Category: Web

The most important borders for Americans to worry about are our own. But the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 has certainly shifted media attention from the crisis on our southern border to the borders of Ukraine. Although we do not know with certainty, it appears likely that pro-Russian rebels were the ones who shot...

To observe the decades-long paralysis of America’s political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964—”Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” What the ex-Trotskyite turned Cold Warrior meant was that by faithfully following the tenets of liberalism, the West would embrace suicidal policies that would bring about...

A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam was shot down in eastern Ukraine Thursday afternoon, killing all 298 passengers and crew. It was hit as it cruised at 33,000 feet above the war-ravaged Donetsk Oblast, 35 miles west from the Russian border. The airliner’s demise has the potential to escalate the...

The early Church faced many grave crises and challenges, many of which can be summed up in one question: What kind of Church was it to be? In an important sense, this question was whether it was to be a Judeo-Christian Church limited to Jews, including Gentile converts to Judaism, or a Christian Church liberated...

We arrived to Florence on early Monday afternoon and stayed till about 12 pm today. The city of Dante was an unforgettable experience, the crowds of Chinese tourists notwithstanding. (There were so many of them in Florence, that in a few years the Florentines will say “Chao” instead of “Ciao”). We stayed at a charming...

Russia’s parliament – called the “Duma” in homage to parliamentary democracy under the Romanovs, an echo as incongruous in its own way as the hearkening of America’s deliberative assembly to the Senate of ancient Rome – is, of course, a misnomer. In fact, the body in question owes nothing to its imperial predecessor and everything...

According to the latest opinion poll, published on July 16, President Putin’s approval rating among different segments of Russia’s electorate has risen to an unprecedented 66 percent. This may change quickly, however, if he comes to be perceived as weak and indecisive in handling the next stage of the Ukrainian crisis – the one that...

To understand how the Church disentangled itself from Judaism, it is necessary to know a little bit about what the term “Jew” means. Modern Christians often seem to think that all the Old Testament patriarchs are Jews, though Adam and Abraham are obviously the ancestors of many nations. The “children of Israel” are, in tradition,...

Last week, there was much talk of a crisis at the border with Mexico, prompted by a surge of Central American teenagers trying to get into the United States. President Obama asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with this influx, with the largest single appropriation, $1.8 billion, to go to the Department of Health...

On Sunday, we went to Bergamo – north Italy’s hidden jewel and one of the prettiest places I have ever been to. Having been advised to visit it by both Dr. Fleming and Dr. Trifkovic, I spent some time convincing my reluctant better half to go there instead of Lugano, Switzerland. We set out from...

It’s been over two months since I first asked this question in the aftermath of the Odessa massacre. The situation has further deteriorated since that time. The Kiev forces, spearheaded by the Right Sector-dominated “National Guard,” have turned much of Slavyansk into rubble. As a massive wave of refugees from eastern Ukraine enters Russia, their...

Saturday, we went on a day trip to Venice (I could hear Andrei Navrozov chuckling all the way from Sicily). Truth be told, I was very hesitant to go to Venice this time of the year after being advised of its oversaturation by tourist hordes, but not knowing when I will be in Italy next...

Today, was certainly a more relaxed day here in the city of St. Ambrose and Silvio Berlusconi. After getting acquainted with the tram routes (Milan’s subways are few and far in between), we got off at the Duomo square. (I must say, my original favorable impression was somewhat spoiled last night, when we, along with...

Arrived today on a direct flight from JFK airport for the first stop in my Italian vacation: Milan. Famous more for its soccer teams and companies than for historic sites, Milan is a convenient first stop because of the abundance of cheap flights from America. After taking an express, lighting-fast train from Malpensa airport to...

Dr. Fleming, Mr. Cadfael,  and now Mr. Navrozov in recent posts have opened a fruitful discussion of the American tendency to debase the language with prettified terms in order to disguise reality and enforce conformity of thought. Actually this is nothing new and is in part a product of what our two most penetrating foreign...

“Since there has never been a great civilization without poetry,” writes Tom Fleming in the current issue of Chronicles, “we can say that European civilization has ceased to exist.” True enough, but if the day’s newspaper is any guide, I reckon the sainted editor is digging too deep. The English word “uxurious” was used, and...

A tactic the left uses to inspire loathing for conservatives is repeating something a conservative or even nominal Republican says, and then slapping scare quotes around it. That supposedly shows that whatever the conservative said is self-evidently false, and worse, “hateful.” It might run something like this: “Tea Party Senator says ‘Earth revolves around Sun.’”...

As Independence Day 2014 approaches, I’m still wondering when one of the Republican presidential candidates is going to seize the immigration issue and march to victory in the White House. That’s assuming there will even be an independent United States in 2015. Or if the country exists, that it will be anything but a totalitarian...

The Prefect was in a difficult spot. As an honest Roman official, he knew better than to get mixed up in the turbulent local politics. The local religious establishment wanted a rebel to be executed. They said the rebel claimed to be ruler of the Roman Empire, a pathetic but direct challenge to the authority...

The old Serbian joke goes like this. An elderly Serb peasant invites his friends over for some drinks and they notice that the crucifix on the wall of his hut is positioned between two portraits: one of Stalin and the other of Tito. When his buddies express their surprise, bordering on outrage, the peasant responds:...

An extensive survey last year by the pollster YouGov found that “21 percent of U.S. citizens believe that human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process.” That’s 1 in 5, a minority more marginal – to choose a random example – than the...

The House Ethics Committee has changed reporting  requirements for members who receive free travel from a variety of groups. The travel will still be reported but only on the House Clerk’s website, making it less likely for watchdog groups—aka paid snoops—and journalists—aka professional liars—to keep track of their indubitably corrupt activities. To answer Nancy Pelosi’s...

Barack Obama has asked Congress for $500 million to train and arm rebels of the Free Syrian Army who seek to overthrow the government. Before Congress takes up his proposal, both houses should demand that Obama explain exactly where he gets the constitutional authority to plunge us into what the president himself calls “somebody else’s...

Ann Coulter’s recent article “America’s Favorite National Pastime: Hating Soccer” is two things. First, it is an example of that shrill uncouthness that Europeans like to attribute to Americans, an obnoxious boorishness that is typical behavior for those jerks, which are the subject of Dr. Fleming’s numerous articles. Second, it is an exaggerated illustration of...

Pace my colleague Eugene Girin, I stand with Ann—and with Tom Piatak and with Aaron D. Wolf, who have fought for American sporting sanity for years.  We were country when country wasn’t cool. For years, we have resisted the foreign invasion that is soccer, unmasking the imposition of the “beautiful game” for what it is: an...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....