Following the Master’s instructions, about 120 of Jesus’ followers gathered in Jerusalem under the leadership of Peter. The first order of business was the selection of a replacement for Judas. The method adopted shows us something of the way the Church will operate: The Apostles themselves choose the most worthy candidates and then leave the...
10959 search results for: Post-Human Future
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April Bombing
The April bombing in Oklahoma City told us a lot about ourselves and how we respond to adversity. When a bomb destroyed the federal building in that city, politicians and journalists were swift to place the atrocity in some kind of wider context, offering interpretations which ranged from the accurate to the vulgar. In the...
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A Political Centrifuge
Yugoslavia, the political centrifuge of the Balkans, is spinning its constituent nations into tenuous independence. Long-standing religious and ethnic animosities have finally erupted into bloody internecine warfare, and it appears that nothing and no one can prevent this crazy-quilt entity of three major religions, three alphabets, and at least five proud national identities from rushing...
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A Closely Watched Term
The Supreme Court’s closely watched October 1999 term came to an end on June 28, and its themes finally became clear: inconsistency, incoherence, and arbitrariness. On that last day, the Court released important decisions on abortion, aid to religious schools, and homosexual rights, and refused to intervene in the Elian Gonzalez case. The Supreme Court’s...
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
So the anti-Confederate backlash comes to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June, voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman. Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large,...
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The Writer as Farmer
Nights are pitch dark here. Looking up at a wonderfully clear sky, I think of how few places today permit stars. The sickly yellow-brown blur of cities has killed the most glorious God-given beauty of all. With the stars has gone reverence, too, and maybe at least partly as a result of the same. With...
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Men in Power
In March, Steve Saltarelli, a junior Law, Letters, and Society major at the University of Chicago, wrote a satirical article for the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, entitled “Men in Power.” The subtitle read, “True equality means groups that advocate for men as well as women.” In the article, Saltarelli jokingly proposed founding an advocacy...
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A Burial Shroud
Monday was a good day, typical of good days in its variety. I was on the phone with another lawyer trying to settle a whiplash. His unlicensed truck driver ran into the rear of my man’s ear with a 50,000-pound cement truck. This case will settle. Another client called. She was ostensibly concerned about her...
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Anarcho-Tyranny in Action
In a recent column, Chuck Baldwin (lately nominated as the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate) pointed to something ominous that was largely ignored in the media reporting on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. Spitzer had been found out because of “suspicious” financial transactions his bank reported to the authorities. Dr. Baldwin (who is pastor of a...
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A Corrupt Bargain
Careful readers have long suspected that the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was about something more sinister than bureaucratic ineptitude and Department of Justice stonewalling. The ATF allowed arms dealers in Arizona and New Mexico to sell weapons to individuals working for Mexican drug cartels in order, the DOJ claimed, to trace the movement of...
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Anti-Catholicism and the Times
“Anti-Catholicism,” said writer Peter Viereck, “is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.” It is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people,” said Arthur Schlesinger Sr. If there was any doubt that hatred of and hostility toward the Catholic Church persists, it was removed by the mob that has arisen howling “Resign!” at Pope...
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In the Gutter With the GOP
The Republican Party’s search for a presidential candidate is a bit like a musical revue. As the star (Mitt Romney) goes up and down the chorus line, one after another dancer emerges from obscurity into the spotlight, dazzles the audience for a few moments, before sinking back into the anonymous mass. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann,...
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On School Vouchers
Lew Rockwell (“Flies in the Ointment,” September) and I have the same ultimate objective: “an educational market in which parents are responsible for paying for their own children’s education.” We agree also on the “twin evils of public education: involuntary funding and compulsory attendance.” In our ideal (libertarian) world, government would play no role in...
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At the Crossroads
At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo “No one is free save Jove.” —Aeschylus Up until now, Ayn Rand hasn’t had a biographer worthy of the name: only the memoirs of embittered ex-followers, or hagiographies written by devotees. Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made remedies that lack. It’s the first serious attempt...
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Is Iran Taking the China Road?
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
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The Balkans War
The Balkans war seemed to be coming to an end in mid-December as we went to press. Trying to sort through the lies, misinformation, and distortions for the fragments of truth in the international press requires the patience of an archeologist and the imagination of a poet, but some things seem fairly certain. For several...
