My first face-to-face interview with Krista took place on a Friday afternoon in a local coffee shop. We had “chatted” several times on Facebook, and since she lived in my area I suggested that we talk in “real” time. I explained that I was gathering material on how the proliferation of social media was reshaping...
Down with a resounding bang comes the wrath of that great moral institution, the National Basketball Association, upon the noggin of L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Boo! Hiss! Get the hook! And once you’ve paid your $2.5 million fine, Sterling, for the offense of lax language during a private conversation, why don’t you just die? ...
“‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said The Lady of Shalott.” “We’ve turned into a nation of TV watchers, video-game players, and virtual sex addicts,” observed the cheerful old cynic. “How is that so different,” asked the resentful 30-something adolescent, “from earlier generations that spent all their time reading poetry and fiction or going to...
There is a distressing history of foreign insurgent groups manipulating U.S. political figures, policymakers, and opinion leaders into supporting their causes. Frequently, that support goes far beyond rhetorical endorsements. On several occasions during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, foreign lobbying efforts have led to U.S. military and financial aid being given to highly...
I never listen to pop music, but I do know the difference between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I even know one of the Stones’ daughters, Theodora Richards, as she went out with the son of a friend who brought her aboard my boat. (Incredibly, she had very good manners.) Pink Floyd—it’s a band—I...
To a casual observer it might seem that President Barack Obama’s four-nation tour of East Asia, which took him to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, came at a time of America’s undisputed global predominance. The visit strengthened existing U.S. military commitments to the region, created some new ones, irritated China, and emboldened American...
It seems that Benghazi is remembered today only for the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission there. In the 1940’s and 50’s, though, it was known for launching the planes that conducted Operation Tidal Wave, a brilliant example of the heroism of American airmen, and an equally brilliant example of Murphy’s Law. The former...
On February 14, Judge Amanda Wright Allen struck down Virginia’s marriage law as unconstitutional. She began her opinion by quoting from a poetic commemorative address, then followed by incorrectly claiming that the phrase “all men are created equal” is found in the Constitution. Thirty years ago, this would have earned Judge Wright the ire of...
There are people who think the classics are a dated luxury. Anyone who believes that should stay far away from the Christian Bible. It’s been many years since I was able to read the New Testament in English. Now, don’t think I’m showing off there. My Greek is not wonderful, and I find a parallel...
Washington desperately needed a new enemy, so the timing of Putin’s bloodless “invasion” of Crimea was just right. Al Qaeda’s value as a fear generator has been seriously compromised ever since the death of Osama bin Laden, and now that it looks like the U.S. government has taken the Syrian affiliate of the group under...
There are three basic types of complexity a reader encounters in contemporary poetry. The first type arises when inexperienced poets have not yet developed sufficient intellectual and emotional depth to understand their subject matter or have not yet developed an adequate command of language. The resulting product is muddled rather than deep. The second is...
Will Russian philosophy gain a foothold in Russia? It already has, laments David Brooks in a New York Times op-ed (“Putin Can’t Stop,” March 3). Brooks finds disturbing Vladimir Putin’s tendency to quote the likes of Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Soloviev, and Ivan Ilyin; more worrying still, the Kremlin has recently sent copies of these three philosophers’ works to...
In his review of Mark R. Levin’s The Liberty Amendments (“Impractical Solutions, February), William J. Quirk emphasizes the novelty of an Article V convention, calling it “a constitutional-amendment process that has never been used before” and criticizing Mr. Levin for proposing that, “for the first time,” we use an Article V convention to amend the...
The recent passing of Maya Angelou generated a predictable panoply of gushing grief from the mainstream media. “The definition of a phenomenal woman” gushed CNN; “Commanding Literary Voice” enthused The New York Times; “A Hymn to Human Endurance”, raved Time Magazine. The latter characterization is actually the most accurate, just not in the way the...
The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...
An evident characteristic of the neoconservatives is that they are forever seeing the light. Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Leo Strauss, and George Bush are just some of the splendid aurorae that, in decades past, have shone upon them at the end of philosophical tunnels and through the clearings in political clouds. It’s just that...
