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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...

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...

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...

And now, Part 2 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: Are you saying that the American people have been victimized by the elite classes that both control mass culture and the higher culture of universities and the arts?  Is the answer some sort of populist...

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...

Click here to watch Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s interview on RT discussing the Eurovision song contest.

Here is Part 1 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: What has happened to the United States?  Observers in and outside of America have been commenting on America’s decline, both as a world power and as an inspiration and model for other countries.  Within living...

January 10   Last night we had a good seafood dinner at La Buca. This was our second seafood dinner, since the night before we had gone to my old favorite, Il Nuraghe, and dined well on fish–in defiance of the Trip Advisor food mavens, who are forever complaining about how stodgy and 1970’s the...

The recent passing of “poet” Amiri Baraka set in motion an outpouring of grief by the mainstream media.  The taxpayer-funded NPR called him “one of America’s most important literary figures” and called his legacy “achingly beautiful”.  The Washington Post gushed that Baraka was “one of the most influential African American writers of his generation”.  Baraka...

January 8   I first came to Pisa in 1988. Christian Kopff had persuaded me to apply to make a joint-presentation of work that grew out of my dissertation on the colometry of Aeschylus.  Feel free to skip this tedious pedantic digression:   What is colometry? Perhaps it is better not to ask, but, properly...

Epiphany   It was a relief to come to Pisa, though the train trip was enlivened by a pair of Africans vendors, returning to Cascina, shouting their native language into their cellphones. I politely signaled to one of them by putting by finger to my lips. He turned his shouting to me and informed me...

Turkey’s Islamist PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come out in support of the retrial of hundreds of military officers sentenced as part of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer show trials.  These Moscow 1937-like shabby spectacles, discussed at length on this website (here and here), seemed to have been the final nails in the coffin of Turkey’s secular-nationalist military...

January 4, 2014   The trip to Florence took a long and unpleasant day. It was cold the day we left, and there was so much snow it required a bit of nerve just to drive to my office to pick up a few things I had forgotten. We caught the bus to O’Hare an...

  Most “NGOs” fomenting regime-changes and color-coded revolutions, promoting “pride marches” and similar “human rights issues,” are in reality Western (mostly U.S.) funded conspiracies pursuing the agenda of their paymasters. That much has been known for years, but in recent days we have witnessed a particularly egregious example of their politically-motivated duplicity. On December 17...

  “Making predictions is very difficult,” said Niels Bohr, “especially about the future.” We live in uncertain times, and they have been chronically uncertain, oftentimes acutely so, ever since July 1914. As we enter 2014, it is apt to remember that a hundred years ago the civilized world greeted the new year with the complacent belief, bordering on arrogance,...

January is not the best time of year to live in Tuscany–though August, with its swarms of tourists, may be worse.  Pisa is hardly any warmer than Florence, but to me it seems warmer, perhaps because of the proximity to the Tyrrhenian Sea.  It is also true that when I got up this morning, the...

Beatitudes, Not Platitudes   According to one interpretation of the scene, Judas went away from this encounter disgruntled with Jesus’ failure to lead a social revolution.   It is certainly true that Jesus’ answer remains a powerful rebuke to those who would confound the gospel with one or another form of state-imposed socialism. The poor,...

Pope Francis has been under attack from many directions.  Perhaps some day his enemies–most of which are self-described traditionalist (as opposed to traditional) Catholics–will find some dirt to stick on the poor man, but so far they appear to be missing their target by more than a mile.   The most ridiculous charge–made among others...

  Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...

  De mortuis nihil nisi bonum is a good rule to follow, especially when the dead person is a stranger in land one has never visited.  I am perfectly happy to believe all the nice things said about Mr. Mandela’s character by his friends, colleagues, and admirers.  Nonetheless, it is not clear to me that a...

  The scenes in Kiev over the past few days have been reminiscent of the “Orange Revolution” in the fall of 2004, which paved the way for Viktor Yushchenko’s eventual victory in the disputed presidential election. There are several significant differences, however, which make a similar outcome unlikely. The first is that the trigger for...

Iran’s nuclear talks with the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany) in Geneva resulted in an “interim” agreement last Saturday. It obliges Iran to verify the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, and to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium under international supervision, in return for limited sanctions relief....

Writing your Congressperson. An unindicted Illinois governor. The American people ever understanding that government debt does not exist to cover necessary expenditures but to provide risk-free, tax-free income to capitalists. American leaders ever understanding the difference between defense and aggression. American leaders ever understanding the concept of “blowback,” that what goes around comes around. President,...

  What a week it has been for the ambulance-chasing media!  Anticipated highs in their schedule were  anniversaries of the Gettysburg address and the Kennedy assassination.  What that pair really should be remembered for are cheap rhetoric to camouflage mass murder and cheap idealism to camouflage not just the libido dominandi but plain old raw libido.   I well...

  I don’t put much stock in attempts to date Paul’s epistles, but he must have been writing under one of two less than splendid rulers, the chuckle-headed Claudius and the egomaniacal Nero, who would burn the Christians.  People of Paul’s social station were not going to meet the Emperor, and it would have been...

After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War ended 95 years ago today. The most tragic event in the history of mankind, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A fundamentally decent and well-ordered world was shattered for ever. The floodgates of hell in which we live now were opened....

  When a false-flag atrocity occurs of which Muslims are the purported victims, the United States goes to war to save them—the January 1999 stage-managed “massacre” at Racak, in Kosovo, being a classic example. When all-too-real massacres of Christians by Muslims take place, they are unreported in the Western media and uncommented upon by Western politicians....

  This part two of a series.  If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I.  I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man.  In Part III, I’ll...

