Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
10950 search results for: Post-Human Future
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Time to ‘Plant’ Obama’s Health Care
It’s moments like this one—our Health Care Moment, we could call it—that make numerous friends of democracy and good government want to pull the covers over their heads and leave a wake-up call for next month. The health care charade has gone on for a year. Polls suggest most Americans don’t want the measures now...
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What We Are Reading: April 2023
Short reviews of Over Here: The First World War and American Society, by David Kennedy, and The Voyage of the Catalpa, by Peter Stevens.
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The War on Fat
The war on fat rages on, and—wouldn’t you know it—one of the leaders in the crusade against fat is, well, on the heavy side. Jacob Sullum of Reason writes that Kelly Brownell, “a Twinkie tax advocate who never tires of comparing Ronald McDonald to Joe Camel,” actually sports “an extra chin and an ample gut.” ...
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China’s One Child Policy—and Ours
If you’re an old pro-lifer like me, you remember the many battles over China’s one-child policy. Mao actually encouraged large families. He thought population problems would be solved by communist economic planning, a large population would make China stronger—and the 60 million he murdered needed to be replaced. After he died in 1976, his successor,...
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Kosovo and the Albanian Drug Trade
As I write this at the end of April, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is in its fourth week. Albania—predictably—has been turned into a NATO base, and the Kosovo Liberation Army is openly recruiting volunteers in NATO countries, including the United States, where both U.S.-born Albanians and Albanian resident aliens are allowed to join the...
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Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
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The McQuearing of America
Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Coach Joe Pa (who continued to employ him). But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State? According to the grand jury report,...
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Shadow of a Shade
The cover of this book describes the late Joseph Sobran as “one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century” and notes that he has often been compared with G.K. Chesterton and H.L. Mencken. As a lifelong admirer of Mencken and his work, I must say that I find the comparison an unfair one—unfair to...
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The American Stasi
The following are excerpts translated from my latest interview with Sputnik News, which was broadcast live on July 19. Q:… What is happening to the freedom of speech in America? Are the current powers-that-be using secret services against journalists deemed troublesome, such as Tucker Carlson? … ST: Tucker Carlson’s evening show is the only mainstream media program...
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Progressive Pilgrim
One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that “America is feeling good about itself again,” the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social...
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Resisting in Berlin
“The (anti-Hitler) conspiracy failed,” wrote the late Willi Schlamm, himself a refugee from Nazism, nearly 30 years ago. “But the list of names of those whom a maddened Hitler hanged after the failure reads like a Gotha of Germany’s famous military families. . . . They are names which, if the truth indeed prevails, will...
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Where are Today’s Athlete Journalists?
The golden age of American journalism featured men of great athletic ability. That they are missing today speaks volumes about why our journalism is so boring.
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Trump & the Press—A Death Struggle
Alerting the press that he would deal with the birther issue at the opening of his new hotel, the Donald, after treating them to an hour of tributes to himself from Medal of Honor recipients, delivered. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. . . . President Barack...
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Books in Brief
Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America, by Mary Grabar (Regnery; 327 pp., $29.99). Mary Grabar has performed an invaluable service by taking the time to dissect Howard Zinn’s polemical attack on America, A People’s History of the United States (1980). Although she doesn’t cover every topic Zinn addresses,...
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War Images
Christopher Wilson was arrested in October in Polk County, Florida, on obscenity charges. Mr. Wilson’s pornographic website contains pictures of the wives and girlfriends of his paying customers posing and engaging in sex acts, and he claims that about a third of his reported 160,000 customers are in the U.S. military. When some of those...
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Socialist America Sinking
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:
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Revenge of the Nerd
“He can be compelled who does not know how to die.” —Seneca “That’s IT. I’ve HAD it with bourgeois-liberal guilt!” In disgust, my friend slammed Lillian Rubin’s new book back across the table at me. We had been reading a hospital scene (one of many) from Quiet Rage, Rubin’s account of the Bernhard Goetz case:...
