Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the contributions of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.” When I was young, we were taught about men and, yes, women in California, not because of their “sexual orientation” but because they were figures of substance and significance. One of my favorites...
The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country. But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even its continued existence—in no small...
I first visited England in 1953, when I was 16 years old. It was a very different country back then, a green and pleasant place, where weekend cinemas were packed with enthusiastic movie fans all cheerfully whistling and applauding the action. The film palaces were thick with tobacco smoke, and no one left his seat...
My wife does not like horror films. I used to think it was because she does not wish to be frightened, but we all, even prim Victorian ladies, enjoy a good scare from time to time, especially when we know we are safe. Girl Scouts around the campfire tell stories about the murdered little girl...
The stagnant economy remains the central concern of most Americans. Although the financial crisis of 2008 had repercussions around the world, the brunt of the job loss was felt here: The International Monetary Fund estimates that one out of every four jobs lost as a result of the financial crash of 2008 was lost in...
On July 11 President Obama said that thanks to his “swift and aggressive action . . . we’ve been able to pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink.” Six days later, Larry Summers repeated the analogy: “We were at the brink of catastrophe at the beginning of the year but we...
I am not sure who is more ignorant of John Calvin: Robert H. Nelson, who wrote The New Holy Wars, or Tobias Lanz, who reviewed it (“Calvinism Without God,” August). Since I haven’t read Mr. Nelson’s book, I will address Mr. Lanz’s review. I was more than a little taken aback to read that “Calvin...
Those who were struck by the graceful prose and clear thinking of Judge Giovanni Bonello’s decision in the case of the Italian crucifix (see “Keeping History,” Cultural Revolutions, July) should be interested to learn that he has for some years had a sideline in the brief historical essay. Many of these have found their way...
Liberal interventionists and their neoconservative twins on both sides of the Atlantic were jubilant as Libyan rebels took Tripoli. From now on, “The right question for the United States and its allies isn’t whether to help oppressed people fight for freedom, it’s when,” declared the Washington Post on August 24. The answer to that question...
Talking to CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic considers the extraordinary readiness of the government in Belgrade to compromise Serbia’s national and state interests in order to demonstrate its subservience to the “international community.” A recent batch of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade drastically illustrates the extent of institutionalized political...
Wednesday, at a meeting with Hispanic activists, President Obama vowed to keep pushing for what he calls “comprehensive immigration reform.” The “reform” Obama wants is one that will enable illegal immigrants to become legal residents, and that will place no meaningful obstacle in the way of others who want to join them. Obama’s comments...
When I first saw the memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism center in Newark, declaring that I’m “a threat to National Security,” not to mention an “agent of a foreign power,” I was incredulous. These can’t be real FBI documents, I thought to myself. Someone is pulling my leg. Sadly, no.
In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory. Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building. A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal. Two calm men enter the room and...
Last Saturday, at United Russia’s congress, the ruling duumvirate of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin finally ended the uncertainty of some months’ standing. Putin first asked Medvedev to head United Russia’s list at next December’s Duma election. Accepting the offer, Medvedev proposed that United Russia nominate Putin as its presidential candidate...
Siracusa: Sunday, 25 September 2011 We’ve been in Siracusa since Friday evening. My wife, Christopher Check, and I, accompanied by our young friend and board member Mark Atkins, are checking out the site of our next Winter School, and there is so much to do: so many ancient ruins to check out, so many medieval...
In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory. Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building. A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal. Two calm men enter the room and...
The commentary editor of the online edition of The Daily Mail has invited me to contribute a blog several times a week. Once he wakes up and realizes his terrible mistake, the blog may be gone with the wind a lot sooner and more permanently than the Confederacy. So, if ...
Kudos to the Morning Edition staff! I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of the...
Monday, September 19 The big noise is, again, President Obama’s job’s plan that will require a tax on the rich, the so-called “Buffet Plan.” Now, I’d be ticked pink if all the Warren Buffets of America could be taxed out of their dirty business. What has Mr. Buffet ever manufactured, what has he ever...
Kudos to the Morning Edition staff! I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of...
The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework...
The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework of...
Srdja Trifkovic, still in Germany at a major conference, will be interviewed by Paul Youngblood on WNTA/1330 at 4 PM today, Thursday 14 September. On this same website there is a button to take you to the station's live webcast.
Friday, September 16 The Paul and I are on the radio at 3 (CDT), but I’m not sure what we do next Friday when I will have just finished cena in Siracusa. Anyone catch Pat Robertson’s words of wisdoms on why it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s because they are more...
