Year: 2014

Large-scale fighting raged in Iraq on Monday, following Sunday’s proclamation of an Islamic caliphate over large areas of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The jihadist group declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as leader of the new entity and its caliph, theoretically combining religious and state authority in...

                      One hundred years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenberg, visited Sarajevo. Waiting for them was a band of would be assassins, who planned to use bombs to kill the heir to the Habsburg throne. The bombs...

Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview on the Ukrainian crisis RT: After Russia’s steps to deescalate the crisis, they are still being criticized. Is there anything Moscow can do at this point to make Western leaders change their ongoing rhetoric? Trifkovic: Oh yes, Moscow could escalate the crisis, and then they would dearly like to come...

Clarey’s first book is a blunt indictment of the scam that is American higher education. A trillion dollar fraud, which brought financial ruin and misery onto thousands of American young people. More importantly, Clarey’s slim tome warns youngsters away from tens of thousands of dollars in debt and years of miserable, unemployed existence. However, even...

There is an Arabic condiment called zatar, a mixture of dry spices which is delicious on toasted bread sprinkled with olive oil. I buy it in the Edgware Road, an oasis of the Middle East in the gastronomic desert that is London. There are many brands, unpronounceable names punctuated with guttural stops one and all,...

With the Islamic warriors of ISIS having captured all the border posts between Iraq, Syria and Jordan, we may be witnessing the end of Sykes-Picot. That was the secret 1916 treaty by which the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire, with the Brits taking Transjordan and Iraq, and the French Syria and Lebanon....

Aaron Clarey is the enfante terrible of American economists. Describing himself as “the only motorcycling, fossil-hunting, tornado chasing, book-writing, ballroom dancing economist in the world”, Clarey quickly became known among young people for his politically-incorrect, masculine, libertarian bluntness.  I found out about Clarey through a law school friend who is currently suffering through his third...

To understand the ideology of the regime, it is necessary to look at some of the most politicized areas of speech, namely everything to do with sex and gender, and—the topic of this installment—race and ethnicity. Without exhausting our entire band-width, I can only scratch the surface. Let’s begin with a few fairly tepid examples...

Thinking of Obamacare, the Iraq war authorization, Chinese Walmart slaves, the myth of the “invisible hand,” and the “jobs Americans won’t do,” I stumbled upon this, from The Idler: Forms of government are seldom the result of much deliberation; they are framed by chance in popular assemblies, or in conquered countries by despotic authority.  Laws...

Here in New York City, you do not have even go online or turn on the TV to find out which team won one of the day’s three first round matches in the World Cup. You just go out of your apartment and walk a few blocks to the nearest bars and restaurants. The color...

The panic that engulfed this capital after the fall of Mosul, when it appeared that the Islamist fanatics of ISIS would overrun Baghdad, has passed. And the second thoughts have begun. “U.S. Sees Risk in Iraqi Airstrikes,” ran the June 19 headline in the Washington Post, “Military Warns of Dangerous Complications.” This is welcome news....

Excerpts from a lecture delivered at the IDC in Paris on May 27, 2014. For the French translation click HERE. For Russian, click HERE. During the Cold War, holding on to the continental rimland – from Norway, across central Europe, to Greece and Turkey – was the mainstay of America’s strategy and the rationale behind...

Some years ago, I proposed a series of short pieces on language. The project never materialized, but it is really more appropriate for the website than the magazine. Here is the beginning: In Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Alphaville, a secret agent (Lemmy Caution) is sent to find a colleague and to destroy Alphaville itself, a computer-designed...

Six-year-old Polina Sladkaya became the latest lodger of the Slaviansk morgue. She was killed on June 8 by a Ukrainian mortar shell. Everyone knows that morgue workers are not distressed by the sight of dead bodies, because of a natural coping mechanism. But even the morgue workers wept when they saw this blonde-haired toddler with...

When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on...

Back in 2006 my neighbor’s son was killed in Iraq by an IED – Improvised Explosive Device. I attended the funeral at the family’s Protestant church in Costa Mesa. He and his identical twin brother had joined the military shortly after 9/11 to defend America. The surviving brother also was fighting in Iraq. The military...

In an essential article published on June 16, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, former ambassador John Bolton, argued that “US focus must be on Iran as Iraq falls apart.” He is unapologetic about the war itself, saying that “inevitably, analysts are rearguing George W. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Barack...

In the primary of June 10, the Republican voters of South Carolina gave a comfortable victory to Lindsay Graham, one of the most notorious and repulsive of the current “invade the world, invite the world” brand of U.S. Senators. Friends from elsewhere  have questioned me repeatedly: how could this happen in such a traditionally conservative...

Pope Francis’ visit to the Holy Land had a few tense moments. First, he prayed at the graffiti-covered separation barrier (nicknamed the “Apartheid Wall” by the Palestinians and their Western leftist supporters) between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Then, he corrected Bibi Netanyahu about Jesus’ native language. Both of these events were widely commented on...

