Like the mindless day traders of the 1990’s who piled into the same hot internet stocks, today’s commentators on the causes of 2008’s residential-real-estate implosion have exhibited a similar obtuseness regarding the workings of financial markets. One will search in vain for any article that identifies a party other than Wall Street or large commercial...
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...
It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime’s lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the “surge” is working. Launched last year, the “surge” was the extra 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would...
“Fame is a calamity.” —Turkish Proverb The face is familiar, but not the gray hair. To some few, it may be so from Our Gang shorts from the late 30’s and early 40’s, known by the moniker of Mickey Gubitosi. To others, it is the face of Bobby Blake of “Red Ryder” westerns and Humoresque...
It seems that Rich Lowry has taken time off from castigating Donald Trump and calling for the prompt removal of Confederate memorial monuments to compose an entire book making “the case for nationalism.” A media launch was provided by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who gave Lowry ample time on his widely watched program to expatiate on...
The Last Confederate Produced by Strongbow Pictures Directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams Written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams Firetrail Produced by Forbesfilm Written and directed by Christopher Forbes Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and...
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...
A generation arose and took its place in the life of Russia, which did witness Boris Nemtsov as a political heavyweight. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, vice-premier, who was seen as an heir to Yeltsin, breathtaking ascension in his political career, and an ability to make country-wide policy—all this left Boris Nemtsov together...
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...
I arrived in Poland just as the television announced the tragic death of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many of Poland’s military and political leaders in an airplane crash at Smolensk in Russia. A week of mourning followed throughout the entire country. The president had been traveling to Smolensk for a joint commemoration...
Say what you will about President Joe Biden, he has stuck to his guns on ending America’s 20-year involvement in Afghanistan’s forever war. His decision not to delay our departure after Aug. 31 was fortified by hard intel that the terrorist ISIS-K was preparing attacks at Kabul airport. Thursday evening, the two bomb attacks occurred....
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. ...
This September marks 16 years since the fateful day we simply call 9/11, when 19 Islamic jihadists caused the deaths of some 3,000 people in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Less than a month after that horrible day, Operation Enduring Freedom began, as the United States invaded the “land of the Pashtuns,” Afghanistan. We’re still...
Cultural genocide is a legal term sometimes used to describe the planned destruction of an ethnic or religious identity. The English, in solidifying control over their islands, did their best to obliterate the historical memory of Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics, and the national socialists of Bill Clinton’s party are doing the same thing here...
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...
The horse went down on a horizontal stretch of trail where no sound horse had any business stumbling. The quadrupe-dal rhythm broke suddenly, his near shoulder crumpled, his head sank at the end of the black-maned neck, until the horse seemed to be wanting to kneel and kiss the ground. I let out rein and...
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,...
Matt Walsh, famed for questioning leftists on gender, now questions leftists on race in his wildly popular documentary, "Am I a Racist?"
To judge from its title, we could reasonably expect this book to be about the growing gulf between women and men. Yet Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College, spends much of the book reciting differences between the sexes that have always existed. With cumbersome detail (as if imparting new and fresh...
A few years after he was removed from office in 1890, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.” At present, the Iron Chancellor’s dictum is applicable to the entire planet. The most important event by far this year has been Europe’s...
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...
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) just reported that U.S. banks lost money at a $100 billion annualized rate during the fourth quarter of 2008. Sounds grim, but it only describes the visible part of the iceberg our financial Titanic has hit. AIG, a giant insurance company, alone has been covered by the Federal Reserve...
Trump has taken massive hits for his years in public service. Now he’s survived an assassination attempt and got up and walked away. He is a legend.
Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) Basilica draws your eyes from every point in Paris. The white Romano-Byzantine domes of this marvelous church dominate the skyline of the grittier neighborhoods of northern Paris. Observed from atop the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur’s domes seem to levitate above Paris. I decided to save Sacré Coeur for my last...
Before World War II, airplanes were something of an oddity in the skies over Framalopa. We would stop and gaze at a Piper Cub chugging along through air, occasionally cutting its motor and gliding for a few seconds while we held our breath. I can’t recall ever seeing a commercial airliner winging its way from...
My friend (and onetime fellow Episcopalian) David Mills speaks dryly, slyly, of the Episcopal Church’s “usual irrelevance” in “Pulling the Trigger” (Vital Signs, March). Well, you know, the question is: “relevant” to what? In this present case, to the received Christian Faith? Ha and double-ha. Stand Christian morality on its head, as did the Episcopal...
