Friday, September 16 The Paul and I are on the radio at 3 (CDT), but I’m not sure what we do next Friday when I will have just finished cena in Siracusa. Anyone catch Pat Robertson’s words of wisdoms on why it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s because they are more...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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A Tale of Two Elections
Despite a surge of popular support for right-wing parties in Britain and France, this summer's elections ended with an effective containment of the right that will last for years to come.
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Stop Importing Ungrateful, Spoiled Criminals
If one valid criticism of American society is that our high standard of living had made our population lazy, entitled, and unappreciative, then why are we importing so many new people with the same qualities?
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Driving Miss Racial Activist
At first blush, the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy seems innocuous. Its plot centers around the relationship of an aging Jewish matron, Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), and her black chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). Yet a recent rewatch caused me to notice irksome elements of the plot I missed the first time around. This has...
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Is It Jaw-Jaw or War With Iran?
“Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” is attributed, wrongly, say some historians, to Winston Churchill. Still, the words lately came to mind. While last week ended with a hopeful U.S.-Iranian prisoner exchange that was hailed by President Donald Trump—”Thank you to Iran for a very fair negotiation. See, we can make a deal together”—a few days...
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: The Neo-Nazis’ Charm Offensive
The radical organization “Right Sector” is the hidden force behind the armed overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych. Even the openly neo-nazi political party “Svoboda” led by the urologist-turned-aspiring fuhrer Oleh Tyahnybok seems almost respectable, compared to the militant thugs of “Right Sector”. That has not prevented such diverse media outlets as New York Times and Steve...
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Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic and War
Twenty-five years ago when I was a schoolteacher in an Afghan mountain valley I came across a book by an English pedagogue called Teaching English Under Difficult Circumstances. I was reminded of that title as I read this informative monograph by Middle East commentator Antony Sullivan. His short book might have been subtitled, “Teaching the...
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Media Metaphysics and Mid-Term Results
American elections are difficult enough to interpret in Presidential years. In by-election years, like 1986, political analyses assume the proportions of tea-leaf readings—or so television network analyses would seem to suggest. Faced with complex nonreductionistic information, the media resorted to metaphysical quick-fixes to explain complicated events. The U.S. Senate was recaptured by the Democratic Party,...
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The Victory of Unvanquished Losers
The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Peter Wyden; Simon and Schuster; New York. History has not been kind to the radical left, not because modern revolutions have invariably failed, but because they have frequently succeeded. So deplorable has been the record of revolutions in power that those who...
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The Straussian Sidestep
Dr. Germana Paraboschi’s Leo Strauss e la destra americana (Leo Strauss and the American Right) is one of the few serious studies of the American right to come out of Italy. Dr. Paraboschi is a young scholar, born in Milan in 1961 and now living just outside Pavia. She spent several years in the United...
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Threats That Cannot Be Ignored
While some communities—such as Portland, Oregon, and Birmingham, Alabama—report making progress toward police and community mental-health cooperation to reduce incidents of deadly violence, the complexities of aberrant behavior will continue to vex us until citizens and public officials are willing to intervene to prevent the violence. That is especially true when evidence clearly demonstrates that...
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Mormon Apocalypse, Part 1
America is special. America has a mission. America is a beacon of liberty. America, God shed His grace on thee. We call it American exceptionalism—the belief that, from among the countries of the world, the United States of America has been uniquely called by God to be X. ...
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On ‘Enemies of Society’
Professor Arthur Eckstein’s fine review of Pete Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (August 1989) calls attention to the fact that the revolutionaries of the 60’s turned themselves into the professors of the 70’s and the deans of the 80’s. Why? Because the universities in the 1960’s were expanding. So...
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Mr. Lincoln’s War An Irrepressible Conflict?
“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions … are the...
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A Strange Romance This Was
Effie Gray Produced by Sovereign Films Directed by Richard Laxton Screenplay by Emma Thompson Distributed by Adopt Films The only reason for making a movie centered on Euphemia Gray (Dakota Fanning) is sex. Or, rather its absence. This story of Effie, the first and only wife of the magisterially influential Victorian art critic and theorist...
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When 007 is caught with a smoking gun,
What do you do? The is the question that everyone should have been asking from the first news of Raymond Allen Davis's arrest in Pakistan three weeks ago. Mr. Davis, after shooting and killing two Pakistanis, was put under arrest. The US immediately demanded his release, claiming diplomatic immunity and ...
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The Last Thing on Anyone’s Mind
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live, high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One, a German, is straight out of central casting of a Panzer commander; the other, an Englishman, more P.G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both...
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Did Putin Order the Salisbury Hit?
Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England. But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit. “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on...
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Light at the End of the Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent...
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Secrets of the Muddled East
The struggles of the Middle East cannot be summarized or dismissed in chalking it all up to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There’s much more at play in the region.
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Iraq’s Collapse
The war in Iraq’s outcome was never in doubt, but the magnitude and speed of the Iraqi regime’s collapse are nevertheless puzzling and deserve closer scrutiny. In terms of numbers and available equipment, the Iraqi military was theoretically a foe worthy of respect. Its past performance was by no means abysmal. It suffered serious reverses...
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Return to Boonville
This is a story of a place, of joy and regret, and of a deed so romantic and so rare as to border on the fantastical. In the early fall of 1955, my father, a physician who had just completed an internship and a year of residency in family practice, moved our growing family from...
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Sixteen Hundred Years
When a civilization nearly two millennia in the building comes to an end, common decency requires that the world take note of its passing. For if ordinary people, born only to die in much less than a century, deserve a proper burial, what obsequies arc owing to a way of forming society and living life...
