Execupundit.com

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

"The Lie About Islam, Europe, and the Dangers We Face"

The Economist would not have written, in 1935, that the Comintern and the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports were symmetrical extremisms requiring equal vigilance. It would not write today that the Chinese Communist Party and the Falun Gong are symmetrical authoritarianisms. In every other domain, this magazine understands that variables such as scale, state sponsorship, and institutional depth matter; that a movement with a coherent multigenerational strategy is not the same kind of thing as a collection of aggrieved amateurs. On this subject, uniquely, the analytical standards slip. It is worth asking why.

Read all of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's essay in The Free Press.

The Issue of Our Times

Great TV Show Themes: A Series

Rainfall and Irrigation

There has long seemed to a connection between washing your car and rainstorms.

Since I live in Phoenix, that theory means I should wash my car every day, but I've noticed another theory to consider: flood irrigation.

I live in an older section of Phoenix that has irrigation. Every two weeks in the summer and far less so in the winter months, my lawn is flooded with water from the irrigation canals.

That means I never sprinkle the lawn but depend solely on the irrigation. There are reports that this system uses less water than the homes with sprinklers, but who knoweth? It's a handy system and, unlike the old days when I did my own irrigating, there are professional irrigators who turn on and off the pipes going into the lawns, so the water flows from one lawn to another.

Rain is predicted this week. So is my irrigation. We'll take it whenever we can get it.