With the war in Ukraine dangerously close to involving neighboring Poland, the specter is raised of the forgotten Polish-Soviet War of 1920. In that war, to Poland’s aid came American pilots, most importantly World War I veteran Merian C. Cooper, …
Month: May 2022
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America’s ‘Female Future’ Has Open Borders
U.S. Democrats have tried and failed thrice at stuffing an illegal-immigration amnesty provision into President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill. This attempt at tagalong legislation for illegals would not have been tried even just a few years …
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Remembering Robert A. Taft
He was known as “Mr. Republican” because of his insistence on party unity, the lack of which had cost his father a second presidential term in 1912, and “Mr. Integrity,” because of his strong moral foundation, laid down many years …
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The Roots of America’s Mentally Ill Homelessness Crisis
In December 2021, six short blocks from the U.S. Capitol, a mentally disturbed transient pushed a young mother to the ground in an unprovoked attack, breaking her two front teeth.
Reacting to the incident, a resident of the tony Capitol …
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The Tithes That Unbind
For several decades now, the Mormon church, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), has been embroiled in controversy over its positions on homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and, more recently, transgender rights. Despite some notable compromises …
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Mapping a Digital Dystopia
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
by Kate Crawford
Yale University Press
336 pp., $28.00
Electronics have completely reshaped the cultural landscape. Recent decades saw a global shift in social interaction from the visceral …
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It’s Time to Break Up Amazon
by Alec MacGillis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
400 pp., $28.00
Amazon.com, the online bookseller founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, is a technology behemoth whose operations affect nearly every aspect of modern human
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Revolt of the Fatherless
Our conservative elites clearly have no clue why our civilization is collapsing before our eyes. They can provide no explanation for the triumph of the woke left. Nor can they explain why the virus hoax fools huge numbers into further …
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Threats? What Threats?
The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency 
by John Mueller
Cambridge University Press
342 pp., $27.95
American leaders have consistently overestimated military threats and underestimated the costs of military adventures; the world would have been …
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And Injustice for All
Kentanji Brown Jackson has been abused, but not by her interrogators at the Supreme Court nomination hearings. Their probing questions, however combative, are only to be expected as part of the process. She has been abused, rather, by most everyone
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Western Hypocrisy Created Putin
Speaking at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland, President Joe Biden declared on March 26 that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” Recognizing the danger of those words, Secretary of State Antony Blinken swiftly tried to do damage …
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Battier and Battier
The Batman
Directed by Matt Reeves ◆ Written by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig ◆ Produced by DC Films ◆ Distributed by Warner Bros.
As I noted regarding The Dark Knight in 2008, it’s strange that films based on
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A Ukrainian Tragedy
The Russian attack on Ukraine presents us clearly with an old dilemma in human affairs, which harks back at least to Hesiod’s Theogony: is our world Cosmos or Chaos? Is our history ruled by chance, in this case in …
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What We Are Reading: May 2022
Those who like the Indiana Jones films and exotic, lost-civilization narratives—as well as anyone who recalls with pleasure the African adventures and cliff-hangers in episodic movie serials on Saturday mornings—can enjoy the chief forebear of these popular genres, H. Rider …
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Media Windbags
It would be remiss of me, given my stated support for the invaded Ukrainians, not to call attention to certain inconvenient facts that neocons and the mainstream media have glossed over. The removal of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian president in …
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Disillusioned by Vlad
Back in 2000, Vladimir Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to NATO, according to the alliance’s former secretary general, George Robertson, as well as my friend, the filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has interviewed the Russian president extensively
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Books in Brief: May 2022
Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, by Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville (Polity; 180 pp., $59.95). The authors of this welcome and overdue treatment of populism make their case in two ways. First, they scoured
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Come Home, America
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a special military operation in Ukraine was aimed at overthrowing the current authorities in Kiev, blocking NATO expansion eastward, defending the pro-Russian regions of Ukraine, and demilitarizing that country, removing any current or …