Category: Vital Signs

Some millennia after the Earth spun out of nothingness and began hosting life forms, there dawned the Age of Reptiles, which gave way to the Age of Mammals.  Then came the Golden Age, the Age of Fable, the Age of Augustus, the Age of Migrations, the Dark and the Middle Ages, the Age of Absolutism...

On February 22, the South Dakota Senate, by a vote of 23-12, approved legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state.  On February 24, the vote in the South Dakota House of Representatives was 50-18 (H.B. 1215).  Twelve days later, Gov. Mike Rounds signed the measure into law.  President Bush criticized the law as too...

Abortionists are apt to be a mite diffident in speaking of their calling—hardly surprising, given the nature of their work and its attendant hazards.  How many abortionists have you encountered socially?  None, I’d wager.  After all, open avowal of their daily labors would hardly invite exchange of further pleasantries.  Picture the scene over the hors...

The United Methodist Church, having declined from 11 to 8 million members in the United States, spent millions on a television and newspaper ad campaign called “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Those millions were probably wasted, however. The ad campaign has been overshadowed by unwanted publicity over increasingly routine battles about homosexuality. Last fall,...

Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...

Today, as state-sponsored American corporatism is being extended around the globe, we are witnessing a gross overproduction of official ideology—the rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and free trade—which conceals some sordid realities. With the state replacing God as the source of all values, human rights and democracy have become key justifying themes for our overseas...

The victory of Lech Kaczynski of the Law and Justice Party (with around 54 percent of votes cast) over Donald Tusk of the Civic Platform Party in the second round of the presidential election on October 23, 2005, augurs well for Poland.  The socially conservative Kaczynski had claimed to represent the ideals of Catholic social...

After years of running smoothly along its predetermined path, the drive toward a United States of Europe seems to have lost wind, especially in France, the place it more or less originated.  It looks as if another trend is gathering strength in the country; it points in exactly the opposite direction, as if it were...

A few nights ago, some friends and I were on our way to a small get-together.  As we ambled up the sidewalk, Rachel, whom I had met at the university I used to attend, commented that the neighborhood was rather “sketchy.”  I almost hugged her.  “Sketchy!” I nearly shouted.  “That’s a word I haven’t heard in...

The current debate about the state and future of higher education seems to center on the question of whether a college degree is a “privilege” or a “right.”  The loudest argument is that any high-school graduate who has followed a “college pathway” and has made decent grades should be admitted to a state institution of...

Some cult writers are admired more for what they mean than for what they accomplish. The works of the novelist, diarist, and prolific reviewer Anthony Powell (1905-2000) enjoyed only modest commercial success; Powell grouched to his British publisher in 1961, “I perfectly realise that I am not an enormous seller, but I am a seller,...

The President’s 2006 budget, called “austere” by some in the mainstream media, provides for an increase in spending for refugee resettlement by $154 million, allowing for the arrival of about 20,000 more refugees in 2006. President Bush has taken a personal interest in refugee resettlement, and the consensus among immigration restrictonists, both within and outside...

Sometimes historical scholarship tells us more about the present than about the past. In June 2005, an exhibit of Omar ibn Said’s The Life, the only known autobiography written by an American black while in bondage, was on display in the lobby of the U.N. headquarters.  What made it even more significant was that The...

According to a host of news reports, the porous, virtually unprotected southern border of the United States has attracted the attention of Islamic terrorists, as many of us warned it would at the outset of the “War on Terror.”  In March, Time, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a ring leader of...

The U.S. government has a new official program called “Orthodox Christian World Outreach.”  Tens of millions of dollars will be spent to counter distrustful perceptions of the United States in Orthodox countries such as Serbia, Greece, and Russia—perceptions resulting, in part, from our policies with respect to Bosnia and Kosovo.  Under this new program, American...

An interfaith education conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Episcopal Church warned that evangelicals and evangelism are potential obstacles to positive relations between Christianity and other religions. Among the featured speakers at the Interfaith Education Initiative was Methodist theologian Wesley Ariarajah, a former official of the World Council of Churches who has denied the...

