True Crime Produced by Malpaso Productions Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Andrew Klavan and Larry Gross Released by Warner Bros. The Matrix Produced by Groucho II Film Partnership and Silver Pictures Directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Released by Warner Bros. Clint Eastwood’s True Crime lives...
10959 search results for: Post-Human Future
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BTK Killer
Dennis Rader, the disgusting, twisted pervert who flattered himself with the moniker “BTK” (for “bind, torture, and kill”), is a living witness to the existence of the Devil. On August 18,2005, he was sentenced to 175 consecutive years in prison for ten grisly murders—the harshest sentence that Judge Gregory Waller of the Wichita district court...
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Sing Me Back Home
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
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Thistles from Figs
“Since there has never been a great civilization without poetry,” writes Tom Fleming in the current issue of Chronicles, “we can say that European civilization has ceased to exist.” True enough, but if the day’s newspaper is any guide, I reckon the sainted editor is digging too deep. The English word “uxurious” was used, and...
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Strategic Lessons of Clinton’s Health Crisis
According to Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points, she wanted to “power through” her pneumonia; but after that “overheating episode” on September 11 it “seemed like the smart thing to do” to take some downtime. According to Politico.com, which obtained the document, “those phrases, projecting strength, prudence, and vigor, were among the six bullet-pointed talking points...
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Blame Bob Hope
The Democratic Party's realignment with big business was engineered by former DCCC Chairman Tony Coelho, once a lost young man before comedian Bob Hope took him under his wing.
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A Great Refusal
As I have previously observed in these pages, each of the ratification conventions with which the people of the 13 original states passed judgment on the handiwork of the Great Convention had its own distinctive drama— structural characteristics which in the end colored the meaning of the Constitution in the communities by which it was...
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The Pit—And the Pendulum
Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
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The Big Bore of Arkansas
“‘Jour printer, by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing—geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes in handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?’” —The Duke, Huckleberry Finn...
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The Sufferings of a Sculptor
SIN (IL PECCATO) Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky ◆ Written by Andrei Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva ◆ Produced by Alisher Usmanov ◆ Distributed by Corinth Films Despite its potentially salacious title, Sin (Il peccato) is thankfully not another sordid tale about an artistic genius lured into fleshly temptations, having a crisis of faith, or battling with...
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Is Europe Burning?
In 1966 a film called Is Paris Burning?, based on a novel of the same name, was a cinematic sensation. Its subject was the liberation of Paris by the French Free Forces and the French Resistance in 1944. More than 70 years later Europe itself is afire as a combined Resistance force including rightists, “populists,”...
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Boozing With Papa
Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure. I knew a place called El Borracho, Spanish for “the drunkard,” where my parents used to dine. The owner was an agreeable Catalan who...
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Ted Kennedy: Lion of Liberalism or Lyin’ Liberal?
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Dedicated to the Proposition
Every moviegoer remembers the sign: “Keep your change. Tipping is un-American.” It is on the cash register of the roadside diner that is the setting for The Petrified Forest. It is a strange expression. We don’t say “un-French” (and hardly ever say “un-English”), and when we do, we mean only that something is not typical...
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Foreign Aid and USAID
There may be no more pitiful sight than that of tides of impoverished and starving refugees; there may be no greater irony than grievous want in the Third World amidst exploding possibilities in the First. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population lives on less than one dollar per day. More than half survives on...
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The Fate of the Book
Back in ye olden tyme, when graybeards would dismiss supposed ephemera like safety razors and indoor plumbing, the wise and knowing liked to dismiss the dismissers. They would recollect the days when urchins barked,
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Imagine No More Meresy
A seven-foot bronze statue of the late Beatle John Lennon greets travelers at the international airport in Liverpool that bears his name. It’s fitting that Lennon’s impish image—hands inserted in pants pockets—is displayed at the airport adjacent to the Mersey River. Lennon emigrated from blue-collar Liverpool, a one-time symbol of Great Britain’s manufacturing strength, to...
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Who Spawned the Christchurch Killer?