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Champion of American Believers
Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the Texas state comptroller, has become the new champion of American believers. Her office is charged with determining what groups qualify for exemption from state taxation (including sales taxes, property taxes, and other state levies) as religious organizations. My ancient Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “religious” as “Imbued with religion, pious, god-fearing, devout...
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Why Can’t Biden Stop This Invasion?
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
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The Tory Contest Is Bad TV
“Excruciating” was the verdict on the TV debate of the five remaining candidates for the Tory leadership. They were perched on stools, like five barflies in search of a bar. I regretted the absence of a woman, though not for the standard reason. It would have been diverting to see a candidate clad in a...
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A Game of Bridge on a Hot Afternoon
In retrospect, I find it shocking that, during World War II, Americans submitted without resistance to a kind of government-imposed serfdom that transformed our habits and our hearts. We have always prided ourselves on being independent, rebellious, even irreverent in the face of authority. In our mythology, we celebrate the defiant eccentric, the rebel, the...
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Silk Stockings 2.0
“Any incidence of offense or insult directed against the Soviet Union or its institutions, irrespective of where the incident may take place (in the street, in a shop, at the theater or cinema, or elsewhere), must be reported immediately to a senior supervisor at the Soviet embassy or consulate. In the event such offense or...
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Missionary to the Amazons
Controversy and intense media scrutiny marked Dee Jepsen’s 14 months as President Reagan’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison to women’s organizations, until she resigned in October 1983 to work for the unsuccessful reelection campaign of her husband. Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa. President Reagan’s extemporaneous remark that “if it weren’t for women, men would still...
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Remembering Moynihan
From the December 2015 issue of Chronicles. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European...
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Whistling Dixie
Historians have been arguing since the 1950’s whether the West ought to be understood as a frontier, a region, or the seamless westward extension of Eastern and Midwestern America. Beginning in the 1980’s the debate intensified, owing to the work of the so-called New Western Historians who like to think that they started it all....
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Egypt: Tips for Serious Travelers
My “Letter from Egypt,” with a comprehensive analysis of the country’s political, economic and social situation is coming in a few days’ time. For starters, let me present our readers with a few practical tips on how to make the most of this incredible country without spending many thousands of dollars/euros and without being herded...
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Big Brother’s Big Plans
Some people have no sense of humor. In the summer of 1998, Eric Rudolph, bomber of two abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, was on the run from the law in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Scores of FBI agents and other officials, trailed by reporters and television crews,...
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To Drone or Not to Drone
Reactions to the revelation that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, may have seriously considered launching a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have predictably been divided along partisan lines. Supporters of Donald Trump have seen it as one more strike (no pun intended) against a presidential candidate whose entire career of “public service”...
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Those Ignorant of History, etc., etc.
President Bush is in Hungary to join the celebrations of the failed 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and this is one Yale graduate on whom the lessons of history are not lost. Bush told the world:
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The Strange Case of Julian Assange
Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. What, after all, is the point to entering into any public discussion of controversial matters? Each side of the question has made up its mind before the facts are in, and the respective champions of the issue or debate are, depending on who has washed your brain,...
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Gnawing Away at Vidal
We do not live in a golden age for homegrown and corn-fed radical critics. Legal restrictions on political speech remain few, but informal strictures and the passage of time have muted those who remember—and like—the free, landed republic that this country used to be, before World War II and the monolithic Cold War state that...
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Regime Change
Whenever Washington targets some poor, misbegotten country for “regime change,” references to that unfortunate nation’s media by Western journalists are usually preceded by the modifier state-owned or state-controlled. The inference is clear: These guys are shills, not real journalists. Yet the West has its own state-owned and controlled media: The Brits have the BBC, and...
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On Lincoln Herds
Abraham Lincoln is thrashed in a series of articles in the February issue of Chronicles (“The Legacy of Lincoln”) as a man of low morality and character who took his actions for the worst of reasons—e.g., to usher in an era of kleptocratic state capitalism; to bring an assembly of free state republics into a...
