Taki recalls the heroic French aristocrat Geneviève de Galard and her selfless service following the fall of Dien Bien Phu.
10957 search results for: Post-Human Future
Post
A Nation at War With Itself
President Donald Trump has decided to cease cooperating with what he sees, not incorrectly, as a Beltway conspiracy that is out to destroy him. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are out to win in 2020.” Thus the Treasury Department just breezed by a deadline from...
Post
Politics Are Killing Medicine
Recently I needed to visit the Urgent Care Center here in Front Royal, Virginia. I have gone there two or three times over the past four years, usually waiting around 15 minutes to see a doctor or a nurse. This time the woman at the front desk told me my wait would be between three...
Post
Switzerland and Its Armed Citizenry
Since the origins of the Swiss Confederation in 1291, it has been the duty of every male Swiss citizen to be armed and to serve in the militia. Today, that arm is an “assault rifle,” which is issued to every Swiss male and which must be kept in the home. During Germany’s Third Reich (1933-1945),...
Post
McDumb and Dumber
With more and better fast-food choices available than ever before, why do Americans continue to reward the mediocrity that is McDonald’s?
Post
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...
Post
Human Comedy
American playwrights handle comedy better than tragedy, at least if this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville is any gauge. Richard Strand’s farce of corporate ladderclimbing, The Death of Zukavsky, and Jane Martin’s broad comedy about lady wrestlers, Cementville, were the two high points of the festival, and even...
Post
Intelligent Design
Intelligent design had its day in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the result was sadly predictable. So was the reaction to it. The evolutionist and atheist left ballyhooed the decision as another victory for science over superstition, and for the separation of Church and state. The intelligent-design crowd vowed to continue fighting, and talk radio...
Post
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,”...
Post
History as Paranoia
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
Post
Trump’s China Problem
In the course of this year President Donald Trump will improve America’s relations with Russia. He will also start purging the irredeemably politicized U.S. intelligence apparatus. The hysteria of recent weeks will be seen—a year from now—as a bizarre footnote to a failed presidency. The “dossier” concocted by a British dirty tricks purveyor hired to...
Post
Our Pushover President
Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...
Post
La Virgen de Guadalupe: Sent Back to Mexico?
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has spilled the beans: She intends to “liberate” Christians, which means Latinos, from their self-imposed delusion—which, surely, is Christianity and belief in God. Mrs. Clinton’s strategy not only calls for undermining Christian-inspired organizations and businesses but aims to “privatize” religion entirely. The best way to achieve these objectives, as revealed in...
Post
Time and the Cross
“[They] assemble before daylight and recite by turns a form of words to Christ as god. I discovered nothing else than a perverse and extravagant superstition.” –Pliny the Younger The New Testament is not a book. In common with the Old Testament, to which it can in some ways be regarded as an appendix, like the Apocrypha,...
Post
The Education of W
It sounds presumptuous, but I wish I had written this column in October 2002, and some eagle-eyed George W. Bush assistant would have noticed it and shown it to his moron boss. Let’s just play the What If game for a minute. Had the moron read it and taken what I’m about to write into...
Post
Teenagers and Lower Forms of Life
While Teen Wolf was opening this past summer in 1,500 theaters. Kiss of the Spider Woman found only 15 receptive movie houses. This may seem odd, given that Teen Wolf is a formula flick, a werewolf comedy in which Lon Chancy Jr. would’ve felt at home, while Kiss of the Spider Woman is “Cinema” writ...
Post
Claudine Gay Is Not a Martyr
The disgraced former president of Harvard University is representative of the DEI regime and the massive undertaking it will be to dismantle it.
Post
Campus Terror
At 3:00 p.m. on February 14, I was sitting in the political-science graduate assistants’ office in DuSable Hall at Northern Illinois University. Ten of us were chatting, waiting for 3:30 classes. At 3:10, my friend’s cell phone rang. “Joe just called,” she said after hanging up, her face ashen and her eyes wide. “He says...
Post
“Banding” Together
Race-norming’s likeliest successor is something called “banding.” If you see references to a “diversity-based sliding band,” do not expect to encounter something as agreeable as a Dixieland ensemble. No, the term is only a euphemism for the latest subterfuge to scuttle rank-order selection of top scorers on tests for hiring and promotion. It’s better, you...
Post
The Right That Is Left
The so-called University of Austin, founded by Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, is an attempt to create a safe space for a renamed left that has rebaptized itself as the moderate right.
Post
Have a Good Day
After the initial horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, official reactions were certain to be heavy-handed, and a great many reasonable people were likely to be swept along with the draconian countermeasures proposed. We should not be surprised about the sweeping nature of the so-called “counterterrorist” laws suggested this spring, which included the inevitable package...
Post
Birthplace of GM
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...
Post
Affirmative Action in the Arts
Affirmative Action Art is all the rage in California. Recently, the California Arts Council decided that, because of ”social conditions which have historically denied some groups access to the mainstream and . . . complicated patterns of cultural bias,” race-blind awarding procedures were no longer adequate. A new “cultural outreach” was called for with hundreds...
Post
Open Borders Subject Women and Girls in the U.S. to Rapes and Wanton Violence
Dangerous anti-female attitudes are invading our country because of open borders.
Post
Accidents & Ignorance
A. J. P. Taylor: A Personal History; Atheneum; New York. With the exception of Edward Gibbon, there have been few great historians who have written their autobiographies. The reason for this should be fairly clear. While some historians, such as Macaulay or Mommsen, led interesting lives, and some, such as Lewis Namier, are interesting...