A federal judge whom I know lamented that the Supreme Court term that ended last June was the worst in recent memory.  That judge loves the Constitution but could find few signs that this term’s key decisions were based on that document.  A Court that can rule that medical marijuana grown for home use substantially...

My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience.  I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour later, I realized how naive I had been about higher education.  I had...

The federal government cannot ban criminals from bringing guns to schools, but it can arrest a person for growing marijuana at home to ease nausea from chemotherapy.  Such is the state of Supreme Court jurisprudence. The intellectual case for the “War on Drugs” faded long ago.  Criminalization of what is primarily a moral and health...

A first-wave Baby Boomer, I grew up the 1950’s and early 60’s.  We teenage girls yearned to look like Sandra Dee (a.k.a. Alexandra Zuck), who passed away on February 20, 2005.  If we couldn’t remake ourselves into the image of “Gidget,” then Mouseketeer-turned-beach-babe Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley (Blue Denim), Tuesday Weld (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!),...

Even in that prehistoric time before television, Robert Alphonso Taft seemed an unlikely leader of men.  Looking like a small-town grocer, he spoke in what one admirer conceded was a “whiney Midwestern voice.”  When trying to pose as a deep-sea fisherman, Taft once allowed himself to be photographed in a boat that was visibly tethered...

Thirty years after publishing Black Mischief, his hilarious novel about Abyssinia, the only independent African monarchy at that time, Evelyn Waugh wrote that the unthinkable in 1932 had come to pass.  The Europeans were departing Africa, leaving the administration of the benighted natives to Ministries of Modification presided over by Basil Seals of the United...

Digitomania is the compulsion to digitize all human activity.  Its compulsive nature is betrayed by the casual, thoughtless manner in which we are casting ourselves down the slippery cyberslope, “acknowledging” the “perils” yet completely unwilling and unable to pull ourselves back. Digitomania gaily mirrors 17th-century Europe’s “tulipomania.”  That classic bubble is described with wicked humor...

President George W. Bush has long been known as a neoconservative, but only recently has he picked up the appellation neo-Thomist.  It is, admittedly, not the first term one would choose to describe a man whose speeches are filled with visions of Wilsonian grandeur.  Writing in the January 31 Weekly Standard, however, Joseph Bottum argues...

It was a beautiful day in May 1979 when the Georgetown University Law School held its commencement.  Honorary degrees were awarded to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Judge John A. Danaher, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  It was an hour with extraordinary coincidence...

Terrorists are on the loose in America—enviroterrorists.  In early August 2003, radical environmentalists apparently burned down an apartment complex under construction in San Diego.  Ecoterrorists next attacked four SUV dealerships in West Covina, a Los Angeles suburb. These crimes were likely perpetrated by the so-called Environmental Liberation Front (ELF), which has long boasted of committing...

Cultural debate over sex roles has reached such a fever pitch that even the sexual preference of the children’s cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants has become a topic of great concern. Conservative religious broadcaster Dr. James Dobson expressed alarm that a new educational campaign to tout “tolerance” and “diversity” was employing the images of SpongeBob, Big...

Like many idyllic towns in Middle America, Rockford is rife with political corruption, rotten with vice and immorality, and beset by criminal gangs who control an ever-growing drug industry and, in a good year, put Rockford ahead of Chicago in the number of murders per capita.  Residents with long memories also remember articles in Life...

The cultural critique of “robotization,” “automation,” “computerization,” “the cybernetic society,” “technofascism”—the takeover of human affairs by artificial intelligence—was born of artist/poet William Blake in the 18th century.  On page after page of beautifully crabbed script, Blake raged against Reason: None could break the Web, no wings of fire. So twisted the cords, & so knotted...

