Late in 1961 the pop-jazz singer Gloria Lynne was booked into one of New York City’s top jazz supper clubs, Basin Street East, on Manhattan’s East 48th Street, where she was to record her first live album. The emcee announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Basin Street East proudly presents a young artist who was...
Year: 2013
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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The Brothers Tsarnaev: Assimilating Terrorists
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
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Goldman Sachs and the Price of Beer
“I do believe that big money does organize itself somewhat like feral hogs. If they detect a weakness or a bad scent, they’ll go after it,” said Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, on June 24. Shortly thereafter, we started finding that our banks were engaged in all kinds of nonbank business—aluminum, electricity,...
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The Middle East: Steady as She Goes
To paraphrase Camus, he who despairs of the condition of the Middle East is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool. In a permanent disaster zone, the best one can hope for is that things will not get worse—not too soon, anyway. Things did get better in the Middle East...
Issue
November 2013
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Of Locks and la King
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons for dishonesty and lies recently claimed he overheard a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. According to the Clinton-wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in...
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Reason and War
I am grateful to George McCartney for his articulate and fascinating review of Copperhead (“Reason’s Enemy,” In the Dark, September). Unlike most reviewers, he concentrates (at least this time) on the plot, theme, historicity, characters, and atmosphere, instead of the usual pointless ramblings about the previous work and personal history of the director, or technical...
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Egypt Stabilized
The arrest on October 30 of Essam el-Erian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s once-powerful Guidance Council and deputy leader of the MB-controlled Freedom and Justice Party, demonstrates the extent to which the interim government of Egypt has been able to cement its control over the country since former president Mohammed Morsi was ousted almost four...
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Women and Children First
A Federal judge in Austin (Lee Yeakel–or is it yokel) has struck down provisions in Texas’ new abortion law requiring abortionists to have hospital privileges within 30 miles of their murder site. Right-to-lifers are angry, but, really, the judge has a point: Why should we care about the life and health of these latter-day Medeas...
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Brave New World
The first reports in early May of 1960 were that a U.S. weather plane, flying out of Turkey, had gone missing. A silent Moscow knew better. After letting the Americans crawl out on a limb, expatiating on their cover story, Russia sawed it off. Actually, said Nikita Khrushchev, we shot down a U.S. spy...
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All Liars Ain’t Spiers but All Spiers is Liars
Caught red-handed spying on the private life of Angela Merkel, the Obama administration and its supporters in both parties have chanted the same responses: “Allies always spy on each other,” and “our monitoring activities in Europe have thwarted terrorist attacks.” True enough, but as everyone knows, politicians only tell the truth when it serves...
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Relax: It’s Under Control
For half a century an enlightened, progressive mentality has dominated the information and entertainment media, the educational system at every level, the courts, the clergy, and the corporate elite. No need to get upset or act surprised that many young people are ignorant, lazy, lack moral standards, love rap music, and vote for Obama. ...
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Cherry Picking Churchill
For the whole weekend I had the (mis)fortune of attending a Continuing Legal Education course at my old law school in order to remain in good standing with the venerable New York state bar. Now, most of the speakers were older attorneys in the personal injury field. One of them, whom I’ll call “Seymour...
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Syria’s Violent Stalemate
The international crisis may be over, but the multisided war in Syria is continuing. On Friday government planes bombarded rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after heavy clashes claimed the life of one of President Bashar al-Assad’s top military intelligence officers. In the long-contested city of Aleppo, a renewed rebel assault on the city’s...
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Lindsey’s Plan for War on Iran
This summer produced a triumph of American patriotism. A grassroots coalition arose to demand Congress veto any war on Syria. Congress got the message and was ready to vote no to war, when President Obama seized upon Vladimir Putin’s offer to work together to disarm Syria of chemical weapons. The war America did not...
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The Inconvenient Dead
On Sunday, 522 Catholics killed for the Faith during the Spanish Civil War were beatified in Spain. So far, some 1500 Catholic martyrs killed during the Spanish Civil War have been beatified. The left is not pleased. An article in the Guardian says that the killing of Catholics during the Civil War is “highly controversial,” “controversial” being the...
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Democrats to the Barricades
While the political spotlight has been on the government shutdown, the Democrats have not forgotten that America’s political future will be shaped by the immigration bill passed by the Senate but stalled in the House. In an effort to convince House Republicans to drop their opposition to the bill, congressional Democrats gave their support to a rally...
