Category: Web

Remember Nick and Nora Charles, the movies’ Thin Man and wife? Of course, you do. How about Larry and Kay Wilson? Embodied by the same actors, William Powell and Myrna Loy, they’re a bush-league Babbitt and his divorce-bent wife in 1940’s I Love You Again. Larry’s pretty insufferable, alright, but after a conk on the...

The Holy Grail of modern political journalism is a fallen dictator’s gold taps. Mind you, the bloodsucking hypocrite need not be actually dead when the assorted hacks and hackettes barge into what, until the new government sent out its press release, had been his bathroom; it is quite enough if the villain of the piece...

The Brown Revolution leader most known, recognized, and respected by the West is former heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko. Unlike his allies Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok, Klitschko’s past makes him an unlikely participant in the neo-nazi led overthrow of legitimate rule in Ukraine. Vitali “Dr. Ironfist” Klitschko was born to an exclusively Russian-speaking family in Soviet Central...

In his latest RTTV interview our Foreign Affairs Editor discusses the developments in the Crimean Peninsula and elsewhere in Ukraine.    Srdja Trifkovic: Ukraine is getting closer to disintegration, or at least a form of federalization to which the Russians can make a stabilizing contribution. Any attempt by the mobocracy that has gained power in Kiev...

Recently  I ordered a bit of merchandise from a  Carolina town about 30 miles away.  It took some time to arrive. With a little research I discovered that the package had been sent by the USPS  to Baltimore! And then to Charlotte, 90 miles from its destination and 120 miles from it place of shipping....

“Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?” is a line from the bad guy, played by John Travolta, in the 1996 action flick “Broken Arrow.” Not a great addition to our national culture, but slightly enjoyable at the time. The line keeps popping into my head during this Ukraine crisis. According to the...

Taking the subway a few days ago, a subway ad grabbed my attention. Usually, the ads on the Big Bunelo/Big Burrito (formerly known as the Big Bagel) subway involve such gems as: “The Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, Queer, Confused, and Bi Asian Youth”, or “Addicted to Marijuana: Join This Confidential Study”. Well, there is a...

The radical organization “Right Sector” is the hidden force behind the armed overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych.  Even the openly neo-nazi political party “Svoboda” led by the urologist-turned-aspiring fuhrer Oleh Tyahnybok seems almost respectable, compared to the militant thugs of “Right Sector”. That has not prevented such diverse media outlets as New York Times and Steve...

  To understand the ongoing crisis in Ukraine it is necessary to take a look at two maps: the distribution of votes between Viktor Yanukovych (blue) and Yulia Tymoshenko (yellow) in the presidential election of January 2010, and the linguistic divide between the mostly Ukrainian-speaking western and central regions (red, pink) and the predominantly Russian-speaking...

A recent blog post by Thomas Fleming cut to the heart of a current issue—as Fleming usually does. I have learned a lot from Mr. Fleming over the years. The issue: should business owners have the freedom and liberty to refuse service to homosexuals.  Almost weekly Americans learn of some situation where a business owner...

Barely eight years ago, 76 percent of Texas voters affirmed by constitutional amendment their commitment to heterosexual marriage as the proper relational norm. But, hey, so what, when a federal judge informs Texans that “[S]tate-imposed inequality can find no refuge in the United States Constitution”? Accordingly, Texas joins the melancholy parade of Southern states—Virginia, Kentucky,...

A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying:  “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....

The most surprising thing about the ongoing Brown Revolution in Ukraine is neither the West’s support for neo-nazis, nor its immediate acceptance of the armed, violent overthrow of a legitimate president, whose election four years ago was deemed valid by the Eurocrats and the State Department. The most stunning aspect of the neo-nazi putsch is...

The local “authorities” and the corporate media have tried to hide and then minimize the facts, but the blessed “alternative” sources got the news out. In the urban county just over the river, the sheriff’s department has been having “joint maneuvers” with elite Army units from Fort Bragg. The curriculum includes helicopter insertions and home...

The cowardly collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s legitimate government and the triumph of the violent, bloodthirsty neo-nazi-dominated revolutionaries may spell the last throes of modern Ukraine. After all, it is an artificial, amorphous country, created by Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev and doomed to failure and fragmentation. As I’ve described at length exactly four years ago, after...

California is a preposterously large state, with 38 million dwellers stretching toward 138 million. So it’s not surprising a new idea to split it into six states has gurgled up from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, who’s holding a press conference today, Feb. 24, at 6 pm EST. His divorce initiative just received the...

First came the whirlwind Pussy Riot American tour.  And now the Boobish Invasion continues, with the Eastern European “topless sextremists” known as Femen threatening to descend on the United States like a Satanic Swedish Bikini Team. The picture that accompanies this article in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast is a little “NSFW,” and the interview that...