Check out the following chart of Real Median Household Income, which declined 9 percent nationally from 1999 to 2012. Find your state’s decline and meet me below. Notice the place at the top of list, which had no decline in Real Median Household...
Russian traditionalist conservative writer and publicist Elena Chudinova recently gave a lengthy interview to Srdja Trifkovic and was the subject of my article in the latest issue of this magazine. Her recent article, “Eurovision’s Blue Beard” describes the current atmosphere in Europe with the author’s characteristic verve and bluntness. Chudinova’s friend, a religious Christian mother...
Andrew Crocker did not attend his graduation exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the honorary doctorates. Shirley Weis, a graduate of MSU’s College of Nursing, received a doctorate of Science as the first woman and first non-physician to serve as...
The way to have the foreign policy you want is first to figure out what kind of foreign policy you want. It is a task at which American leaders grow less and less adept, possibly on account of Americans’ general inability to figure out what they want: involvement, isolation or variations of the two? What,...
In recent years, there has been much media attention given to “bullying” in schools, with the lion’s share of attention given to a particular type of bullying, that directed at youngsters identified as “gay.” The schoolyard scorn directed at students who are fat or unathletic or unattractive or unpopular for a myriad of other reasons...
The Front Nationale is expected to get at least 18% of the vote in the ongoing European Parliament elections and with eleven new cities in France resulting from a “breakthrough” (the BBC’s words, not mine) in the recent local elections. The best forecast of Le Pen’s triumph is the change of the mainstream European media’s...
Serbia’s foremost writer Dobrica Cosic (Dobritsa Chossich) died in his sleep on May 18 at the age of 93. He was a complex man with an interesting life. A Partisan commissar during World War II and a Communist Party senior oficial and approved writer until the early 60’s, by the end of that decade he...
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
The fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education generated several articles in Chronicles outlining the noxious legacy of that dubious decision. But there were hundreds (if not thousands!) of other decisions by the judiciary that misinterpreted the Constitution, disregarded millennia of Western traditions and laws, and spat in the face of American voters....
Beware fields of endeavor with the surname “science” tacked on to their names. Astronomy, for instance, has done very well for itself without being called “astronomic science,” as have mathematics, chemistry, zoology. Even philosophy and psychology – and yes, even that bastion of grasping mountebanks, sociology – have managed to get along fine with just...
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...
The 60th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education is being celebrated today with far more pomp than has accompanied Independence Day celebrations in recent years. Not surprisingly, Michelle Obama took the occasion to condemn not just the growing trend of resegregation in public schools—a nasty term for neighborhood-based schools—but also the persistence...
The highlight of my time in law school – three years of varying degrees of dreariness and constant irritation was the visit of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The great jurist came to my nominally Catholic second-tier alma mater – I cannot help, but shudder at the latter word, so inappropriately used to describe...
“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...
One of the advantages of living is that, as some of those around you pass on, you get to tell funny stories about them – stories they wouldn’t necessarily have wanted told when still alive, vain, and touchy. The down side is that telling such stories rebounds on the storyteller. For instance, when, a couple...
[Srdja Trifkovic’s latest interview with RT] Published time: May 12, 2014 11:48 Those who keep power in Ukraine are a bunch of criminals who will advocate criminal methods in keeping their ill-gotten gains, with the West supporting this farce, Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles Magazine, told RT. RT: Let’s say Donetsk and Lugansk...
A few months ago, Srdja Trifkovic aptly described the Eurovision song contest as “a political as well as a cultural irrelevance” and an “infomercial of poor taste pop”. He correctly if lightheartedly characterized the only global hit that came out of Eurovision (Abba’s song “Waterloo”) as “a typical example of cheesy tra-la-la europop”. Well, this...
California, once the American Mecca of milk and honey, has fallen on hard times. Though its degradation and decline are largely self-inflicted, California’s condition is nonetheless an American tragedy and a dire portent for the rest of us. The state is fast becoming a colony and milk cow for Mexico, with a few enclaves...
