How well I remember, 40 years ago, prowling in the stacks of a college library and reading the books, observing museum pieces in the halls of that library, and attending concerts in the auditorium next door. Glenn Gould showed up to play the Goldberg Variations, Jerome Hines to sing, and Wolfgang Schneiderhan to play Vivaldi...
The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state. The U.S. government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest...
The fiscal 1991 budget proposed by President Bush totaled some $1.2 trillion. This prodigious amount, larger than the entire Gross National Product of twenty years ago, is considered a “tight budget” in Washington. Politicians complain that they cannot find enough money to finance programs, while the hunt has been on to find programs to cut...
When a forgery is uncovered or a plagiarized volume appears or a fake letter is adduced to support a mediocre manuscript, cries are sent forth that there is a need for tighter security by publishers. This is often coupled with a complaint that authors should scrutinize themselves more carefully. The burden of my remarks is...
Margaret Thatcher enjoyed being who she was. She did not think of this inner bounce as a gift of fortune but as a virtue, as obligatory self-respect. She was a patriot and a Tory in that way. The party was her milieu—the people whose self-respect resembled her own and supported it. The country, too, was...
One week before last Christmas, the U.S. State Department fast-tracked four European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) projects in Serbia, which consisted of a loan to HVB Banka Serbia; an equity investment in Syntaxis Mezzanine Fund I; an equity investment in South Eastern Energy Capital; and a loan to Danube Group Holding of Serbia,...
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of...
Flint, Michigan, is the birthplace of both General Motors and the United Auto Workers union (UAW), which makes the recent demise of Buick City, its last automobile assembly plant, more than a little ironic. In June, GM closed Buick City, idling 2,200 hourly workers at a plant that once employed 28,000 building Buick LeSabres and...
Andrew Lytle lives in a log house on the Assembly Grounds in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is a busy area in summer, but in the wintertime most of the other houses are closed, and he has few immediate neighbors. The house is built on a cross plan and has somewhat unusually high ceilings. Most often Mr....
Jessie and Kirk Dawson were in their late 20’s when they I moved into Grove Glen, and Fred Glover’s wife Eva saw at once that they needed work. This was a tight community, not the kind two kids could walk into cold, so Eva took it as her responsibility. She was, after all, the boss’s...
Dangerous anti-female attitudes are invading our country because of open borders.
“How shameless and how greedy all these people are!” —Fyodor Dostoevsky Once there were three finance firms and then there were none. One was a Ponzi scheme, one a tax fraud, and the last was sold to American Express for $380 million. One CEO is broke and in jail; one is a wealthy fugitive from...
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are so...
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its politics. The secessionist spirit is spreading on the left and in leftist portions of the...
This next week may determine whether President Trump extricates us from that cauldron of conflict that is the Middle East, as he promised, or plunges us even deeper into these forever wars. Friday will see the sixth in a row of weekly protests at the Gaza border fence in clashes that have left 40 Palestinians...
In one of the most important acts of his Presidency, on Sept. 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump announced his pick to fill the United States Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court has recently been divided 4-4 in terms of judicial philosophy, with Justices Ginsburg, Stephen...
Now that the American empire has become explicitly leftist—committed to gay rights, feminism, abortion, and “democracy”—the left has become bloodthirsty cheerleaders for its wars.
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
Coincidence is the smile of luck, but it is also the laughter of misfortune. A smile is singular, rather like tears; it appears meaningful insofar as it seems to have a precipitant cause. Laughter, by contrast, is repetitive and mechanical; automatons may laugh, but they can scarcely be imagined smiling. Thus, hysterical laughter is common...
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
After centuries of delusion that white people ever accomplished anything worth doing, Euro-Americans are finally learning to grapple with just how worthless they really are. Last November, a conference of the Brahmins of “Afrocentrism” in Atlanta devoted all of a weekend to expounding the much-trumpeted insights that it was really Africans who built the pyramids,...
The partial birth abortion of late-term fetuses is the most odious form of abortion, known as “dilatation and extraction” (D & X). The procedure, fully and gruesomely described in the major media and on the floor of Congress earlier this year, when President Clinton vetoed the bill that would have banned D & X, involves...
The catastrophic burst of the housing bubble in the fall of 2008 shook the foundations of the world economy and instilled a fear of a new depression. Morris Dickstein notes with irony that he completed his cultural history of the Great Depression just as the country was entering a steep recession with parallels to the...
Last Wednesday China completed a major naval exercise in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. On July 3 it was reported that China was testing a new naval helicopter which “could fill a big gap” in its expanding fleet. Over the weekend, Australian media reported that the country’s navy was monitoring a Chinese...
