Ten people are gathered around the table in a Chicago kitchen. Most of them are Kentuckians who left the farm for the factories during World War II. They brought with them what is called in the country their “ways”—their love of simple food, their attachment to plain music, their conviction that their money, their politics,...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
Post
The Real Saboteurs of a Trump Foreign Policy
The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump. Their investment in the myth is just too huge. For Clinton and her campaign, it is the only way...
Post
U.S. Syria Policy: Incoherent, Reckless
The United States is in danger of descending into the Syrian quagmire. There are clear signs of mission creep devoid of logic or strategic rationale. It is not too late yet to step away from the brink. This would require swift action by President Donald Trump to rein in the war party before it takes...
Post
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
The Soviet Union in 1964 was about the last place on earth where anyone could find respect for traditional ways and reverence for ancestors. For the most part, the thuggish bureaucracy controlling that unlamented establishment exuded an almost eager desire for drabness that was downright studied in its gleeful love ...
Post
A Nation of Davids
” . . . Ahaz . . . did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord . . . he . . . made his son to pass through the fire . . . he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green...
Post
On Intelligence and Race
Samuel Francis is among America’s best publicists. It is thus painful to read his praise (March 1995) of three materialist, pro-robot scientists, particularly the most materialist of the three, for whom civilization is determined by cold versus hot climates and their “cognitive demands.” In Philippe Rushton laudatio, Francis quotes the barbaric passage: “the cognitive demands...
Post
Trouble in Paradise
The origin and nature of the state has been at the heart of political theory from the time of Plato and Aristotle. While speculations about man’s primal innocence in a state of nature cannot be taken seriously as science, they continue to influence political propaganda. Liberal philosophers like Rawls and Nozick continue to write about...
Post
Islamists
Two small additions. First, the powers-that-be insisted upon Islamist as a negative term to distinguish real Muslims who want to kill us for the sake of religion from people who pretend to be Muslims without really having firm convictions. Perhaps we should call them Methodist Muslims or, for AW's sake, ...
Post
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.
Post
Charities Off the Dole
As of June 1, residents of the Land of Lincoln are free to enter into civil unions, which allow same-sex couples to enjoy the benefits, protections, and responsibilities under Illinois law that are granted to spouses. According to the richly appointed homosexual-rights movement that lavished funds and exerted pressure upon the politicians who passed the...
Post
A Prince of Our Disorder
“Very few care for beauty; but anyone can be interested in gossip.” —C.S. Lewis In 1982 The Village Voice published an article accusing the famous Polish emigre writer Jerzy Kosinski of being a fraud. The authors (Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith) argued that Kosinski’s novels had all received extensive and unacknowledged “help” from various editorial...
Post
Hard Cases and Bad Law
During the next four years, the Clinton administration will appoint dozens of federal judges, in addition to (perhaps) two or three Supreme Court Justices. In the confirmation procedures for these individuals, issues of gender politics are likely to predominate. Abortion will obviously be one such question, as may sexual harassment, but we should also hear...
Post
Letter From Central America
World attention focused on Managua several months ago, as leaders of the Socialist world, led by Fidel Castro, converged on Nicaragua for the most stupendous Marxist levee since Ethiopia’s $100 million bash for Colonel Mengistu. Meanwhile, thousands of Nicaraguan campesinos, dubbed “contras” by their enemies, continued to risk their lives in a voluntary, patriotic, and...
Post
Moral Impressionism
Vanilla Sky Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Cameron Crowe Screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on Abre Los Ojos Released by Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures In Vanilla Sky, director Cameron Crowe and producer/actor Tom Cruise have created an American version of Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s 1997 feature, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). I have...
Post
I Was a Stranger, and You Deported Me
In early May, a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table (“EIT”) held a press conference and announced the unleashing of a $250,000 advertising campaign. The goal of this media blitz is to persuade American Christians to support the Gang of Eight’s immigration legislation (The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013). The...
Post
Don’t Have a ‘Merry Little Christmas’
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
Post
Ugly Lessons from Katrina
What are Americans thinking these days? So many seem surprised by what is happening in New Orleans. How could they be? Last year, when hurricanes raked the Gulf Coast, a rural store offered free ice and water and a serious riot erupted in the parking lot where people refused to wait in line. Or take...
Post
Derail Fast Track!
Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP’s declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president. Give us powerful new majorities, said John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and we shall halt these usurpations of Congressional power. And, so,...
Post
The Return of Ethnic Nationalism
In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya. Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya, have been subjected to merciless ...
Post
Things Are Seldom What They Seem
The worldwide economic meltdown has upended many long-held beliefs about how economics and finance really work. Since 2008, a wide assortment of authors has started to question the standard explanations that the economics gurus have been offering us about globalization, free trade, and free markets. The growing controversy is hardly surprising. America’s recession and economic...
Post
Can Trump Still Avoid War With Iran?
President Donald Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. “All of us (should) get together and exchange ideas, respectfully, and come to a consensus–and that should be bipartisan,” says...
Post
Indian as Ecologist
Most of us learned in grammar school, if not before, that the American Indian had a special reverence for nature. He was a kind of proto-ecologist who conserved natural resources, be they trees or beasts, with a religious devotion. I cannot recall the number of times I heard someone repeat, mantra-like, that “The Indian used...
Post
Just War or Just Another War?
Political experts are certain that war with Iraq is on the horizon, though there is some disagreement about how distant that horizon might be. The way the Bush administration and media pundits invoke the words “justice” and “just war” without actually calling attention to the historical criteria for a just war has been disconcerting. The...
Post
Feeling the Effects
Caribbean immigrants in New York City are feeling the effects of several new immigration reform laws. Although New York’s immigration problems are acute—as the rage seen in the Abner Louima torture scandal attests—reform had to come from the federal level, since Mayor Giuliani continues to welcome massive immigration as a boon to the local economy....
Post
Imperfect Redemption
OLD HENRY (2021) Written and Directed by Potsy Ponciroli ◆ Produced by Michael Hagerty and Shannon Houchins ◆ Distributed by Shout! Studios The weight of the past so often looms large in the Western film genre. In classic films like The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952), Ride the High Country (1962), or Unforgiven (1992), the plots...
Post
Thunderbolt Kid
With this book, Chronicles’ capable executive editor contributes to a series for teenagers—seventh grade and older, says the publisher’s website—on successful contemporary writers who have some literary cachet. Since his style in the book is as limpid and straightforward as that of his monthly column, The Rockford Files, it seems that at least one children’s...
Post
American Genius: Carver Skateboards, Skateparks, and Resisting the Joy Killers
Plans to build a skatepark in Brooklyn offer a laudable public works improvement to the city but are still not my style. The freewheeling street surfing possible on a Carver skateboard, however, is as American as it gets.
Post
If We Cared About “Democracy”
Democracy is under attack, we now hear regularly. While Donald Trump, the GOP, and (if you ask Rachel Maddow) the weather have all been identified of late as “threats” to our democracy, the Great Satan is, of course, Russia, pop. 144,498,215. Vlad Putin directs, or winks and nods at, a Red Army of hackers who,...
Post
Inconvenient Children
Never Rarely Sometimes Always Directed and written by Eliza Hittman ◆ Produced by BBC Films ◆ Distributed by Focus Features These Wilder Years (1956) Directed by Roy Rowland ◆ Written by Frank Fenton ◆ Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer In the guise of a documentary treatment of abortion, Never Rarely Sometimes Always tells us quite...
Post
Equal Opportunity and the Limits of Liberalism
The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival in academic political philosophy, particularly in the English-speaking world. A subject which was widely pronounced dead in the 1950’s has recently produced thousands of articles and numerous books of real importance. One indicator of the scale of this revival is the length of a recently published...
Post
The Neocons’ Palin Project
Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin? Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party. In St. Paul, Palin was...
Post
What Is America’s Mission Now?
Informing Iran, “The U.S. is watching what you do,” Amb. Nikki Haley called an emergency meeting Friday of the Security Council regarding the riots in Iran. The session left her and us looking ridiculous. France’s ambassador tutored Haley that how nations deal with internal disorders is not the council’s concern. Russia’s ambassador suggested the United...
Post
In Memoriam: Mary Kohler
Chairman Ray Welder remembers fellow board member and longtime Chronicles supporter Mary Kohler.
Post
Backed Into a Box
Canada’s social engineers got themselves into a box by creating what the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission called in 1967 “an equal partnership between the two founding races.” Descendants of all other immigrants, who until then had thought of themselves as Canadians, were suddenly excluded from the new definition. To placate them, the engineers declared the...