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Up From Television
“I came to cast fire upon earth; and would that it were already kindled!” —Luke 12:29 In order to mark the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s election to the Papacy, Italian Radio and Television commissioned Vittorio Messori to conduct a live television interview with the Pope. It must have seemed a good idea...
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The American Proscenium
Red Rainbow What’s astonishing (or, perhaps, moderately surprising, if we remain aware of what life in liveral America has taught us over the last two decades) is the media’s color blindness when it comes to making an ideological evaluation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s programmatic rhetoric. At a closer look, this agenda followed by the...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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Of Death and Diapers
Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World by Vance Packard; Little, Brown; Boston. Who Will Take the Children? A New Custody Option for Divorcing Mothers—and Fathers by Susan Meyers and Joan Lakin; Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis. Secular liberalism is the supreme doctrine of the sovereign self. As such, its failures are particularly obvious at the...
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The Grand Manner
The culture war takes many forms—or, perhaps, we should say that the war has many fronts, and that the musical conflicts arising from this war are significant ones. Thus, we are convinced, when we approach a car that delivers a pounding reverb of bass, that the driver is not only cultivating a hearing loss that...
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That Kennedy Legacy
The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas...
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A Pack of Lies
“The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies.” —Bishop Willkin Stubbs Marc Ferro sets out to broaden our horizons. He picks 14 countries (or sometimes ex-countries) to tell us “the vision of the past which is proper to each.” By “proper” he clearly does not mean “correct,” for he puts his stamp...
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Government by the People
Héctor Villa was, by nature, a patient, long-suffering man. Even so, he arrived home in a cross mood that evening, at the end of an unusually frustrating day. First, there had been the traffic ticket; next, his unproductive meeting with Mrs. Ahmadinejihad. Finally, he’d been unable to meet with the school principal, after waiting for...
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A Desirable Transit Point
The Republic of Georgia’s desirability as an oil and natural-gas transit point has made her a pawn in a game that involves Washington, Moscow, Caspian Sea oil, and the fate of Iraq. And this game is, in turn, part of the great game going on in Central Asia. Since September 11, 2001, American policymakers have...
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Vipers in Ivory
“Teaching,” said the former nun in blue jeans, as if she were instructing a room full of halfwits about something very important, “is a political act.” It was early December 1991 at Providence College, the school where I taught for 27 years, the school that I grew to love deeply, though that love, it seems, was...
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The Facts Behind the Greek Melodrama
Greece is now technically in default, having failed to pay its $1.8 bn monthly installment to the IMF which was due June 30. Contrary to the mainstream media treatment of the story, there will be no ripple effect and no major financial crisis. The Greeks are in dire straits, but their economy (the size of...
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Walt Disney Rolls Over in His Grave
Fun for the whole family, the ad for the movie said. (I was relieved to know that it wasn’t zany or lafF-packed, although later I would have settled for that.) Our kids, then eight and 13, deserved a celebration for lasting through the final day of school before Christmas vacation, so, loaded with grotesque candy...
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The Siege of Sweden
In an era of political correctness, “safe spaces,” and “trigger warnings” for the constitutionally feeble, there are plenty of things we are not supposed to talk about. Increasingly in recent months, this seems to include crime and immigration in the Kingdom of Sweden. From across the political spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic,...
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Hamas is Israel’s Golem
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.
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The Gift of Limitations
When he was little, Rick Curry was the first of his friends to tie his own laces. That may not seem like such a big deal unless you know that he was born without a right forearm. He was brought up to believe he was completely normal. At six, Rick’s father sent him to an...
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For What, All These Wars?
“I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. … I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies.” As President Obama sent this letter of apology to Hamid Karzai for the burning by U.S. troops of Qurans that were used to smuggle notes between Afghan prisoners, two U.S. soldiers...
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Young Destransitioners Lead the Charge Against Corrupt Medical and Educational Establishment
Detrans explores the horrific abuse of vulnerable and confused young people perpetrated by our medical and educational establishment in the name of compassion.
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A Supreme Disqualification
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court once again trampled on the rights of the states. The media took little notice. Since it became a state in 1912, Arizona has had a citizenship requirement for voters. In 2004, the people of the state, in an effort to combat voter fraud, enacted Proposition 200. This initiative requires...