Reading Joseph Blotner’s biography revives my memories of Robert Penn Warren. I was summoned to his rooms at Silliman College on September 5, 1969. I was a freckled, red-haired 18-year-old in whom he may have seen an apparition from his past. “Show me the poems you wrote this summer,” he demanded. I produced a sheaf...
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee from Patrick O’Brian’s novels The Last Samurai Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Edward Zwick Screenplay by John Logan Magisterial sea yarner Patrick...
I enjoyed Mark Winchell’s “Tracts Against Capitalism” (Vital Signs, January) when it presented facts regarding the Agrarians, but I must take issue with a number of his opinions. Peaceful Valley residents have more than two options regarding Wal-Mart. They could, for example, form a corporation (non-profit or otherwise) to buy the land in question, or...
Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant. Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media, the leadership of both parties, the entire...
Lying With Pictures In any shopping mall, on any day, you can see a grizzling kid yearning for the chocolate-covered candy bar that his/her cruel mother is withholding from the distraught child. You can take a photo of this distressing scene but will not expect to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, or whatever touches the...
Like many Englishmen of his generation, Charles Darwin in his youth was an avid reader of William Paley’s The Evidences of Christianity (1794). As Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he lost his faith in Paley’s argument that nature manifests God’s wisdom and foresight. “The old argument from design in nature,” he wrote in his’...
Just seven weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Among the largest spending bills in history, it was passed without the vote of a single Republican. The plan sent direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, extended a $300 per week unemployment insurance boost until Sept. 6...
A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sin, but his own. —North Carolina newspaper, 1854 Powerful ornary stock, George, powerful ornary. —”Sut Lovingood” on the Puritan Yankee If a person lives...
Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008. While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...
After some years of ecclesiastical combat (Episcopal battlefield), I think I know why so many conservative Christians do not respond to liberalism as strongly as one would expect. They think that liberals are just cheating: that they know the rules, but like spoiled and willful children have decided to play by rules they like better....
Following the 1862 battle at Perryville, the angry Unionists who held the Kentucky town declined to bury their slain foes. When the stench and sight of wild hogs gorging themselves on corpses finally proved unbearable, the task of laying the dead to rest fell upon one Henry P. Bottom, the secessionist upon whose once-prosperous farm...
President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...
Emerald Robinson recently wrote a witty piece for The American Spectator puncturing the pomposity of the Never Trump wing of the conservative movement. At least one member of that wing, the thin-skinned Jonah Goldberg, now the holder of the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute,” was not amused, and he let...
The American dollar will be displaced as the global reserve currency by 2040, and the unipolar superpower of the United States will be but one player in a multipolar world.
Betsy Clarke’s informative and readable review of In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Chronicles, Nov. 1985) raised the question of how we ought to regard homosexuality. Talking of the homosexuals on parade in Jhabvala’s novel, Clarke writes, “By stressing the fact that fathers were absent from the early homes of these...
Michael New, the 22-year-old Army medic who faces a bad conduct discharge for refusing to wear the United Nations uniform, may well lose his fight to clear his record. He was court-martialed and convicted in January, and it seems unlikely the Army court will reverse that decision. At issue is his refusal to wear the...
Edmund Burke warned that the state seeking to re-order society tends to destroy the natural associations that alone make people decent citizens.
PERSPECTIVE Freedom of Conscience by Thomas Fleming Politics and ancient traditions. VIEWS With Malice Toward Many by Tom Landess Washington, Lincoln, and God. The Conversion of a Culture by Harold O.J. Brown Crisis and revolution. Dobson's Choice by Aaron D. Wolf Politics and the spirit of martyrdom. Throne and Altar by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. Imposing ...
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
Sam Pickering (born 1941) recently retired from professing English—mostly, it would appear, creative writing. Oh! “Beware! Beware! . . . Weave a circle round him thrice / . . . / For he on honey-dew hath fed / and drunk the milk of paradise.” If Coleridge had not crafted his magical lines for a figure...
There was a time when National Review had standards and vauled decorum. No more. In his zeal to take down Ron Paul, David Frum has approvingly cited and linked to a piece describing Ron Paul as
The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001. Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces. President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...
The New York State public restroom equality law, popularly being referred to as “the potty parity act,” is no laughing matter. Rather, it takes away gains achieved by men in their long struggle, starting with the establishment of the first public restroom, to receive some degree of compensation for past inequities. The purpose of the...
“Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.” —Friedrich von Hardenberg John Betjeman’s evocative and educative television programs and his uniquely readable poetry have left an indelible image in the British public mind—of a jolly, witty, and eccentric man, ambling around Britain’s cities and countryside, pointing out hitherto unnoticed details of hitherto underappreciated buildings...