Post
Some Place in Time
“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists...
Post
Muddling the Missile Crisis
The Abyss, a pop history treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, revives unhistorical myths in an effort to chalk the whole thing up to American hysteria, and to portray the bumbling JFK as having masterfully handled the crisis.
Post
The Next Abortion Battle
Abortion opponents in South Dakota had a simple message for voters in the mid-term election: Vote what you know in your heart is right. More than 148,000 people heeded the call, voting to retain a state law that banned virtually all abortions in South Dakota. Their numbers, however, amounted to just 44 percent of the...
Post
Defining Life
The morality of abortion is entirely a matter of definition: is the fetus a person or not? The definition—whether derived from millennia of religious tradition or from individual analysis and subjective choice—both generates and justifies the intense emotions that are given free rein when fact is irrelevant. There is no logical or empirical way to...
Post
The New Imperialism
Martin is a Franciscan lay missionary whom I befriended early in my stay in Tuzla. Over beers at the Harley-Davidson, a bar popular with the international crowd, he explained, “A lot of organizations will be pulling out at the end of the year. This year is real important. If the democracy will hold, it has...
Post
Rubio Rising?
In the Daily Beast, Senior Congressional Correspondent Tim Mak is Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over Marco Rubio’s speech Wednesday before the Council on Foreign Relations: “The student has now become the teacher. “Sen. Marco Rubio, once viewed as a protege of presidential competitor Jeb Bush, schooled the former Florida governor Wednesday evening in the first...
Post
Light Slander, Heavy Artillery
Both of these books are written by young, self-styled conservatives; both demonstrate indisputably the unfounded charges made against the “right” by the media and academics; both easily devastate the biased and factually inaccurate statements about Republicans, conservatives, and the American past and present that emanate from the cultural left. The TV personalities Ann Coulter goes...
Post
The Multicultural Lie
Rockford, Illinois, the home of The Rockford Institute and Chronicles, was established in a series of migratory ripples: first Yankees, then Scots, then Swedes. A later wave of immigration brought many Italians, both from Sicily and Northern Italy. Today, German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in Rockford, as they are in the United States as...
Post
In a Precarious Condition
The NATO airstrikes against the Republic of Yugoslavia have suddenly precipitated us 60 years back. We find ourselves faced with events which strangely resemble the aggression directed by Germany, first against Czechoslovakia, then, with the aid of the Soviet Union, against Poland. It was striking to hear President Bill Clinton compare his “essentially humanitarian” action...
Post
Battle of the Narrative
When a manufacturing company is confronted with the reality of a huge drop in product sales, the initial reaction on the part of the managers is to blame the marketing department and to demand that it come up with a new and more effective advertising campaign. After all, the notion that their air-conditioning units are...
Post
That Bestial Visor
“Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold.” —William Shenstone In the popular memory the interwar years in Western Europe were a period of instability, inertia, and poverty or, as Auden described the 1930’s, “a low dishonest decade.” One seldom hears about the interesting fact that during those interwar years, in...
Post
“OneVoice’s” $350K vs. Sheldon Adelson’s Millions
Srdja Trifkovic discusses Senate probe of “anti-Netanyahu” U.S. Government funds on RT International. In the final few days before the general election in Israel, it was announced that a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee with subpoena powers was investigating the possibility that the Obama administration has aided efforts to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The investigation...
Post
Sublime Misrule
X.J. Kennedy can be said almost to be a popular literary figure. (A New Jersey native, Joseph Charles Ken-nedy, born in 1929, adopted his pen name upon settling in Massachusetts.) This is not at all to say that he belongs to popular, or mass, culture. But his accomplishments in verse have been widely recognized, and deservedly...
Post
Surfing the Void
There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s powerful and haunting antiwar film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), in which Ron Kovic’s mother is bending down before the television (this is B.R.—before the remote) and wincing. It is the Fourth of July, 1969, and long-haired antiwar protesters are surging through the capital with angry...
Post
Wir Schaffen Das
“Wir schaffen das”: I admire the cool cheek of Boris Johnson. He spoke those loaded words to Angela Merkel, who had famously spoken them in defence of her open invitation to a million migrants. The massed ranks of the German Press corps were slow to take it in, and there was a brief pause. Then...