Category: Web

  In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...

  In the Anglo-American tradition of Common Law, the status of wives was defined by the principle of coverture, which meant that the wife’s legal identity was merged with that of her husband. [i] When Hamlet is taken to task for addressing his stepfather as “mother,” he replies: “Father and mother is man and wife, man and...

  A nation of 300 million souls—richest and most powerful in the world, for all its messes and perturbations—needs a turning radius wide as the future. But you know what—realization precedes intellectual assent, which precedes needed action. There’s much to be hopeful about as the nation goes in for its electoral physical. Valuable realizations are...

  Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth....

  The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex.  Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in...

  Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...

  Assuming, no doubt, our anxious world could use a good laugh, Stephen Hawking undertakes to provide one. He says the universe created itself. The theory itself isn’t the joke. The joke is the dogged persistence of atheists trying in the face of common sense to persuade the world as to the wisdom they see...

  “Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...

  “Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. “The American way of life needs to be rebalanced. Households...

Ah, glorious soccer.  The sport where fat and tall and tough guys don’t get a pass, unlike those other statistic-driven, ‘roid marinated, jingoistic sports Americans love on a more regular basis.  But what really makes FIFAball the sport of conservative spectators is that it combines the Grecian ideal with pure thespian talent.  And as recent...

Yahoo has decided to promote the World Cup by prominently featuring scores to games on its home page.  Last night, I saw a World Cup game playing on some of the TVs at a local sports bar.  Thus does an event that used to receive as much coverage in America as spelling bees in Uzbekistan...

On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...

Next let us turn to Woods’ comments on my discussion of scarcity as an economic concept.  I again quoted Paul Samuelson who introduces the topic as fundamental to economic analysis and concludes by saying:  “If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy...

Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote.  Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters.  As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...

Dr. Woods’ article, “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck,” is, I must admit, superficially attractive. It appears to crush opposition under a weight of impressive learning. But, I would suggest, when his assertions are examined, Woods’ citation of authorities, like his argument in general, fails. I begin with...

I have read somewhere that courtesy is the highest form of charity.  Whether or not that is true (I like to think it is), courtesy is certainly charity in its least expensive form.  Which prompts the question of why, in the age of what an anonymous wit a generation or so ago dubbed conspicuous benevolence,...

“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” Some 170 years...

While the United States is preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, a far more dangerous crisis is brewing: the prospect of an armed confrontation between Taiwan and mainland China.  Unfortunately, Washington’s current policy places us in the middle of that quarrel.  If U.S. leaders do not change course, America could find herself in a...

The northern industrial suburbs of Paris suffered the worst of eight consecutive nights of rioting on November 3-4. Disorder has now spread to dozens of provincial towns, including Dijon, the first city outside Ile-de-France (the metropolitan region) to be affected by unrest. Hundreds of cars, as well as schools, stores, and warehouses have been torched or...

Over the month a small controversy has broken out over my article criticizing Thomas Woods’ two lectures given at the Mises Institute in 2002 and earlier this year. Mr. Woods then replied to me, and as I was away for nearly two weeks, I am belatedly replying again to Woods. Unfortunately I will largely have...

Even among otherwise orthodox Catholics in the United States there is generally little knowledge of or interest in Catholic social doctrine, that body of Catholic teachings which concerns man in society, especially with reference to the political and economic orders. Since Leo XIII began vigorously to develop and apply this teaching to the changing conditions...

The U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, turned out to be every bit as odious as its name promised. It furnished an occasion for the talking heads, otherwise-unemployable NGO apparatchiks, and sanctimonious windbags around the globe to do their thing, and—in particular—to agonize over the departure...

The systematic and deliberate destruction of the Yugoslav democratic revival by the “international community” and its Belgrade minions following the fall of Slobodan Milosevic may not be the most important news unfit to print of the year, but it is certainly the biggest untold story. As we approach the anniversary of this event, the time...

“The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the use of the word culture. My conservative friends...

        “The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . .is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin for hayseeds.” —George...

       “The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner…. His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...

        “With him the love of country means Blowing it all to smithereens And having it all made over new.” —Robert Frost Paul de Man’s life was “the classic immigrant story” (according to James Atlas). He arrived in New York in 1948 from his native Belgium and worked as a clerk at...

       “There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic...

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” wrote Honoré de Balzac in a cynical sentiment that Mario Puzo chose as the epigraph of The Godfather. The line at once establishes the metaphor that dominates the book as well as the films and carries us into the essentially Machiavellian worldview that pervades them and to...