Heather Mac Donald is a very good journalist, and conservatives are in her debt for her work dealing with immigration, crime, and the realities of urban life. But Mac Donald, an atheist, is puzzled by religion. Last Sunday, this puzzlement took the form of a short piece at the Secular Right website, where Mac Donald...
Wake Island (1942)Directed by John Farrow, B&W, 88 Minutes Go Tell the Spartans (1978)Directed by Ted Post, Color, 114 Minutes Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983)Directed by Stephen Frears, Color, 106 Minutes Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World War II without...
To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives. Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount. But is it wise for the White...
Our friends at Takimag have posted an excellent column by John Derbyshire on the sins of Wikipedia. Derbyshire tried to correct his own entry, posted by someone obviously out to get him. He sums up the entire fraud in the sentence:
This is a brief note to introduce the next formal Booklog, which will be a discussion of Euripides’ Orestes, a rather strange play that pits the claims of family not only against each other but against those of friendship. I hope that it can be used to highlight certain older ideas about kinship and friendship...
PERSPECTIVE Johnny Rocco’s Worldby Thomas Fleming VIEWS “Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”by James O. TateThe commodification of culture. Unpalatable Valuesby Andrei NavrozovCulture as gastronomy. Watching the Moneyby George McCartneyBrought to you by NokiaTM . NEWS The $15 Trillion End Runby William J. QuirkAn “oligarchy of interests.” REVIEWS Decline and Fallby Tom Piatak Theodore Dalrymple: Not With...
The conservative press lost no time in converting the Henry Louis Gates affair into a morality play that pitted a loose-lipped race-baiting President against a squeaky clean policeman with an excellent record in what is politely termed
You can't make this stuff up. First, the name of the program—Cash for Clunkers. Then the origin, the fountainhead—to wit, the U.S. Congress. Then the results: unexpected demand for participation, unanticipated shortages of cash, bureaucratic unresponsiveness, public and congressional consternation. Many of the politicians who designed Cash for Clunkers want now ...
With “controlling costs” a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, “rationed care” takes on a new meaning for us all. London’s Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by...
“ . . . and bank-notes will become as plentiful as oak leaves.” —Thomas Jefferson “They [the people], and not the rich are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion...
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
The Russian government has established a presidential commission charged with countering “attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history.” The history it refers to is that of the 20th century, in which domestic and international crimes committed by the former Soviet Union played a salient and notorious role. The Kremlin insists that the sacrifices made...
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
Here, you can see almost forever. It is a great green plain bounded by low wolds to the west and the North Sea to the east, by the River Humber to the north and the shining mudflats of the Wash to the south. It is a landscape for seven-league boots and ten-league thoughts, as the...
“America was, is, and—we pray—will continue to be the place where more than anyplace else, dreams actually do come true” —William J. Bennett The key phrase to notice in William Bennett’s statement is “more than anyplace else.” In recent years, a number of well-meaning patriots have taken up the theme of what is called American...
A piece appeared recently in my local newspaper by one Anthony C. Infanti, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He wrote in support of a pending state antidiscrimination bill that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and “gender” identity. There’s no urgency in attacking his position or his argument. ...
It’s Friday evening, and you have arrived at your local multiplex with your ten- and twelve-year-old boys and two of their very closest friends. You’ve come to see the best movie $150 million can make. You cannot remember just when, but it seems you idly mentioned to your wife earlier in the week that you...
Drag Me to Hell Produced by Buckaroo Entertainment Directed by Sam Raimi Screenplay by Sam and Ivan Raimi Distributed by Universal Pictures Some reviewers have hailed Drag Me to Hell as an hilariously ghoulish comedy. I can’t think why. Oddly enough, it takes calculating discipline to make a comedy genuinely hilarious, and that is...
Well, of course you’re reading my compelling exposition because of its lapel-grabbing title, but did you notice that my title is in quotes? Oh, yes indeedy. That’s because I got the title from Motoko Rich’s article in the New York Times of May 20, and I didn’t want to plagiarize, or rather I should say...
With the election of Barack Obama, opponents of U.S. intervention abroad were supposed to throw their hats in the air and cheer: The millennium had arrived! The war in Iraq would end rather shortly, and the Bad Old Days of the Bush-Cheney-neocon Axis of Evil were coming to an end. So why are we embarking...
In the aftermath of the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the “liberation” of Iraq by U.S. forces, Bush-administration officials who had earlier compared Saddam to Hitler extended that analogy and suggested that postwar Iraq was like post-World War II Germany and Japan and Italy, where the U.S. military occupation helped replace totalitarian regimes with thriving...