Last Friday, in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the more civilized places on earth, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, turned on his cellphone camera and set out to livestream his massacre of as many innocent Muslim worshippers as he could kill. Using a semi-automatic rifle, he murdered more than 40 men, women and children at...
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Grading Greenspan
President Bush’s recent announcement that he will renominate Alan Greenspan for a fifth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board elicited mostly favorable reactions from a wide range of economic and political pundits. At the critical end of the spectrum, economist James Galbraith, in an op-ed entitled “Greenspan, The man who stayed too long,”...
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Those Deadly, Depressing, Syncopated Semiautomatic Assault Rifle Blues
An Exercise in Calculated Hysteria The semiautomatic rifle has been part of the American scene for nearly a century. In 1903 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company marketed the first commercially successful semiautomatic rifle. It was not designed as a military arm, and no sales were made to the US Army. The new rifle was marketed...
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Israel’s Strategic Dilemma
Israel will face an impossible strategic situation if it enters urban warfare in Gaza. Far from being a sign of weakness, exercising restraint in the face of Hamas’ provocations is the sound and politically profitable course of action.
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The Jan. 6 Video Cover-Up
Hide and seek should be a game for children, not for ruthless feds. But here we are. An American citizen, innocent until proven guilty, is fighting for his freedom against a government juggernaut hell-bent on framing him as a violent Jan. 6 insurrectionist. One crucial key to clearing his name, his lawyer argues, lies in...
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Germany Encapsulates the West’s Totalitarian Drift
The recent totalitarian drift in Germany shows what happens when Western people cannot suppress the nagging doubt that they are not morally responsible actors but unquestioning consumers of predigested choices.
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A Meditation on a Meditation
“The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” —Jeremiah Why has the South had such a flowering of letters in the interval between World War I and the Korean War? Flannery O’Connor responded to that question by quoting the answer Walker Percy gave when he received the National...
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Thugs and Tarbabies
Ferguson is on fire? Blacks are looting and trashing black stores, homes, and even churches? Who could have imagined? There is really nothing to be said about such events, as predictable as a celebrity face lift and as unsightly as a Kim Kardashian photo shoot. Those of us who lived through the 60’s have seen...
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Buchanan and Churchill
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. New York: Crown. 544 pp. $25.95 A Review published in The Wanderer . Since this is my unedited text, any errors are the fault of the author and not ...
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The Punishment That Europe Imposed on Itself
The hegemonic clique that conducts American foreign policy has managed to bring Europe under control more firmly and radically than at any time during the Cold War. And this is not a temporary, transient phenomenon.
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A Bad Man’s View of the Law
Law professors rarely write books. When they write at all, they typically produce incomprehensible and heavily footnoted articles (usually unread) for obscure law reviews. It is even rarer to find a law professor who can write with flair about something of more than ephemeral interest. And it is rarest of all to find a law...
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The British Invasion of the Ozarks
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
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Civil Unions
Civil unions, which offer same-sex couples the privileges that presently accrue to those who have been united in normal marriages, have been discussed by several legislators since the MassachusettsSupreme Judiciary Court ordered the state legislature to establish “homosexual marriage.” The Massachusetts high court, under the dynamic (demonic?) leadership of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, decreed that...
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Is Trump’s Agenda Being Eclipsed?
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942. True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation. When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945,...
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The Oslo Connection
In his 1,500-page European Declaration of Independence mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik approvingly quotes me and several other authors who have written critically about Islam, including Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The exploitation of the connection followed promptly. “Norwegian butcher a product of Islamophobia” was last Monday’s banner headline in the Zaman, Turkey’s...
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The Coming Bin Laden Conspiracy Theory
The killing of OBL is a significant event politically and psychologically. It will not have any detrimental impact on the operations of Al-Qa’eda, however, because that amorphous group does not need a leader and has not had a centralized command-and-control structure for a decade. We should not expect a single retaliatory terrorist assault by “Al-Qa’eda.”...
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Professional Sports, Sport-Betting, and Hypocrisy
Leagues like the NHL have made their moral stances clear—their millionaire star players may not engage in sports gambling, but hockey fans are subjected to over two hours of gambling propaganda during each broadcast.
