Category: Web

  I posted a response from one Robert–not our friend Robert–and replied to it, but despite the manifest silliness, I’l put it and my reply so that our intentions are not misunderstood. It is a good example of the incompatibility of Christianity and Marxism. “Good grief. Do you not know any poor people? Have none...

I’ve just posted a Daily Mail piece on the treason of the Pakistani physician who collaborated with the CIA.  While I strongly encourage anyone who has anything to say to post a comment over there–it can only improve my standing there–we can also have a different sort of discussion here.  I do urge everyone, if...

  The story of the Mexican Left’s murderous persecution of the Church is not well known, even though it inspired one of the great novels of the 20th century, The Power and the Glory.  The story of the Cristero uprising intended to end that persecution is even less well known.  But that uprising has now inspired a...

Aaron actually got it right.  While Latin docilis was used in a special sense  by St. Thomas, the word has always been used far more broadly to mean trainable or teachable.  Ovid even applies it to hair.  In English we are most likely to think of animals, like horses, subject to control by their masters, and I...

  On my way to TRI Towers from my country estate this morning, I took a different route into the city. I started noticing something different in my peripheral vision, so I began looking more intently. Street corner after street corner had teenagers in ratty shorts and T-shirts waiting for a Rockford school bus. That...

  Toma Nikolic’s victory in the Serbian presidential election has panicked the boys of the press.  The Washington Post has  particularly hysterical account, typical of the Post’s purely ideological coverage of foreign affairs.   Both the headline and the lead sentence get in the key-word “ultra-nationalist,” while Nikolic’s moderate strategy is described as “claims to have transformed himself into...

Scott, yes, I anticipated the flop for exactly the same reason.  What appears not to bother anyone is the obvious fact that Zuckerberg and his friends have flimflammed a lot of people.  It seems to me that one of the more obvious ways in which the new Facebook world is significant is that it allows...

    Andrew Marvell wrote masterpieces in several genres of verse, from satire to love poems to the most ambitious ode in the language.  While it is foolish to use words like “the greatest” of any one poet, the worth of this libidinous Puritan is beyond question.  Some of Marvell’s satires are quite amusing, particularly...

  Just three days after Georgetown University had Kathleen Sebelius on campus to address an awards ceremony during commencement week, another prominent Catholic university found a better way of dealing with Sebelius:  the University of Notre Dame filed suit against Sebelius in federal court, asking the court to enjoin and then vacate the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring...

  Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning, quipped Churchill in November 1942, following Montgomery’s modest success at El Alamein. The same applies to Tomislav Nikolic’s victory in the second round of Serbia’s presidential election last Sunday. The...

  With the threat of a second, unfettered term for President BHO looming, one begins to wonder what sort of legacy he would try to cobble together.  Well, smack in the middle of that second term would be the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.  A drumbeat from the left has been growing over the last...

  Tom, the Facebook IPO went about how I predicted it would. I’d been trying to figure out how to short Facebook out of the gate, because it simply seemed obvious that Facebook’s business model cannot, in the long run, support even the $38 opening price (and perhaps not even in the short run). Zuckerberg...

  Try not to be so negative, Clyde, and look on  the bright side.  Increased diversity enriches our lives.  If you want really authentic Chinese food, go to Bangkok, where a Chinese from Taiwan was arrested for his exotic taste in food and religion.  He had roasted six unborn babies and covered them with gold...

  Today brings news that Georgetown alumnus and author of The Exorcist William Peter Blatty intends to pursue a canon law lawsuit against his alma mater that may possibly result in Georgetown’s not being able to call itself a Catholic university any longer.  Not coincidentally, today also marked the appearance at Georgetown of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius,...

  Among the more controversial chapters in Suicide of a Superpower, my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.” It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity. That book and chapter proved the proximate cause...

  Bill Clinton gleefully predicted this development.  I know he was technically the first black president, but did Bill ever look in the mirror?   Or perhaps he is like the man described by James: “ For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his...

  Tom, I heard on the radio some of the greeting Sebelius received–a gratifying round of jeers, boos, and anti-abortion outbursts.  Ordinarily, I am in favor of maintaining respectful silence on these occasions, but when an advocate for homicide is invited to a Catholic school, the students have some obligation–within limits of course–to make their...

  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...