Category: Web

  The news media love you and have a wonderful plan for your life, to borrow a phrase.  And that plan is to ramp up your feelings of hate, which will fuel obsession over sensational news stories, which means better ratings. In evidence today is one Bianca Prieto, who writes the following first paragraph on the...

Yesterday was not a good day. I got the word about the new birth ratio and realised that the local Chinese restaurants are now advertising in Spanish.

  In May 2011 this column covered the Kafkaesque tribulations of an American citizen, Zack Shahin, who was arrested in Dubai in 2008, held in isolation for months on end and denied bail. As we noted then, “Shahin still remains in jail on what appear to be spurious charges, with no trial date in sight. All this is...

  Manny Pacquiao is apparently a boxing legend and a member of Congress in the Philippines. According to a recent story on Breitbart.com, Mr. Pacquiao has been banned from making an appearance at an Los Angeles area shopping mall.  The sin that led to his excommunication was a statement, given in an interview, that one should “obey God’s law...

  The New York Times has delivered the unshocking news: “White births are no longer a majority in the United States.” Using words like “milestone” and “tipping point” and “tectonic,” the Times wonders aloud whether greedy white folks will be willing to pony up the cash necessary to educate the burgeoning majority-minority generation.  After all, the Maj-Mins (copyright ADW) will...

  The latest spectacle of disgusting posthuman monsters in expensive suits squandering other people’s billions—while displaying nothing but studied contempt for hoi polloi whose blood is their sustenance—is sickening and infuriating. Déjà vu all over again. Never mind the regulators and government officials with whom they are in existential cahoots; the bastards will continue doing their thing...

  When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working...

  It took Joe Biden’s public embrace of same-sex marriage to smoke him out. But after Joe told David Gregory of Meet the Press he was “absolutely comfortable” with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a...

  I have always been fond of the English decadents.  In an age of blustering nationalism, industrialism, and ideological zaniness, poets like Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson preserved some little corner of beauty.  Yes, they drank too much, experimented too much, affected too much, but they wrote poems worth remembering.  I’ve already presented some Johnson,...

  Friday, May 4, 2012, 16:08 Moscow Time Wiping out local minorities after an extensive NATO airstrike is the only combat tactic the KLA had mastered and the only thing the Syrian opposition can really learn from them, foreign-affairs editor for the U.S.-based Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, told RT. RT: Just what might the Syrian opposition learn at...

  Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) was the oldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  He inherited much of his father’s talent and brilliance but also some of his lack of discipline, which resulted in the forfeiture for intemperance of his Oriel fellowship.  He wrote biography for money and is often felt to have largely squandered his considerable...

  In the latest issue of The Jewish Chronicle (UK) a polemicist by the name of Oliver Kamm takes The Jerusalem Post to task for publishing an article last February “by one Srdja Trifkovic claiming that US recognition of Kosovo was an advance for jihadism.” In a fact-free diatribe Kamm complains that the JP “did not mention that Trifkovic has described Srebrenica as...

  “Bibi” Netanyahu was disgusted. “My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation.” The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday’s meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran. Subject: Iran’s...

  Here is a somewhat conversational masterpiece by the great Ben.  It’s a bit long but very vivid, funny, and, while self-serving, not hypocritical.  What a man he must have been!  Small wonder younger poets loved him, and not simply because he helped them.  His poem on Shakespeare, so often misunderstood as carping or envious,...

  This is a big topic.  Conversational verse includes satires, dramatic dialogues, and homey little poems of the Robert Frost type.  To achieve a conversational tone, one has to lower the diction a bit and work somewhat against the metrical rules.  I’m going to stick mostly to iambic pentameter lines.  Let’s start with an example...

  That a week is a long time in politics is confirmed by three significant events of the past seven days which will make life more difficult for the proponents of American “engagement” abroad. One was Bashar al-Assad’s victory in Homs, accompanied by the embarrassing discovery of French military “advisors” with the rebel troops. Assad’s...

  I was away in Europe when President Obama delivered his third State of the Union Address, hence a belated commentary. Obama’s carefully crafted speech sounded more like the opening shot in the reelection race than a set of serious policy proposals. His “blueprint for the future,” which supposedly will bring about a new era...

  Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged. In a January visit to the Vatican, American bishops were warned by Benedict XVI that “radical secularism” posed “grave threats” to their Catholic faith. Your religious freedom is being circumscribed, said the pope....

  After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning.  Let us turn to the Apology.  You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology.  It is Plato’s reconstruction (or imaginative recreation) of the speech Socrates made in...

  Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to veto Germany’s demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence. With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU: “British surrenders of sovereignty come to...

  It has been a while since I posted a Booklog entry.  It is not for lack of reading, on my part, but most of my reading has been either rather technical–Sicilian history, Pre-Socratic philosophy, the history of marriage–or too light to merit discussion.  In preparing for our own Sicilian Expedition, though, I reread Plato’s...

  Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the Russians!” marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were...

  My latest on the Daily Mail takes up the rise and what I hope will be the fall of Herman Cain. I also have an even newer piece on Obama’s First 1000 Days. Please do not respond here, since what is really needed is a show of interest at the Daily Mail.   I would rather be doing these pieces...

  In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory.  Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building.  A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal.  Two calm men enter the room and...

  Kudos to the Morning Edition staff!  I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of the...

  The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework...

  Friday, September 16 The Paul and I are on the radio at 3 (CDT), but I’m not sure what we do next Friday when I will have just finished cena in Siracusa. Anyone catch Pat Robertson’s words of wisdoms on why it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s because they are more...

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: This was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had...

  In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan...

  Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the war...

  It used to be that plutocrats felt they were part of the society in which they lived, or at least felt the need to act as if they were part of that society. Thus, when they decided to give away some of their enormous fortunes, their gifts generally reflected a desire to improve the...

  The decision by Standard & Poor’s to strip the United States of its AAA credit rating, for the first time, has triggered a barrage of catcalls against the umpire from the press box and Obamaites. S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books were stuffed with suspect...

  As a former resident of Winchmore Hill I am well familiar the surrounding areas of north London—Wood Green, Ponders End, Enfield…—affected by three successive nights of rioting and looting which has now spread to other parts of the capital. Burglaries, car thefts and vandalism started being a problem in our N21 neighborhood two decades ago, but the Hobbesian mayhem of...

  Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt. Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama’s “grand bargain,” the “big deal” of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in...

  Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.  John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it right.   Elder...

  Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, became the heir to the imperial crown of Austria and the royal crown of Hungary when his father Charles ascended the throne of the multinational Dual Monarchy in November 1916. In the final decades of his life (1979-1999) he was an influential figure...

  Did you enjoy your “peace dividend”? Did you enjoy your “stimulus” money? Do you think its wonderful that our Congresspersons and other federal officials constantly strive to make “our” lives better? Isn’t a great example of bipartisan statesmanship that all our leaders got together to save “our” economy by giving billions to the New York...

“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...

  Only one spectacle in recent weeks proved more nauseating than the Commander-in-Chief fine-tuning the Afghan drawdown to suit his re-election timetable. It was Barack Obama’s attempt to justify continued American participation in the illegal and unnecessary war in Libya by claiming that—far from being a war—it does not even merit the designation of hostilities. Back in...

  The Libyan affair became a choreographed farce on June 27, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafy, one of his sons, and his chief of military intelligence. This move is a carbon copy of The Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicting Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at...

  Unless you live in a cave, you know that New York’s legislature recently passed a bill recognizing homosexual marriage, a bill that was quickly and enthusiastically signed into law by the latest loathsome member of the Cuomo clan to govern the Empire State.  The mainstream conservative movement’s reaction to this event was only slightly...

  A better class of illegal immigrant. A good three-dollar cigar. A Presidential contender who has once in his life done something that is truly worthwhile, notable, patriotic, or unselfish. Fewer people who know what is best for other people. (This may require giving the Deep North back to Canada.) A Presidential candidate who is...

  Centuries before William James coined the phrase, men have sought a “moral equivalent of war,” some human endeavor to satisfy the jingoistic lust of man, without the carnage of war. For some, the modern Olympic Games have served the purpose, with the Cold War rivalry for medals between the United States and the Soviet...

  In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year’s end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves. He has, however, well served his political interests. A larger drawdown would have risked the gains made...

  The restoration of a McDonalds in Alabama is a signficant step in the progress of civilization, writes a prominent Misesian, who was struck with awe by the beauty of it all:   “I snapped a dozen images of their newly restored interior, which is absolutely beautiful.”  Absolutely, let us remember, means ultimately and without exception.  McDonalds...

  I listened to a bit of President Obama’s speech.  Why am I disgusted?  After all, I have said from the first day of our war against Afghanistan that it was a futile operation that might kill a lot of Afghans and a few Americans but that it would  would accomplish nothing.  Whenever I have...

History contains many tragedies, and one of these is the early death of Mozart. For those of us who enjoy Mozart’s choral music, it is particularly poignant to reflect on the fact that, before his death, he had been appointed assistant Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Thus, had he lived longer, Mozart would...

  Do you look forward  to living in a majority nonwhite country, which the U.S. is predicted to be in a few decades? Will you take a lie detector test about this? Do you look forward to your descendants living in such a country? Have you ever thought about your descendants at all? Did your...

  Farsighted conservatives have warned for decades that globalization was leading to wage stagnation in the United States. This was, for example, a major theme in Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal, published in 1997. The less farsighted are beginning to catch up. Recently, David Frum published a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on his website, which was then picked up...