Twenty-first century America is the creation of President Woodrow Wilson, who used the messianic ideology of American Exceptionalism (the belief that America is unique and morally superior to other countries) and the opportunity afforded by World War I to turn America into one of the first ideological empires of the 20th century. To achieve this,...

Pundits have been calling them “designer babies” since the first egg was fertilized and nurtured ex utero more than a quarter-century ago.  Little Louise Brown was her parents’ biological child, however, who happened to begin life in a test tube for medical reasons: Her mother’s Fallopian tubes were blocked.  Pioneering British physicians used laparoscopy to...

Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness.  Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he...

A recent film festival sponsored by Human Rights Watch at New York’s Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center attracted the hard-core sandalistas of the Upper West Side, who filed in to watch—what else?—the Sandinistas and Contras in a cartoon of a Canadian documentary called The World Stopped Watching.  The accompanying flyer asked, “What happens to...

Brand New Strings by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Recorded and mixed at Skaggs Place Studios Produced by Ricky Skaggs When Lester Flatt’s health began to decline in 1979, he was sure of one thing: All those years, when he was playing Gospel songs with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, he had been an unbeliever. ...

Congressman Chris Cannon of Utah and his open-borders cronies at the Wall Street Journal, who have embarked on a smear campaign against mainstream immigration-control groups, should learn to differentiate between real xenophobes (as found in an August 2004 Tennessee primary election) and the vast majority of people with legitimate rationales for favoring lower, tighter immigration....

David Reimer, the 38-year-old man who was raised as a girl (“Brenda”) following a botched circumcision in infancy, committed suicide on May 4, 2004. As the left rushes to validate sodomy by judicial fiat and “homosexual marriage,” perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit his case.  It reveals more about the public-policy effect of...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Directed by Peter Dobbins Written by William Shakespeare Stage Manager: Joe Danbusky Produced by the Storm Theatre Trust Directed by Erica Schmidt Written by Gary Mitchell Stage Manager: Megan Smith Produced by The Play Company at the Kirk Theatre When a former professional football player turns actor, the inclination is to...

Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?”  Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly.  He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...

Washington’s implicit commitment, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, to defend Taiwan from attack is becoming more perilous by the year.  Given Beijing’s increasingly insistent demands that Taiwanese leaders cease their efforts to spurn reunification with the mainland, there is a very real possibility that the United States will someday be called upon to honor...

When Americans debate the merits of Wal-Mart, the discussions often become contentious, centering on whether this megaretailer is a corporate predator that drives wages down and Main Street businesses into ruin or is a corporate good guy because it offers decent jobs to the jobless and low prices to consumers. Whatever one’s opinion of Wal-Mart,...

Since at least the 1960’s, federal judges in the United States have overturned a number of state and federal laws dealing, broadly speaking, with marriage, sexuality, and the family—most notoriously in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.  And numerous commentators have pointed out the constitutional absurdity of these decisions, based on no clear...

“Oh, yes, I know, we have recently been told by no less than 365 academic economists that such a thing cannot be . . . Their confidence in the accuracy of their own predictions leaves me breathless.  But having been brought up over the shop, I sometimes wonder whether they pay back their forecasts with...

The Alamo Produced by Todd Hallowell and Philip Steuer Written by John Lee Hancock, Leslie Bohem, and Stephen Gaghan Directed by John Lee Hancock Distributed by Touchstone Pictures The familiar mythic image of the Alamo was burned into my mind at an early age, augmented by legends told by my grandfather; pictures of my namesake,...

With the peace in Iraq proving as messy as the war, the Bush administration has spent a year desperately trying to get other countries to send troops for occupation duty.  Brazil, Egypt, and India said no; Japan temporized, before sending in 550 soldiers for “humanitarian” duty.  The kidnapping of one Filipino truck driver caused the...

That the intelligence community (IC) misrepresented evidence suggesting that Iraq was harboring WMD’s cannot be denied.  To what extent was this misrepresentation politically motivated?  “The Committee found no evidence that the IC’s mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities was the result of political pressure.” In this statement,...