“This was a recognition of American terrorists.” That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined. Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing...
The much-ballyhooed young conservative movement of the early 1980’s may soon come to an inglorious and grinding halt. While the early 80’s were marked by a certain gusto on the part of conservatives fighting to overthrow entrenched liberals, the middle 80’s are a time of unwarranted complacency. One can almost hear cries of “Reagan is...
Those earnest “neoliberals” at the Washington Monthly have again gotten religion, which, every few years, seems to be their wont. The putative convert this time is Amy Waldman, who writes that the left (her term) has needlessly neglected to “draw on a religious tradition” when trying to persuade others to support its political program. The...
NATO has three new members: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The event has taken place at a time when Europe is as stable and unthreatened as it has ever been in history. The Russians—regardless of political persuasion—are profoundly disturbed at the shift eastwards of the limit of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, which postulates that...
Basque nationalists are on the move. Despite the vigilance of the French and Spanish authorities, the Basques have carried out a fierce summer offensive, the latest stage in a clash between nationalism and federal police power. But there is no sign that Europe’s leaders can cope with this latest nationalist upsurge. Following a couple of...
John Stuart Mill woke up one morning and had this overwhelming feeling that the “answer to the question of the ages” had come to him in the middle of the night. But he forgot what it was. He then placed a quill and paper next to his bed, and a few mornings later he awoke...
When he was younger, my son would pipe up from time to time with what he called “Scott’s rules to live by,” his distinctly personal little life guides. My all-time favorite, arrived at when he was seven, was “Never get your hair cut by a man named Buster.” But the tidbit I would ponder most...
I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat. The snakeskin titles of mining claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. —Stephen Vincent Benet, American Names My family used to live in a mountain valley near a mining community in the wilds...
Right wing politicos should focus on protecting alternative networks and institutions from the current, corrupt regime. As for scaling down or ousting said regime, that's not happening.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, brilliant laissez-faire economist of 18th-century France, said that interventions by the government to protect consumers “would be like wanting it to provide cushions for all the children who might fall.” If he were alive today, wouldn’t he be amused to learn that a sober (?) New Jersey legislature (Cultural Revolutions, March...
Public trust doctrine is the latest rage among law professors with a radical agenda. It challenges private ownership of natural resources and believes the state has the right to claim title to those resources in the name of the people. As Professor Robert I. Reis at the University of Buffalo School of Law notes, this...
If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him. Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many enemies for his...
The Mercy Killing of Socialism, launched so hopefully throughout Central and Eastern Europe in 1991, has failed. Most visibly, Polish voters returned the communists to parliamentary control in 1993, while Russia swung toward a version of National Socialism. Even in the smaller but symbolically important nation of Sweden, the “conservative revolt” sparked by right-wing election...
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook...
Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I’d have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old daughter is the apple of my eye. I want her to live in a society that is moral and free, that looks as much as possible like the old American Republic, unsubverted by the welfare-warfare state and its allied...
Writers of worthwhile biographies must not only research their facts carefully, they must also highlight the moral, imaginative, or philosophic significance of their subjects’ lives. Both James Grant’s Bernard Baruch and Stanley Jackson’s J.P. Morgan are well researched and clearly written, but both fail to tell us why we should care about either of these...
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
This book seems to be a coffee-table job for golfers, and no doubt there are many who will enjoy it that way. Some may even fancy that they will learn something about golf from it, but I think that something will be limited. No, this openly closed book reveals nothing that was not for years...
Michael Novak has repeatedly argued (recently, in a lecture here at Elizabethtown College) that our economic system is “permanently attached to a Judeo-Christian culture,” but history suggests otherwise. Although capitalism developed within a Christian culture, it has also actively undermined that culture’s moral and spiritual foundations, as the use of the market by the entertainment...
What price would you place upon your soul? For the people of Mississippi, this question recently became more than a mere philosophical or theological inquiry. True enough, all of us face this question in small, unnoticed ways as we move through life. Thankfully, most of us can make our choice quietly, in private, and away...
The debate over illegal immigration has become more about entertaining people than solving problems, as both the right and the left tee up tired, old arguments that miss the point.
The expansion of NATO has been hotly debated by American conservatives. As a conservative Catholic Pole living in Poland, I am obviously interested in this debate, not least because Poland and America are part of the same civilization. Any matter of importance to either nation has to be seen within a wider context of the...