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More Great American Inventions
The Book of Moroni. Replacing the White Man’s Burden with the Multicultural Gender-Neutral Burden. The Lincoln cult. Politicians and journalists guaranteed to have integrity—they tell you so themselves. Deification of “education.” Along with the belief that all students are, or can be, above average. Disguising professional athletes as “students.” The infomercial. (Actually, a commenter on...
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Reattacking Leviathan
In 1989, Russell Kirk recalled browsing through the library at Michigan State College as an “earnest sophomore” over 50 years earlier. It was there that he happened upon Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan. “It was written eloquently,” Kirk notes, “and for me it made coherent the misgivings I had felt concerning the political notions...
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Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima, the jovial and plump woman who for decades graced the pancake mix cartons, was replaced a few years ago by a younger, slimmer figure, who was nevertheless identifiable as someone who could have been the niece of the original. Now Betty Crocker, the blonde, blue-eyed cook of cake mix fame, is to be...
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Hakeem Jeffries Becomes Historic
The ascent of an anti-white egalitarian to House Democratic Leader shows that the American left intends to double-down on racial politics.
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The Roots of America’s Mentally Ill Homelessness Crisis
The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has intensified the homelessness crisis across American cities.
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The Making of an Individualist
“To be merely queer is no achievement, but to be brilliantly individualistic is a fine art which Geneva brought to perfection,” wrote Warren Hunting Smith, who died last November at the age of 93. Mr. Smith lived something of a double life. He was an editor of the Yale Edition of the Horace Walpole correspondence,...
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Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York. Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a decade of relentless Soviet arms acquisition, righteous notables in the West chant for a (virtually unilateral) freeze...
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Fantastic Allegations
I am the author of the books They Were White and They Were Slaves and Judaism Discovered. After accurately stating those facts in the June 2010 Chronicles, Scott P. Richert proceeded to pen a farrago of pseudobiography (“You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh,” Rockford Files), stating that this writer received a $40,000 contract from “School...
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Seeing the Wizard Off
A historical sense can be a wonderful thing to have. Not long ago, for instance, someone reminded me that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Inquisition was going full tilt. When Islam gets to be two thousand years old, he suggested, maybe it’ll be as guilt-ridden and effete as Christianity has...
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Is Hillary Morally Unfit to Be President?
Does Hillary Clinton possess the integrity and honesty to be president of the United States? Or are those quaint and irrelevant considerations in electing a head of state in 21st-century America? These are the questions put on the table by the report from FBI Director James Comey on what his agents unearthed in their criminal...
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Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
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Franky, Ma’am
You know someone is old enough to remember, let’s say, the Kennedy assassination when he shudders as some lout on TV giggles out a laugh-line that substitutes ass for the body part known in quainter times as the derrière or the behind. Without a beg-your-pardon, ma’am. It’s a wonderful new age, to be sure—one marked...
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Will the GOP Establishment Opt for President Hillary?
The Iowa caucuses are under a month away, and the GOP Establishment is in white-knuckle panic that Donald Trump’s candidacy has not imploded. His rather moderate proposal for a temporary time-out on Muslims’ entry into the U.S. has gone the way of its predecessors in actually boosting his numbers. Allegations of sexist misuse of a Yiddish expression have fallen...
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‘Brazilian Trump’ Rides Wave of Low Expectations
Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the presidency of Brazil last year provoked a media meltdown similar to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Just as in the U.S., journalists in Brazil and abroad predicted the “Trump of the Tropics” was akin to the second coming of Hitler, ushering in the end of democracy, revoking gay rights, and...
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Theses and Antitheses
American liberals have long been troubled by a sinister force lurking in our society, namely conservatism. Albert O. Hirschman’s motive in writing The Rhetoric of Reaction is to explain this phenomenon to his fellow liberals. He refrains from psychoanalyzing conservatism; instead, he argues that conservatives, regardless of personal quirks, are bound to certain forms of...
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Burke on our Crisis of Character
Abandoning our tradition-based constitutional republic, whether for a mythical medieval shire, an idyll of Lockean abstractions, or even a Church militant, is neither necessary nor prudent.
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Books in Brief
The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 499 pp., $29.00). This sympathetic, indeed deeply moving, biography of the ill-fated king is dramatic and mostly well written, save in certain instances where I found the presentation of particular events (such as the controversy at the immediate start...
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Dakota Days
It was their ordinariness that made them matter. . . . Individual life was by its very nature a tragedy; it came to an end; for all of us it was going to be a short way to that grave. But the ordinary life of a society was a comedy that just kept going on....
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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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Who’s In Charge Here?
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...
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Christchurch: The Sharia Enabling Act
Violent incidents, perpetrated by the opponents of a tyrannical regime, tend to enable such regimes to become openly terrorist. They may have been on a brutal trajectory all along, but their enemies’ acts of desperate defiance (or plain insanity) often facilitate their transition to the level of oppression which had been desired all along. Charlotte...
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Happenstance Phenomena
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
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The Democrats’ Collapse
Kamala Harris' presidential campaign flounders after a series of awful October interviews. The smart money says Trump is heading back to the Whitehouse.
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The War on Arizona
Not since President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and JFK sent U.S. marshals to the University of Alabama has the federal government seemed so at war with a state of the union. Arkansas and Alabama were defying U.S. court orders to desegregate. But Barack Obama's war on Arizona is ...
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Liberty and Justice–For Jerks
Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks. The mere fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane. Over the past three or...
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The Celts of the West
The ancient story of early Scotland will not be fully told until much more study has been completed, The face of the land literally is pockmarked with the remains of settlements and dwellings—many unexcavated—raised in an age so remote from our own, we scarcely know the names of the races that inhabited them. Riddles there...