Post
Lest We Forget the Evil Empire
As long as the Soviet Union existed, voices were heard in the United States favoring peaceful co-existence with the socialist bloc, pushing for unilateral reduction in the country’s defense expenditures, and protesting the development of nuclear weapons. Some of those voices were well-meaning and naive, while others were serving a “higher” purpose. Seeking to replace...
Post
Law &/or Order—February 2010
PERSPECTIVE Print the Legend by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Great American Outlaw by Roger D. McGrath On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. NEWS Conservative Leninists and the War on Terror by Ted Galen Carpenter REVIEWS A Huge and Healthy Pessimism by Jack Trotter John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism plus Clark Stooksbury on Chris Hedges' ...
Post
Zebra Killings
Whenever whites commit crimes against blacks, the dastardly deeds make headlines and are featured on nightly news programs. The president wrings his hands and makes speeches about racism. The Promise Keepers hug one another, cry, and confess to a newly minted transgression, the “sin of racism.” Western Europeans look down their long noses at us. ...
Post
What? Are You Crazy?
A nationwide initiative has been quietly in the making since 2002. Conceived in Texas, apparently with President George W. Bush’s enthusiastic blessing, there are now some 27 sites around the country piloting various parts of it. Nationally, however, the proposed legislation earned barely a blip on the radar screen—the project is so hush-hush that two officials...
Post
Derek Chauvin: The Great White Defendant
In the brilliant novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” author Tom Wolfe describes what he calls the intense media interest in covering “The Great White Defendant.” A review of “Bonfire” explains: The overarching theme of the book is the search for the great white defendant. The vast majority of defendants in New York City are...
Post
Judge Roy Moore vs. the ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Roy S. Moore, the Etowah County (Alabama) Circuit Judge, for having the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom and for beginning each session with a prayer, on the usual grounds that a “wall of separation” stands between government and religion. Judge Moore agrees—up to a point....
Post
Beyond the “Strategic Partnership”
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...
Post
Notes on Noir
I’m watching lot of film noir lately, from the 1940s (the style persisted through the 1950s, so there’s much more to be seen), and wondering about noir in general. What is “pure” film noir? Why is film noir so enduringly popular? I answer my first question easily, though I suspect hardly to anyone else’s content,...
Post
Fighting Terrorism
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism. In the first episode, the ...
Post
The Most Odious Form of Abortion
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...
Post
The Anti-Philosophy of Richard Rorty
On the bookstore magazine rack were several copies of Dissent. The cover piqued my interest because it advertised an article by Richard Rorty, an academic philosopher and a professor of mine at Princeton in 1977. Rorty’s contribution to Dissent, part of a multi-author retrospective on the impeachment of President Clinton appearing in the Spring 1999...
Post
The New Blacklist
My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end. After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous. The calls for my firing began almost immediately...
Post
Clint and the GOP
Poor Clint Eastwood. Like most film actors, the man is a fool, and like most entertainment celebrities, he has no idea how foolish he is. I suppose few of us could resist the temptation to believe the praise that is lavished on our every grunt or belch, and it is no reflection, personally, on...
Post
Secret Sharers
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...
Post
A “Constitutional Crisis”
The impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton poses a serious threat to the prosperity of our economy, the stability of our government, and the peace of the entire world. That, more or less, is the line being taken by the Democratic leadership. Whatever Messrs. Gephardt, Daschle, and Moynihan may think privately of the President’s fitness to...
Post
Why Russia and China Are More Conservative Than the West
Despite their Communist past and present, Russia and China are demonstrably more conservative in many ways than present-day, self-hating America.
Post
Teachers and Parents
Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current traumas of education proceed...
Post
That’s Life: The Changing Face of Board Games
On the first page of The Death of the West, Patrick Buchanan proclaims that “America has undergone a cultural and social revolution.” He argues that opinions, beliefs, and values have, in the last generation, been altered by elites using TV, the arts, educational institutions, and various avenues of entertainment to transmit their ideas. One of...
Post
The Romantic Revival
The first thing to say about the Romantic Revival is that the phrase itself is a bit ambiguous, though I haven’t meant to be misleading. Romanticism originally had an aspect of revival of the medieval, as in the Gothic revival and the revival of medieval romance. And the phrase could also denote the return to...
Post
Hardened Line
Vladimir Putin, prodded by a reporter’s question regarding the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, remarked that Russia, for “economic and political” reasons, “has no interest in the defeat of the United States.” Putin’s comments were seen by Russian media observers as a sign that the Kremlin had come full circle on the Iraq question. ...
Post
To Lose a War
President George W. Bush’s highly anticipated prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America was supposed to be nonpartisan and conciliatory. It offered him an opportunity to present mature thoughts on one of the most momentous events in this country’s history, to correct several manifest flaws in his conceptual approach...
Post
Too Much Monkey Business: Inherit the Agitprop
Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination. Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another Humpty Dumpty? The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of...
Post
The Banality of Fiction
It’s Sunday morning in London. The Sunday Times is here. (Yes, we too have a Sunday Times.) The “Week in Review” section is nice and fat. (Yes, it’s nice and fat here, too.) Headline: “End Game: Why the Soviets are pulling out of Afghanistan.” Photo of Najibullah, photo of Gorbachev, photo of two smiling soldiers....
Post
Neocon Nightmare
I have a recurring nightmare in which the war criminals who lied us into Iraq reappear to mock the hundreds of thousands they murdered in cold blood, repeating the same lies, the same rationalizations, the same mindless slogans that lured us into that hellhole to begin with. Bill Kristol, the Kagan clan, the Israel Firsters,...