Richard Engel of NBC, reporting from Maidan Square in Kiev, described what he witnessed as the Feb. 19 truce collapsed. Police began to back away from their positions in the square, said Engel. And the protesters attacked. Gunfire was exchanged and the death toll, believed to be in the dozens, is not known. In short,...

To the joy of traditionalists everywhere, the obscene-named punk feminist band’s exploits in Sochi came to an inglorious end.  The bandmembers gained worldwide celebrity status after yelling out Christophobic slogans on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.  After being pardoned from their two year sentences by Vladimir Putin, they made a whirlwind tour...

RT: In Ukraine there have been accusations of the use of live ammunition by both sides in the conflict. Protesters are well armed but it is unclear just where they’ve sourced their firearms from. They were also using grenades, fireworks and Molotov cocktails against law enforcers. Others threw rocks, wielded baseball bats and metal rods....

That collecting “the wretched refuse of the earth” was a good thing for the country?  (Certainly, the Founders of the U.S. did not think so.) That some people should receive special rewards and  preferences because of the assumed sufferings  of their ancestors? (Most of our ancestors suffered. And many of the beneficiaries, not surprisingly, are...

The politically correct are breathing a sigh of relief. A proposed piece of Kansas legislation that would permit businesses not to provide services to same-sex “married” couples has been pronounced “dead in the water.” At least we’ll be spared another round of mindless name-calling between the “libtards” and “wingnuts” who prowl the internet seeking the...

One of the biggest accomplishments of the Sochi Olympics has been its role in dousing the fires of the unrest in Ukraine – a fiery sequence of events that took the woefully unstable country to the brink of civil war. Crowds of bloodthirsty hooligans, goaded on by the terrible trio of anti-Yanukovych leaders (Tyahnybok, Yatsenyuk,...

Look, the Wendy Davis candidacy for Texas governor isn’t going anywhere. (Ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bubba, as we might say in Texas.) What’s with the New York Times Magazine cover story on Feb.  16 – Wendy looking sleepily seductive,  blonde tresses streaming down to her shoulders; the headline inquiring in pseudo-provocative fashion, “Can Wendy Davis Have...

There is more than meets the eye to the wave of ostensibly “non-ethnic” anti-corruption demonstrations in several majority-Muslim cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which started on February 6 and largely fizzled out a week later. The Nulandesque agenda became obvious within days, as protest leaders and various NGO activists, journalists and politicians all over “the international community”...

Now the numbers are declining for clowns – beside those holding political office. Seriously, if possible, the NY Daily News reports: “Membership at the country’s largest trade organizations for the jokesters has plunged over the past decade as declining interest, old age and higher standards among employers align against Krusty, Bozo and their crimson-nosed colleagues.”...

In the Dead West, our heroes are no longer cowboys but those creepy weirdos who slink around the alleyways of red-light districts.  One such warrior for righteousness is described by the Associated Press as “Vladimir Luxuria, a former Communist lawmaker in the Italian parliament who has become a prominent transgender rights crusader and television personality.”...

In the Netherlands, Els Borst has been found dead in her garage. A few hours earlier, the 81 year old physician and former deputy prime minister had attended a meeting of what is described by the Telegraph as her center-right political party. In the Netherlands, apparently, any party to the right of the Maoists can be...

The American mainstream media’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics has been more concerned with bashing Russia and Vladimir Putin than with analyzing the performance of athletes and teams.  Even previously non-political magazines like ESPN started coming out with vehemently anti-Putin articles.  As if on cue from the White House, the American media started an anti-Russian...

Some Americans are wondering, “Why all the hoopla over Hollande’s courtesy call on Obama?” Is there something sinister or even serious going on? The obvious answer—and even some journalists are aware of it—is the natural affinity of two Marxist political hacks. “Dear Barack,” as Hollande now refers to the American President, would like nothing better...

A great way to attack somebody is to mock hypocrisy over a perceived strength. During the Cold War, anti-communist writers like yours truly would scribble something like this about the Soviet Union: “In the workers’ paradise, only the bosses have cars and a washing machine is your babushka (grandmother).” Payback time. In recent decades, Americans’...

When we arrived back in the States, it was Zero degrees in Chicago and Rockford. The welcome was even chillier at O’Hare’s passport control, which now has machines to which the lines of cattle–I mean travelers–are directed, in our case, by a Subcontinental who could barely speak English.   After 17 hours of travel–from the...

The opening ceremony, which stunned and impressed the skeptical West, will probably be the most interesting part of the Sochi Olympics.  The ceremony was Putin’s Russia’s attempt to re-introduce herself to the world and show that it’s neither the old Soviet Union, nor the wrecked, pitiful Russia of Yeltsin. The musical introduction with the Russian...