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Devil Knows Latin
In anticipation of our Latin Is Essential event this Friday and Saturday, October 11, 12, (if you haven’t signed up, please do!) we’re offering Dr. E. Christian Kopff’s tremendous book The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. As one reviewer describes the work, “E. Christian Kopff cuts to the heart of the Culture Wars ....
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Netanyahu Overplays His Hand
Following his doomsday speech at the United Nations General Assembly on October 1—in which he warned the world that Iran’s new president should not be trusted and that Israel would attack Iran on its own unless it ends its nuclear program—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent two days in New York on an anti-Rouhani media...
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The Importance of Being Mean
The three pillars of liberal morality are engagement, compassion, and inclusiveness; its corresponding demons apathy, hatred, and exclusiveness. The shorthand word for the three cardinal virtues is niceness; for the three supreme vices, meanness. Nice is a word familiar among middle-middle class Americans, who have been liberalized whether they know it or not: the sort...
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Golden Skirts and Women Quotas
Viviane Reding is a woman on a mission. She believes Europe’s major companies are run by an old boys’ network that excludes female colleagues from top jobs. And since Reding is the E.U. commissioner for justice, fundamental rights, and citizenship, she is in a position to do something about it. She has proposed a quota...
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Elysian Fields Forever
Elysium Produced and distributed by TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp’s second film, Elysium, is, in a way, a sequel to his first, District 9. This time, however, there are no eight-foot-tall prawn-like aliens accusing earthlings in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the crime of apartheid or insensitivity...
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The Agrarian Burden
Recently, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute hosted a panel discussion on the “great books of conservatism,” among which was Richard Weaver’s 1948 work Ideas Have Consequences. The title, as one panelist noted, has become something of a catchphrase on the right, even as the memory of Weaver and his own influences, the Southern Agrarians, fades into...
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Advice From an Old Coot
My dear Hobson, Given your exasperated response to my advice on making big bucks in the Land of O (“Surviving the Budget Crisis,” Correspondence, March), I conclude that your university taught you to appreciate the literary tools of sarcasm, sardonic humor, hyperbole, and irony. Points to you, nephew: You have acquired a carpenter’s box with...
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A President at Golf
The confusions of our day are so many and so inherent that we have no time or attention to spare for empty issues or nonproblems. The remarkable situation of President Barack Obama is one that deserves some restraint in judgment, for we may soon find that certain difficulties are part of the deal, not individual...
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A Failure of Intelligence
“Al Qaeda is on the run, Osama bin Laden is dead,” President Obama announced at a rally in Des Moines on the eve of last year’s presidential election. Less than a year later it is evident that, contrary to Obama’s assurances, Al Qaeda is alive and well, along with other Islamic terrorist networks. The jihadists...
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Targeted Assassinations: Killing the Republic?
Contrary to the popular slogan, the September 11 attacks did not change everything. They did, however, transform how Americans, and especially American officials, think about both war and executive power. The resulting “War on Terror” has been under way for a dozen years. In a traditional war, whether formally declared or unofficially fought, the battlefield...
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Light of Being
Lest readers misunderstand, it must be said at the outset that these poems, selected from Psaumes de tous mes temps (1974), by Patrice de La Tour du Pin (1911-75), are not translations, even rough ones, from the Psalms of the Bible. The poet did serve as a translator for the Catholic Church when use of...
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“Not a Slam Dunk”: Syria and Chemical Weapons
On August 31, President Obama announced that he would seek congressional approval for military action against Syria, in response to chemical-weapons attacks that took place outside Damascus ten days earlier. The White House said the attacks killed 1,400 people, including more than 400 children, and that the U.S.-imposed “red line” had been crossed by the...
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A Different Hollywood
We’ve all heard it dozens of times after another disappointed moviegoer leaves the theater: “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” One reason is the absence today of the kind of men who once made the movies. Try this test yourself: Think of a few of your favorite movies, and then identify the directors,...
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The Drones of Mordor
It’s like something out of The Lord of the Rings: a vast empire ruled by a king known as “B’arack”—an Orcish name if ever there was one—sends out its mechanical murderers to wreak destruction far and wide. They strike from the air, whistling over homes huddled against the hills, dropping down on children as they...
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An Aix to Grind
As though in memory of those antediluvian Playboy “pictorials” in which the hapless young lady posed with whatever attribute of her metier the photographer had unearthed in the props room—an alleged student of architecture with a carpenter’s wooden compass, a presumed graduate of the police academy with a sheriff’s badge, a putative nurse with a...