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Brexit Party Beats the Tories Again
“The main lesson to draw from the Peterborough by-election is that the Brexit Party can wound but it cannot kill.” Thus the London Times, in all its majestic myopia verging on outright blindness. Have the wordsmiths who write its editorials ever heard of “mortal wounds,” or wounds that are so serious they require years in...
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Gibson’s Passion
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ opens in theaters on Ash Wednesday (February 25). It is too early to tell whether Gibson has achieved his aim of creating an artistically compelling account of the last 12 hours of Christ’s life that is also faithful to the Gospels, although those who have previewed the film...
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The Failure of the Canadian Right
The Canadian federal election in October confirmed a long-term, leftward trend in Canadian politics. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface scandal, the Liberals retained power, winning a plurality of 157 out of 338 seats and 33.1 percent of the popular vote. Conservatives won 121 seats (34.4 percent of the vote), gaining truly overwhelming support from...
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The Terrestrial God
It all depends on what we mean by “sacralizing” and “sacred,” and to a lesser extent by “secular.” The fact that Professor McKnight is a student of Eric Voegelin should not be left unmentioned in this regard, because for the recently deceased great scholar, “sacred” remained an elusive term. The word certainly referred to a...
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A Conciliar Critique, Etc.
It is significant but not surprising that Ross Douthat in his book The Decadent Society and reviewer John M. DeJak (“A Decadent Diagnosis,” August 2020 Chronicles) both overlooked the pivotal impact of Vatican II and Catholic social doctrine. These two liberal landmarks changed the religious and cultural focus from duty to freedom; from truth to inclusiveness; from repentance to...
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The Way We Are, No. 5
Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference; that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered ...
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The End of Obamaworld
In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into...
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Who Are the Taxers?
Never say Republicans can’t learn. After losing the presidency in 1992 on the tax issue, they now use euphemisms for their tax hikes and hide the increases with new and improved fiscal gimmickry. In this Congress, the word “reform” has come to be synonymous with a scheme to extract more money from the private sector,...
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The Moral Clarity of the Morally Depraved
Tolerant, kind, generous, forbearing—none of this you’d call our everyday Islamic mass murderer. One thing you may justly call him: discerning. He knows the stakes in the war on terror. He knows the degree to which the Christian, or semi-Christian, West makes impossible the realization of his ideals. Accordingly, he murders explicit Christians, as many...
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Getting Real III: Bribability Without Liability
BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to be a lead story. Naturally it has engendered polemics over who is responsible and a broader discussion of whether offshore drilling should be continued or even increased. On these great issues that agitate NPR listeners and FOX watchers, I have nothing to say. I would,...
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The Struggle for the Gate of Tears
Houthi attacks on Israeli allied vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are disrupting the world economy and prompting the U.S. to intervene. Known as "The Gate of Tears," this strait is the gateway for much of the world's commerce.
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The Day of Conception
In Russia’s Ulyanovsk region, the birthplace of Lenin, the regional government has declared September 12 the “Day of Conception,” throwing in a promise of time off work for couples striving to make that day a success. Such programs have been instituted more frequently since Russian President Vladimir Putin made boosting the country’s birthrate part of...
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Europe’s Ongoing Demise
“The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea,” I observed in these pages in June, as thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants sailed from Libya to Italy day after day. In the intervening four months, in a dramatic development, a new southeastern land route was stormed by a...
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Pleasure-Marrying: The Next Human Right
In my recent piece “Hell-Bent,” one of my overarching themes was that the rush to approve same-sex marriage was really about self-identified “heterosexuals” seeking approval for themselves. Legally sanctioned “gay marriage” is a kind of public proclamation that the constraints of traditional morality do not apply. As if to prove my point, Time‘s new cover story is...
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Tar Heel Dead
“In my honest and unbiased judgment, the Good Lord will place the Garden of Eden in North Carolina, when He restores it to earth. He will do this because He will have so few changes to make in order to achieve perfection.” —Sam J. Ervin Jr. William S. Powell’s magnificent portrayal of an American state...
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A Third Way
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...