If man is the measure, it cannot be right to tell him what to do. We cannot be forced to be free or ordered to be equal. Neither theoretical refinements nor practical compromises can resolve such basic contradictions or keep them from leading to unprincipled and irrational conduct that eventually proves self-destructive. Savor that felicitous...
In 1939, the year I was born, gasoline was ten cents per gallon. A new car cost $700. A new house cost $3,850, and the average rent was $28 per month. Harvard tuition was $420 annually. A loaf of bread from the bakery was eight cents. Hamburger was 14¢ per pound, eggs were 19¢ per...
Hard cases make bad law, and since 2002 the exposure of some ugly criminal cases has stirred legislators in several states to contemplate dreadful legal innovations. However far removed these crimes may appear from regular mainstream American life, the legal principles involved threaten to wreak havoc in the coming decades. As all the world knows,...
The unemployment rate in Illinois broke double-digits in May to hit a seasonally adjusted 10.1 percent, a 26-year high. Of course, double-digit unemployment rates are nothing new here in Rockford; we have been above ten percent for the better part (so to speak) of a year now, hitting a high of 13.5 percent in March...
If you think comedy is dead, just read Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest proposals regarding a Palestinian state and try to keep a straight face. “Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without preconditions,” says the comedian, and then proceeds to state the following preconditions: Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, where Palestinians hope to build a...
For years, the United States and East Asian nations have proceeded on the assumption that a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is feasible. A settlement would entail Pyongyang’s renunciation of its nuclear ambitions in exchange for diplomatic and economic concessions by the other participants in the six-party talks. But what if the...
Conservative political strategists are like the military strategists they would like to emulate: They are always fighting the last war. For how many years, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, did conservatives continue to rail against the communist menace? Marxism, and not only the virulent Leninist strain adopted by the Bolsheviks, had once posed a...
“The lives, not only of men, but of commonwealths and the whole world, run not upon a helix that still enlargeth; but on a circle where, arriving at their meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the horizon again.” —Thomas Browne, Religio Medici I There are few books I have read in recent...
“For me,” wrote P.D. James in her “fragment of autobiography,” Time To Be in Earnest, “one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of murder inquiry.” Murder “is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.” As a writer...
“Another Crisis like this one and the West will be wiped out,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 1. “Once we have overcome this Crisis, the question will be how can we return to a path of virtue as far as public debts are concerned.” Of course, the first question is whether the West...
I usually find Roger D. McGrath’s Sins of Omission to be the most interesting column in Chronicles, and “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (July) was no exception. However, I wonder why defenders of our use of the A-bomb seem always to present us with a false dilemma: Either we use the bomb or suffer hundreds of thousands...
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it. Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive....
The day before Thomas Fleming offered his reflections on the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I offered mine at Takimag. My focus was different from Dr. Fleming’s. I used the anniversary to reflect on how and why America had declined since Neil Armstrong took that famous step onto the moon, and wished that “we could...
Last week on NPR, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health-care bill is the U.S. government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health-care costs, not about providing hard-pressed Americans with health care. The professor said that if...
“The sound alone was worth the $24 billion!” So said fellow Nixon speechwriter Ray Price as the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted Apollo 11 and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins off the launch pad, three miles away, on the start of their voyage to the moon. It was a splendid moment in that first year of...
You should not drink and bake at the same time. —Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom . . . —Owen Wister His best companions, innocence and health,And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. —Oliver Goldsmith Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the...
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the United States was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy....
Not that the secular world walks the floor at night worrying over the Episcopal Church and its waning influence over the minds of all decent and honorable Americans. The secular world lost this decent and honorable habit years ago and likely won't get it back, especially with Episcopalians themselves acting ...
When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
Despite our high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden’s first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I...
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:
There is no economy left to recover. The U.S. manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free-trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.” The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real-estate bubble, and by “free market”...
The Soviet Union in 1964 was about the last place on earth where anyone could find respect for traditional ways and reverence for ancestors. For the most part, the thuggish bureaucracy controlling that unlamented establishment exuded an almost eager desire for drabness that was downright studied in its gleeful love ...
The overarching flaw of the neocons is arrogance. It was arrogance that led them to believe that we could remake the Mideast when we invaded Iraq. It was arrogance that led Catholic neocons to lecture John Paul II on Catholic just-war teaching as they lobbied the Vatican to endorse our disastrous invasion of Iraq. And...