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: This was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had...
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: This was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had been...
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan...
1:00 PM CDT, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 In the aftermath of the greatest loss of American life in a single attack since Pearl Harbor—and probably ever—our first thoughts must be for the victims of an attack that was neither cowardly nor senseless (as it is already being called), but a well-coordinated demonstration of American...
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied....
Idling: A Public and Entirely Self-Serving Diary 1 September 4,2011. A few words by way of justification for wasting time, mine as much as yours, on talking about nothing. I have always been by inclination an idle man, the sort who is too lazy to balance his checkbook or do his taxes until the...
September 2 is the 38th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien (1973). The man who inspired so many to see the real, enchanted world and not the sterile, imagined one of modernity was himself inspired by deeply Christian Anglo-Saxon poetry. The very idea of “Middle Earth” came from a (likely) ninth-century poem called Christ or The...
Alas, Tea Partiers, you may as well fold your tents and quietly leave the field. Salon (a website that apparently caters to members and would-be members of the national elite) has given your movement the coup de grace. They have uncovered the cruel truth that your movement is a “Southern” movement. No more need be said. The...
Please join my friend Paul Youngblood and me at 3:00 (CDT) on WNTA 1330. LAst week the station changed the schedule on us, but we're back to normal now. We are probably going to talk about the new report on Thomas Jeffferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemmings--who says we don't ...
I don’t care what you’ve read here or elsewhere: There’s still some serious discrimination going on in the Land of Lincoln. No, I’m not talking about poor Governor Rod, whose peers sent him up the river, or poor Governor Ryan, who is still up spit creek and being denied parole. I’m talking about love. We...
Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of technology over nature. A moment’s reflection, however, would have neatly reversed the...
I first encountered Kenneth Minogue as a sophomore at Columbia, when his name appeared on a reading list for a course in modern political philosophy. The professor, it goes without saying, was a radical who had his own reasons for disliking liberalism, but I do not recall his criticisms, if any, of Minogue and his...
The modern conflation of democracy with the welfare state to the contrary, there is, in fact, a vast, actually unbridgeable, gulf between these two things. Democracy had previously assumed a citizenry independent enough—socially, financially, intellectually, and morally—to be able to form fair, balanced, and informed opinions concerning public matters and issues of state. The welfare...
I became acquainted with Peter Stanlis through my connection with The Rockford Institute, yet he is always associated in my mind with New Mexico, where our late mutual friend Jim Rauen had retired from his construction business in Chicago. Jim and his wife, Ann, were for many years benefactors of TRI. I no longer remember...
This is strange to say, but observation bears it out: Almost all publishers and most booksellers and librarians neither know nor care anything about books. Publishers don’t have a clue as to what is a good book or even a good-selling book. Whenever you run across a book by a new author that is a...
They are cutting hay in the Haymarket. A woman is laying out clothes to dry on the grass of Aldgate, and stags patrol where St. James’s Park will be one day, staring in puzzlement at the vast abbey protruding above the willows of Westminster. It is London as delineated by Ralph Aggas circa 1590, reproduced...
The revisionist historians are at it again, this time taking on the Alamo—a perfect target because of its position in the hearts of those horrible Texans. Many historians are merely would-be journalists who choose as their playground past eras because, by the time honest historians can expose the new misconceptions and biases, the revisionists already...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Steve Kloves, from J.K. Rowling’s novel I took my son Liam to the first Harry Potter movie ten years ago, so I thought it only proper to let him take me to the...
Donald Rumsfeld has produced, four years after his departure from government, a memoir of no stylistic distinction. It contains few if any interesting revelations, save, perhaps, those relating to President Nixon’s choice of vice presidents. For what it does contain, it is at least twice as long as it should be. There is a great...
Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader. Whenever I see a copy of War and Peace, I think not only of Pierre and Natasha but of...
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
Peter Stanlis sometimes seemed stiff and formal; and he was, because he practiced his whole life the arts of a gentleman. This required a certain reserve, but one that never covered heavily the kindness of his Christian nature. Part of being a true gentleman is to understate one’s sense of humor, at least partially, but...
Every year at midsummer, the secret rulers of the world meet in solemn conclave down the street from me. In the down-at-the-heels resort town of Monte Rio, on the banks of the Russian River in California’s wine country, is the Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre “encampment” that houses the members of the Bohemian Club, founded in...
Most college and university professors know that even though students may successfully complete remedial courses and even a full slate of freshman and sophomore classes, many will still be unable to use proper language mechanics or to work with complex math formulas at an advanced level. It’s an observable fact that many graduate students, some...