  Part I: What it Is Obamacare’s enrollment fiasco has provided endless opportunities for pointless blather from the unwashed masses of the American “right.”  Talkshow celebrities and the delicate young men who blog for magazine websites cannot contain their outrage.  One of them yesterday, the editor of an actual print magazine of moderately large circulation,...

  Forty years after publishing his prophetic dystopia Jean Raspail is still with us, ever more resigned that our civilization is on the “road to disappearance.” As he explained in an interview published in Valeurs Actuelles on October 25 (transl. by ST), he has no desire to join the big circle of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration...

  The arrest on October 30 of Essam el-Erian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s once-powerful Guidance Council and deputy leader of the MB-controlled Freedom and Justice Party, demonstrates the extent to which the interim government of Egypt has been able to cement its control over the country since former president Mohammed Morsi was ousted almost four...

  The first reports in early May of 1960 were that a U.S. weather plane, flying out of Turkey, had gone missing. A silent Moscow knew better. After letting the Americans crawl out on a limb, expatiating on their cover story, Russia sawed it off. Actually, said Nikita Khrushchev, we shot down a U.S. spy...

A Federal judge in Austin (Lee Yeakel–or is it yokel) has struck down provisions in Texas’ new abortion law requiring abortionists to have hospital privileges within 30 miles of their murder site.  Right-to-lifers are angry, but, really, the judge has a point:  Why should we care about the life and health of these latter-day Medeas...

  Caught red-handed spying on the private life of Angela Merkel, the Obama administration and its supporters in both parties have chanted the same responses: “Allies always spy on each other,” and “our monitoring activities in Europe have thwarted terrorist attacks.”  True enough, but as everyone knows, politicians only tell the truth when it serves...

  For half a century an enlightened, progressive mentality has dominated the information and entertainment media, the educational system at every level, the courts, the clergy, and the corporate elite.  No need to get upset or act surprised that many young people are ignorant, lazy, lack moral standards, love rap music, and vote for Obama. ...

  For the whole weekend I had the (mis)fortune of attending a Continuing Legal Education course at my old law school in order to remain in good standing with the venerable New York state bar.  Now, most of the speakers were older attorneys in the personal injury field. One of them, whom I’ll call “Seymour...

  The international crisis may be over, but the multisided war in Syria is continuing. On Friday government planes bombarded rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after heavy clashes claimed the life of one of President Bashar al-Assad’s top military intelligence officers. In the long-contested city of Aleppo, a renewed rebel assault on the city’s...

  This summer produced a triumph of American patriotism. A grassroots coalition arose to demand Congress veto any war on Syria. Congress got the message and was ready to vote no to war, when President Obama seized upon Vladimir Putin’s offer to work together to disarm Syria of chemical weapons. The war America did not...

  On Sunday, 522 Catholics killed for the Faith during the Spanish Civil War were beatified in Spain.  So far, some 1500 Catholic martyrs killed during the Spanish Civil War have been beatified.  The left is not pleased.  An article in the Guardian says that the killing of Catholics during the Civil War is “highly controversial,” “controversial” being the...

  While the political spotlight has been on the government shutdown, the Democrats have not forgotten that America’s political future will be shaped by the immigration bill passed by the Senate but stalled in the House.   In an effort to convince House Republicans to drop their opposition to the bill, congressional Democrats gave their support to a rally...

  In anticipation of our Latin Is Essential event this Friday and Saturday, October 11, 12, (if you haven’t signed up, please do!) we’re offering Dr. E. Christian Kopff’s tremendous book The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. As one reviewer describes the work, “E. Christian Kopff cuts to the heart of the Culture Wars ....

  Following his doomsday speech at the United Nations General Assembly on October 1—in which he warned the world that Iran’s new president should not be trusted and that Israel would attack Iran on its own unless it ends its nuclear program—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent two days in New York on an anti-Rouhani media...

  French Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls recently drew howls of politically-correct outrage.  Valls, who is according to the BBC, a rising star in Hollande’s administration, said that the sociopathic Gypsy lifestyle, based on chicanery and the avoidance of socially acceptable work, is “clearly in confrontation” with the lifestyle of the French. In response...

  Angela Merkel is not a charismatic leader. She lacks Margaret Thatcher’s zeal, Benazir Bhutto’s looks (Berlusconi once commented on her lack of feminine charms in his inimitably discourteous manner), or Indira Gandhi’s carefully cultivated caring touch. She wears one of her dull jackets with dark trousers every day. When asked about her biggest youthful...

  Presumably like every live being in the U.S. 65 or older, I recently received from the government a 152-page paperback book explaining to me the glories and the ins and outs of Medicare.   Being of a perverse nature, I became interested in the numerous photographs of happy Medicare recipients and caregivers that were spread...

  In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...

  Just a few days ago, I heard some attorneys lamenting that we in this country, don’t have a three day weekend every week, “like they do in France”.  I smirked into my Kindle, not wanting to cause a tropical downpour on the poor devils’ parade.  France doesn’t have three day weekends every week, and...

  The dust had barely settled at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday when a barrage of lies began to fly from the usual suspects on the left.  For once, the religion of the crazed shooter, Aaron Alexis, was not buried or ignored completely, since he was publicly connected not to Islam but to Buddhism....

  Harold Wilson was right: A week is a long time in politics. The one just behind us—the longest of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far—has provided a mix of drama, bravado, mendacity and stupidity unseen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. That crisis was a more serious affair than Obama’s Syrian gambit—thermonuclear war was a...

  Timothy Broglio is Archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services.  Early this year, he attracted a great deal of media attention, mostly negative, for a letter he issued condemning the Obama’ administration for requiring Catholic institutions to include contraception in its insurance coverage.  An adroit diplomatist, Broglio reached a compromise with the Pentagon, and...