Because the movies are a by-product of modern technology, it’s understandable that significant changes in the medium are presumed to be technological. Sound, color, and digital recording are the usual suspects for having caused cataclysmic upheaval. But on the evidence, sound—supposedly a bombshell innovation that littered theaters with films in which neither camera nor actors...

“Both Mr. Assad and the jihadists represent a challenge to the United States’ core interests,” former U.S. Ambassador in Damascus Robert S. Ford wrote in The New York Times on June 10. He advocated a strategy that would supposedly deal with both Bashar al-Assad and the jihadists: “with partner countries from the Friends of Syria...

Despite my disagreements with him, I’m saddened at documentarian Michael Moore’s civil divorce. Raised a Catholic, his marriage likely is sacramental, which means he still would be married whatever decision is made by the courts of the civil government he loves so much and seeks to expand ad infinitum. Yet I also have some schadefreude...

First, a warning to my dear readers. Please read this article on an empty stomach and when you are in a comparatively calm, placid mood. The subject matter is so nauseating, infuriating, and outrageous, that I do not want to be held liable (here goes that attorney in me!) for the consequences. Having said all...

Last Tuesday’s sudden capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city (population 1.8 million), by a coalition of Sunni forces led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was swiftly followed by the fall of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town. By Thursday morning the insurgents were reported to have advanced to the city of Samarra,...

My short piece on the anti-Catholic hysteria in the media surrounding the St. Mary Home for unwed mothers and their children in Tuam, Ireland—which closed its doors 53 years ago—has generated a lengthy response from Rod Dreher entitled “Trust Diarmuid Martin, Not Tom Piatak.” Judging by Dreher’s response, my post accomplished at least two things....

The defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in tonight’s Virginia Republican primary is a victory for America. Cantor lost for one reason: he was seen as weak on immigration. The entirety of the American Establishment is pushing for what it calls “immigration reform,” which actually means amnesty for illegal immigrants and a massive increase...

“The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.” — Hannah Arendt “Power is where power goes.” — Lyndon B. Johnson Right now the immigration issue is lying in the street for whatever Republican presidential candidate, if any, is willing to pick it up...

I fell in love with Claridge’s long ago. It was not a passion based on intimate contact, as I was never rich enough to stay there habitually, but rather a platonic yearning for the unreachable ideal, a poet’s misty-eyed vision of the eternal beloved. I cared little that this was, apart from everything else, a...

For 10 days, Americans have argued over the wisdom of trading five Taliban senior commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. President Obama handed the Taliban a victory, critics contend, and imperiled U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the five return to the battlefield. Moreover, he has inspired the Haqqani network and other Islamists to capture more Americans...

Fairness does not exist and it is no use looking for it. The world got into the habit of taking the wrong side. That was how Christian Serbia was torn apart and Albanian criminals turned Kosovo – holy for every Serb – into a different state, a drug lord state, a human organ trafficking state,...

At the end of last month, Mehdi Nemmouche (also spelled “Nammouche”, “Namouche”, or “Nemouche”) shot up the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people:  an Israeli married couple on vacation, a French visitor, and a Belgian museum employee. About a week later, the French police picked up the jihadist in Marseilles. The media...

“Eight Hundred Dead Irish Children thrown into the sewer by Catholic nuns.” So charged Rod Dreher last week at The American Conservative. Dreher was referring to the findings of local Irish historian Catherine Corless, who found that 796 children died at a home for unwed mothers and their children operated in Tuam by the Bon...

It is well to remember that ruling powers never exercise censorship to suppress falsehoods. They often themselves perpetrate falsehoods they find useful and are indifferent to others. The purpose of censorship is always to suppress inconvenient  truths. One of the best reasons to question the prevailing dogma of evolution as the source of life is...

Sephora, a multinational chain of cosmetics stores owned by the luxury behemoth LVMH, operates over 1700 branches in 30 countries worldwide, generating over $4 billion in revenue as of 2013. Their flagship emporium in the Champs Élysées in Paris attracts over six million people a year, and even the smallest town in Italy boasts a...

Verbatim transcript of live RT interview broadcast at 15:07GMT, June 4, 2014 RT: We now hear on America’s aid offer to Ukraine from Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles magazine, talking to us here on RT International. America is ready to pour millions into the Ukrainian military because the Ukrainian army is in a sorry...

The twin scandals that enveloped our glorious military are proof of its degradation and the ineptitude of the Obama administration. First, there is the 115 day waiting period at the Phoenix, Arizona VA hospital, which officially resulted in 40 deaths (the real figure is probably in the hundreds). Seventy-one-year old Navy veteran Thomas Breen died...

Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...

“We needed to get him out of there, essentially to save his life.” So said Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, an Army sergeant in Vietnam, of Barack Obama’s trade of five hard-core Taliban leaders at Guantanamo for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a Taliban prisoner for five years. The trade speaks well of America’s ‘s resolve to...

President Barack Obama’s commencement address at West Point on May 28 managed to displease pretty much everyone in the nation’s commentariat. Before making an overall assessment of its significance, it is necessary to examine the validity and implications of Obama’s individual statements. “[B]y most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of...