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Dominion Mosque
If the definition of a liberal is a person who won’t take his own side in a fight, Adam Ebbin and Kaye Kory, Democrats who represent Virginia’s 49th and 38th districts in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates, should have their pictures next to the word in Webster’s. Ebbin, a homosexual Jew, invited Johari Abdul-Malik, a...
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Carrying the Burden
The Help Produced by Dreamworks Pictures Directed and written by Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett’s novel Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Guard Produced by Reprisal Films Directed and written by John McDonagh Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics I went to see The Help fully expecting it would be a travesty of race relations...
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Reading The London Spectator in Kishinev
In segments of the black community, particularly among the urban poor, being pursued by the police is a badge of honour, a sign that you have stood up to ‘the man’. Many black voters in Washington thought the police entrapped Marion Barry because he was getting too ‘uppity’. Barry won nearly every vote in poor...
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A Politically Incorrect University
Texas A & M, founded in 1876, is one of those educational entities a certain kind of Texan recoils from praising too lavishly—the kind of Texan who went to the rival University of Texas and grew up deriding the Aggies as abrasive bumpkins. Traditions, masticated like a chaw of first-rate ’baccy, are hard to put...
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GooTube: Dems’ Kiddie Propaganda Arm
In case you hadn’t heard, Vice President Kamala Harris’ venture into government space propaganda for children was a galactic bust. The veep’s smarmy performance in a NASA agitprop video touting World Space Week was universally ridiculed and exposed this weekend after a local Monterey, California, TV station interviewed one of five child actors who auditioned...
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How the Fourteenth Amendment Repealed the Constitution
“It is easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate.” —Chomfort The evisceration of the federal system by the Supreme Court during the last few decades—indeed, most of the modem malfeasance of that august body—has been accomplished largely through the instrumentality of the Fourteenth Amendment. This sorry tale, from the adoption of...
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Judicial Taxation Without Representation
There is an unattributed quotation that says, “The average taxpayer is the first of America’s natural resources to be exhausted.” The American people have turned away from a big, activist federal government because they feel they have been forgotten; in fact, taxpayer resources have long been exhausted. Today, average Americans, forgotten by the bloated bureaucratic...
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The SU-24 Non-Mystery
There is no single explanation for Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian SU-24 bomber over Syria on November 24. That it was shot over Syria (and did not merely fall inside Syria) is by now a matter of record, confirmed almost immediately by U.S. military sources: The United States believes that the Russian jet...
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Celestial Sights
It is a November evening in 1572. The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe is returning to his uncle’s house. As he notes that the clearer sky bodes well for resuming his observations after dinner, a strange, brilliant star suddenly catches his attention. In amazement, he watches it for some time, then: When I had...
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A Third Way
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...
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End the Feds
James Comey’s curious and unorthodox contributions to the media’s rumor-fueled hysteria over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency—and perhaps the fate of the U.S. government and the American people—ought to raise a fundamental question in the minds of conservatives: Why did he have a job to begin with? It matters little whether we like the...
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The Real Cost of Electric Vehicles
For all their use in green virtue-signaling, electric cars have enormous hidden costs, both financial and humanitarian.
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What Was, and What Might Have Been
Most Americans appear to have spent their second September 11 anniversary paying tribute to the American ideals of open borders and acceptance of all forms of diversity—religious, ethnic, sexual, moral, and intellectual. I spent it in Novi Sad, attending a conference on Islam and the West. The one-day conference, part of the Rockford Institute convivium...
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The Candidate
A politician’s life—Héctor was discovering—is, like that of any celebrity, not a happy one. Even before he’d announced his candidacy for the open seat in New Mexico’s First Congressional District, Tomasina Luna issued a campaign statement announcing her endorsement by the National Council of La Raza, accusing the Republican Party of racism (amounting possibly to...
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Save the Children
Suddenly, we may receive a son—a six-year-old, our first child—and we may get him in weeks. My small worries grow immense. Some background on one of them: My husband and I have what has been called a “mixed marriage” (sort of a hot dish, like franks and beans). He is firmly Catholic; I, by upbringing,...