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The Long View

The Long View 2007-01-17: Franco-British What-Ifs; Steyn on Children of Men; Obsolete Doomsday Clock

A Franco-British Union is the kind of alternative history that John J. Reilly loved to post about, except this one was seriously proposed more than once in mundane history. Franco-British What-Ifs; Steyn on Children of Men; Obsolete Doomsday Clock This is not one of the great "What-Ifs" of

The Long View 2007-01-15: Stephen King & The Second Religiousness

I’ve never been a Steven King fan, but his influence is hard to escape in American fiction. John riffs off of Ross Douthat’s attempt to make sense of the historical moment King can represent. Stephen King & The Second Religiousness The title of this entry was not the

The Long View 2007-01-11: Bush on Iraq; the Conversion of Islam; Scandals & Bad Motives

Since David French has done the unspeakable by defending the indefensible sixteen years later, here is a moment of sanity from John J. Reilly in 2006: Regarding the official Democratic reply to the president's address, I think that Senator Dick Durbin was quite mistaken in expressing the desire

The Long View: The Translator

John J. Reilly’s book review of John Crowley’s The Translator comes up at an apropos time: I am digesting a history of science fiction in the twentieth century, and The Translator seems to be a good example of science fiction as a kind of secular scripture. There is

The Long View 2007-01-09: Anti-Freeze Life; Ethical Racket; Charles Fort Lives; Towards Universal Health Care; Steyn on Russia

John Reilly had a minor sideline in Fortean phenomena, named after Charles Fort, strange and uncanny events sometimes described as being outside of what science can explain, but often better seen as low frequency events that are difficult to describe. In that vein, the recent juvenile humpback whale found in

The Long View 2007-01-05: Goddard, Mahdi, Climate, Anti-McCain

John J. Reilly proposed this scheme of immigration reform once before: (1) Physical control of the borders; (2) Legal immigration restricted to family reunification and political asylum; (3) Amnesty with parallel tracks for repatriation or naturalization He intended it as a compromise in the name of domestic peace, even knowing

The Long View 2007-01-02: Overdiagnosis; Literature Maps; Starship Jesus Conversion from Islam; Spengler's Deal; Shabby Hanging

I do agree with John here that our diagnostic tools often don’t improve health, and that the definitions of “disease” are often too broad, but I disagree about why healthcare doesn’t do much as you might think to improve our health. I definitely don’t blame administrative costs,