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The Islamic Republic of Egypt
The most important foreign event in the final days of 2012 was the ramming through of Egypt’s new, Sharia-based constitution by President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. The cultural, demographic and geographic center of the Arab world is now set to become an Islamic Republic. Egypt’s transformation, after 60 years of secularist...
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Hollywood and the Convent
Biographers do much of their work in the study and the library, but they also get to some out-of-the-way places. I’ve interviewed people in bars, nursing homes, and insane asylums, chased down wealthy informants in country houses and elegant apartments, poor ones in drafty cottages and cluttered flats. Some welcomed me with a hefty drink,...
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The Cost of Madness
This compendium on immigration by editors of the National Research Council (NRC) includes the work of 14 scholars, among them economists, demographers, and sociologists. At least one of the contributors is a strong advocate of high levels of immigration, while another has recently criticized current policy for ignoring the decline in skills and levels of...
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Dr. Trifkovic Interviewed on RT
Dr. Trifkovic Interviewed on RT by Chronicles • May 5, 2011 • Printer-friendly abc123″>8 Responses<a href="#respond"
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NeverVancers Are the New NeverTrumpers
The usual suspects are out in force to undermine J. D. Vance as antithetical to Reagan’s realism merely because he repudiates George W. Bush’s disasters.
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Jacobins—and Jacobins
At the dawn of the 21st century, few of today’s public (or private) school students would argue with you if you told them that the United States of America was founded upon the principle, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” They would offer no argument, perhaps, except that they...
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Sabotaging the Poor, Selling Out for Politics
If there were a Museum of Terrible Ideas, the permanent collection would surely include today’s elected leaders who believe the best way to represent impoverished neighborhoods is to demand the defunding of police departments and supporting policies to undermine public schools. How can anyone argue that poor people benefit from lax law enforcement or ending...
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On Saving Canada
Kevin Michael Grace begins his profile of Conrad Black (“The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik),” News, June) with a piece of hearsay—an observation that “Canada isn’t worth saving,” supposedly uttered by David Frum to me and by me to Mr. Grace. David has never said such a thing to me, and...
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Throwing Off the Albatross
It came as a bolt of lightning out of the blue. One moment the Trump administration was besieged on all sides. The media were accusing him of treason, and the Democrats, having just taken control of the House of Representatives, were promising multiple investigations. Robert Mueller was reportedly sharpening his prosecutorial knives, getting ready to...
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Books in Brief
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, by Nicole Hemmer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; 320 pp., $34.95). This very readable and otherwise excellent book is a history of the first generation of what the author calls “media activists,” conservatives who refused to work for mainstream periodicals and broadcasters...
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Love in the Ruins–More Final Thoughts
I was leaving for Ft. Worth early Wednesday morning and, although I did not turn on the radio, watch television, or buy a newspaper, “the news was out all over town” and impossible to evade, even though I have avoided the media ever since. Yesterday, my wife asked me to listen for the weather on...
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Dubious Allies
“We love our children, but we need food,” says Masih Saddiq, a 50-year-old brickmaker, explaining why none of his 13 children were in school. They range in age from one-and-a-half to 25; all seem destined to spend their entire lives making bricks, as have their parents. The brickyard sits outside central Lahore, Pakistan’s second-most populous...
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Scandalizing Uncle Ez
Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal. “deferentially. Eliot called him il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman. Pound was a brilliant critic, too. In scores of widely read...
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Order and Justice? Cowardice and Folly!
In April 1986, Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Minister and the Massacres was published in Britain. Like his earlier Victims of Yalta (1978) and Stalin’s Secret War (1981), the book was uncompromising in its indictment of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan personally and of British foreign policy generally at the end of the war. “In the second week...
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Letter From Waco: A Visit to Mount Carmel
We are headed north on Interstate 35 from Austin to Dallas, on the tail end of an unexpected trip to Texas. The dog days of August have not been quite as unbearable as we anticipated but are still startlingly hot by our Alaskan standards. Beside the interstate, we glimpse many small Protestant churches, mostly of...
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Imperial Overstretch
Toward the end of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, America stood alone at the top of the world—the sole superpower. After five weeks of “shock and awe” and 100 hours of combat, Saddam’s army had fled Kuwait back up the road to Basra and Bagdad. Our Cold War adversary was breaking apart into 15...