary indicator of the collapse of the cultural institutions that have long drawn us out of our narrow self-interest and into cooperation for a common good.

[…] But beneath the apparent selfishness of the dog-eat-dog mentality that could caricature pessimistic populism lurks a grim determination to preserve the small portion of the social contract that actually can be preserved.

From my latest column at The Daily Caller.

The line between anti-establishment people right and left is blurred badly enough in key places that we can think seriously about an emerging coalition that Thompson might have dubbed “Freak Power/Rube Power ’12.”

Though tea partiers and Occupiers alike can be excused for nursing national pretensions — if it doesn’t happen where the elites run the country, all our prejudices tell us, it ain’t happenin’ — they’d both be better off, as Thompson’s crushing political disappointment shows, going local. Thompson beclowned himself not only because going national meant party politics — and party politics meant failure, win (Carter) or lose (McGovern) — but because he took that experience to mean that local politics, too, was a useless enterprise for hopeless fools.

Today, The Battle of Aspen seems to prove the opposite point.

The Daily Caller.