RTTV live interview with Srdja Trifkovic RT: We’ll now bring in Srdja Trifkovic, who is a writer on international affairs and Foreign Affairs Editor for the magazine Chronicles. Thank you very much, Mr. Trifkovic, for joining us at RT International to discuss the situation in Ukraine. As we know, Victoria Nuland plans to meet both the...

Anatoly Gladilin next shares his experience with the baleful reality of French public schools.  His daughter Liza was attending school with Nastya, the daughter of Pravda’s Paris correspondent.  Ironically, the daughters of two purported ideological enemies befriended each other.  Anyway, by that time the Soviet Union has collapsed and Gladilin was more of a freelancer....

I recently stumbled onto a short, but excellent book by Soviet dissident author Anatoly Gladilin who moved to Paris in 1976 during the strongest days of Brezhnev and worked for Radio Liberty.  The book, called “Rogues and Criminals, Welcome to Paris!” is a collection of uber-politically incorrect observations of the state of affairs in France....

U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi wrapped up the first round of the “Geneva II” negotiations last Friday reporting little progress. No ceasefire was agreed, and talks on a transitional government never began. The next round is scheduled for February 10, but its prospects are dim. The opposing sides predictably blame each other for the stalemate, but in any...

The first Superbowl I’ve ever watched was the battle between the famous Dallas Cowboys powerhouse of the mid 90s and Bill Cowher’s inspiring underdog Pittsburgh Steelers (Superbowl XXX, played in Tempe, Arizona).  I was in America a little more than a year and was the only kid in my small Russian Jewish immigrant neighborhood in...

1 February 2014   Two news items occupied the media today. The “big” national and international story was the reversal of the reversal of Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s conviction for complicity in the sexual abuse and murder of Meredith Kercher. The outcome was almost a foregone conclusion, not because–as Americans have been saying–an American...

Rome was Rome, not only in the obvious and universal sense that, however much the city changes, it remains the urbs aeterna and not just for Catholics, but in the narrower sense that when you are in a place every year for more than a few days, it loses the exotic charm of unfamiliarity and...

I did not watch the President’s State of the Union Address. I hardly every watch such things, especially if I intend to write about them. What would be the point? The President’s boys and girls spend the previous week leaking the main talking points to the press to make sure that no one fails to...

Your last three Presidents are liars,  war criminals, and completely lacking in any of the necessary qualities of statesmanship.   The first is a pathological rake; the second a fool (“useful  idiot”);  the third is barely American (foreign father and expatriate mother). Such perspectives as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism,  Catholicism,   may each have something valuable to contribute...

The title is intended as a joke and not as a declaration of apostasy. The past two weeks my attention has been almost entirely absorbed, first by our Winter School program and then by an informal after-excursion to Rome with a few lingering students. I enjoy these programs, but while they are going on I...

The Arizona GOP (a species disappearing faster than the Amur tiger), came out with a strongly worded condemnation of John McCain.  Seems like they had enough of Mr. Invite the World, Invade the World’s support of amnesty for illegals, Obamacare, and “assaults on the Constitution and the 2nd amendment”.  They were especially angry about McCain...

John “Invade the World, Invite the World” McCain is one of the loudest supporters of the anti-Russian, pro-EU forces in Ukraine, who are in armed rebellion against the legitimate (if bumbling and corrupt), government of Viktor Yanukovych.  One of the leaders of this uprising, concentrated in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan) is Oleh Tyahnybok, a former...

After the last two blog posts, several readers and acquaintances asked me to recommend some books on the topic of demonic possession and exorcism.  Over the last few years, I read several non-fiction books on the topic. 1.  “Hostage to the Devil” by the late Fr. Malachi Martin.  A book that opened my eyes to...

[Click here to watch the video] The EU has condemned the violence in Ukraine, putting the blame on the government. “A dialogue is needed in the parliament and especially between the government and the opposition, who are present in the parliament,” Member of the European Parliament Libor Roucek told RT. However, Chronicles foreign-affairs editor Srdja Trifkovic described the Ukrainian opposition...

As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog entry, until I watched “The Exorcist” in late high school, I was more or less skeptical about the possibility of demonic possession.  However, I did witness, what I to this day believe was an exorcism as a child in post-Soviet Moldova.  Walking past a Russian Orthodox church dedicated...

Following the lead of Scott Richert, I read William Peter Blatty’s “Legion”.  Blatty, the descendant of Lebanese Maronite Catholics is world-famous for his chilling and yet uplifting novel “The Exorcist”, which he later adapted into an Academy Award-winning screenplay.  In “Legion”, Blatty re-introduces several characters from “The Exorcist” and the new novel still takes place in...

January 14   We’ve spent a busy two days doing nothing. Yesterday we more or less wasted the day (with Mark Beesley, Michael Guravage (who came down from Holland), George Gaudio, and the Arnetts–whom we picked up along the way) going back and forth to Florence. We had intended to gaze lovingly at the Fra...