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The Stafford Disaster
If you didn’t hear about the social and medical catastrophe that occurred at Stafford Hospital, in the English Midlands—a disaster that claimed some 1,200 lives—then you must have been following the U.S. news media. The Stafford experience should be a nightmarish wake-up call for Americans, and a crushingly definitive argument in the nation’s debate over...
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Friending Narcissus
Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs. He also said that only a man without a brain tweets. (Well, he would have said it, were he around today.) The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with...
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Terminators, Inc.
“Hieronymo’s mad againe.” The cover of the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled “Drone Warrior,” features a picture of President Obama and the question, “Has It Become Too Easy for a President to Kill?” I should have thought “Stop me before I kill again” or, perhaps, “I’ll be back” would...
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A Supreme Disqualification
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court once again trampled on the rights of the states. The media took little notice. Since it became a state in 1912, Arizona has had a citizenship requirement for voters. In 2004, the people of the state, in an effort to combat voter fraud, enacted Proposition 200. This initiative requires...
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Killing Due Process in the War on Terror
One striking feature of the U.S. Constitution is the number of procedural rights guaranteed to individuals accused of criminal behavior before they can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The overall guarantee of due process of law contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments constitutes the basic foundation, but there are many other protections. ...
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Blowing Bubbles
Between 2000 and 2005 I found myself spending an increasing amount of time scratching my head. I had been researching and investing in financial-services stocks since 1992, but what I saw during that five-year span confounded me. Banks offered “ninja” mortgages—no income, no job, no assets—to any borrower brazen enough to walk into a branch...
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Plausible Deniability: The U.S. Assassination Program
Mercenary (Mer-cen-ar-y): Adjective (of a person or their [sic] behavior): Primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; Noun: A professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army; Synonyms: adjective venal; noun hireling soldier of fortune Assassin (As-sas-sin): Noun 1. A murderer of an important person in a surprise attack for political...
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King George’s Tax
A few points on “Of Presidents and Guns,” by Egon Richard Tausch (Vital Signs, June). After the French and Indian War the British crown gave George Washington some large land grants in Western Pennsylvania for his service. The Indians (part of the Iroquois Confederation) living there didn’t think the British king had any authority to...
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The End of the Trail
“What am I doing here?” That was not the question that Paul Theroux expected to be asking himself not long after he returned to his beloved Africa and exclaimed that he was “happy again.” His last African journey, chronicled in Dark Star Safari (2003), was south by land from Cairo to Cape Town. This time,...
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Eating Crow
“I kneel to de buzzard, An’ I bow to the crow; An eb’ry time I weel about I jump jis so.” —from “Jump Jim Crow” (1828) Readers of this magazine hardly need to be told that antiracism in America has become a secular religion, but lest there be any doubt about...
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ELCAin’t
In a 1992 episode of the TV show Cheers, the slow-witted bartender Woody is distressed to find out on his honeymoon that he has just entered a “mixed marriage.” He belongs to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), and his bride is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Among Woody’s concerns is...
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Manuel Valls Take on the Gypsies
French Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls recently drew howls of politically-correct outrage. Valls, who is according to the BBC, a rising star in Hollande’s administration, said that the sociopathic Gypsy lifestyle, based on chicanery and the avoidance of socially acceptable work, is “clearly in confrontation” with the lifestyle of the French. In response...
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Merkel’s Flawed Attempt
Angela Merkel is not a charismatic leader. She lacks Margaret Thatcher’s zeal, Benazir Bhutto’s looks (Berlusconi once commented on her lack of feminine charms in his inimitably discourteous manner), or Indira Gandhi’s carefully cultivated caring touch. She wears one of her dull jackets with dark trousers every day. When asked about her biggest youthful...
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Enormities and Other Irritations
Presumably like every live being in the U.S. 65 or older, I recently received from the government a 152-page paperback book explaining to me the glories and the ins and outs of Medicare. Being of a perverse nature, I became interested in the numerous photographs of happy Medicare recipients and caregivers that were spread...
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Getting Naked in the Public Square
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
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The Liberal’s Schizophrenic Love Affair With Europe
Just a few days ago, I heard some attorneys lamenting that we in this country, don’t have a three day weekend every week, “like they do in France”. I smirked into my Kindle, not wanting to cause a tropical downpour on the poor devils’ parade. France doesn’t have three day weekends every week, and...
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Navy Yard: “Regardless” of the Truth
The dust had barely settled at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday when a barrage of lies began to fly from the usual suspects on the left. For once, the religion of the crazed shooter, Aaron Alexis, was not buried or ignored completely, since he was publicly connected not to Islam but to Buddhism....