“Get used to it guys. Here in America you will see a lot of these murder cases: children killing parents, parents killing children, siblings rubbing out each other. This might shock you now, but in a few months, you will just glance over it in the paper and forget”. This was the slightly snobbish admonition...
You wonder what took so long. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels any group or person even a smidgen to the right of Al Sharpton a “racist,” “hater” or “right-wing extremist,” is now terrorizing those who indirectly fund “hate groups.” Last week, World Net Daily reported that SPLC is moving against websites through which...
The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday’s primary for the U.S. Senate. But the story ended less happily for the Beltway elite in the Tar Heel State’s 3rd Congressional District. There, the planned purge of Rep....
Some years ago a friend of mine in Venice, whose family had been too influential during the Fascist years for anyone to doubt the source, told me a funny story about Vittorio Cini, an intimate of Mussolini’s. I recently found it corroborated in a memoir by Federico Zeri, the great historian of the Italian Renaissance...
With little fanfare, in the past week the United States officially became a military dictatorship. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a suit brought against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that allowed indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. That means the military now can, at any time, “disappear” you, even if...
Last week, a brawl between supporters of a federalized Ukraine (known in the Western media as “pro-Russian separatists” and supporters of the neo-nazi dominated Brown revolution (known in the Western media as “pro-government demonstrators”) escalated into a massacre. A crowd of anti-Maidan demonstrators was chased into the Trade Unions building. The building was then torched...
In March, a group of academics released their estimate of the costs of the Iraq war: 1.7 trillion dollars, with an additional 490 billion dollars in benefits owed to wounded veterans. Given that wounded veterans will need a lifetime of care, the estimated costs could rise to 6 trillion dollars over the next four decades....
The events in Odessa and the Donetsk region over the past three days mark a new stage in the Ukrainian drama. The authorities in Kiev are ready to use indiscriminate force, their Western mentors are supporting them while continuing to blame Russia for the rampant violence, the insurgents in the east appear to be on...
Congratulations to Taki for achieving what seemed to be impossible: transforming the effete, amoral boob FDR into a sympathetic figure (“Little Yellow Bastards,” Under the Black Flag, April). Taki’s celebration of early-to-mid-20th-century Japanese military traditions and the heroic unshackling of Japan’s economy from those nefarious usurers was understandable. His failure to mention other significant activities...
Is the past really a foreign country? Did they do things so differently then? Or is it that the past isn’t dead after all—and isn’t even past? In Washington, it is always 1939. But the Crimea isn’t the Sudetenland, and Vladimir Putin isn’t Hitler. No Blitzkrieg threatens Europe, or even Kiev. Then it’s the 1950’s,...
Spending the first three days of spring in snowy Moscow, especially after being in balmy Yalta and Sevastopol, is not my idea of fun. It is useful, however, when you write on foreign affairs and there’s a first-rate crisis under way between “Putin’s Russia” and the West. The overriding impression is that Moscow no longer...
One of the great knee-slappers, however perverse, of the so-called War on Terror is the fact that fundamentalist Islamic forces are stronger than ever as a result. It is like going on a crash diet for a month and putting on 20 pounds. In the 12 years since George W. first uttered those three little...
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. “Robbing, slaughtering, pillaging they misname sovereign authority, and where they make an empty waste they call it peace.” Tacitus puts this accurate if one-sided summation of Roman imperial strategy into the mouth of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain, urging the Celtic warriors to resist...
With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters. Born in 1921, Corti grew up in the rolling countryside south of Lago di Como known as the Brianza. His father was a textile manufacturer whose handsome brick factory in Besana had been converted into the...
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
Americans are getting a taste of unintended consequences from overly broad public-accommodation laws enacted in the past half-century. Christian business owners are especially burdened when individuals practicing what once was considered perversity are deemed “suspect classes” and are thus entitled to heightened legal protection. A prime example is Elane Photography v. Willock. Elane Photography is...