Edward Wilson views the humanities today with alarm. In the hard sciences, the pursuit of objective knowledge remains the order of the day. Not so in literary studies, where deconstruction dissolves hard facts into arbitrary perspectives. Each author’s meaning is unique to himself, goes the underlying premise; nothing of his true intention or anything else...
3631 search results for: SAFe-SASM neuester Studienführer - SAFe-SASM Training Torrent prep ☁ Suchen Sie auf ➡ www.itzert.com ️⬅️ nach kostenlosem Download von ☀ SAFe-SASM ️☀️ 🤭SAFe-SASM Vorbereitung
Free Speech or Federal Tyranny?
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church has encouraged many decent conservatives to think that the United States will not so quickly go down the garden path of political correctness as Canada and the EU. I think this view is seriously mistaken. As everyone knows, the Westboro Baptist “Church” is a...
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, is not happy with the current state of American civilization, a view he makes crystal clear in Empire of Illusion. Hedges is an independent man of the left and a cultural conservative. Chronicles readers may recall the controversy over his commencement address in 2003 at Rockford...
Dan Daly
A friend recently sent me an e-mail with a link to YouTube. A click took me to a tribute to Col. Bob Howard, broadcast by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams upon Howard’s death just before Christmas 2009. Howard is one of our most decorated heroes, his courageous and brilliant acts in combat worthy of...
There’s More Than One Way to Burn a Book
“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world that systematically burned books. In late December, I resolved to try and read more books than those I review for Western North...
Betting Against a Blue Wave
Democrats are likely to face insurmountable partisan, demographic, and policy challenges during the final weeks of midterm election campaigning.
Mending Wall
The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...
Presence, Real and Ersatz
The Talented Mr. Ripley Produced by Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Anthony Minghella Screenplay by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith Released by Paramount Pictures Anthony Minghella’s screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley has beautiful photography, good acting, and real suspense. What it lacks is the element that...
Prepare, Pursue, Prevail!
By way of explaining his eight failed marriages, the American bandleader Artie Shaw once remarked, “I am an incurable optimist.” In reality, Artie was an incurable narcissist. Utterly devoid of self-awareness, he never looked back, only forward. So, too, with the incurable optimists who manage present-day American wars. What matters is not past mistakes but future...
Decline Without Fall
Stephen Glain, a former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, joins a long list of journalists, pundits, and think-tank analysts who have endeavored, since the World Trade Center attacks, to help America understand the Arab world. In his first (and, so far, only) book, he argues that the relationship between economics and political...
The Search For the Sacred
Religion is inseparable from the sacred, the channel through which the divine transcendent communicates with man, according to man’s sensate nature. Any object, natural or man-made—a Gothic cathedral or the lapis negra excavated on the Roman forum—may assume the character of sacredness. Through it, the divine communication becomes incarnated, and, in the intellectual-rational order, verities...
Waiting for Charles the Second
“How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?” —Edwin Markham, “The Man With the Hoe,” 1899 “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in...
Colleges Side With Radicals, Their Students Be Damned
The public knows what they are seeing on campuses is not freedom of expression—a sacred American right—but lawlessness and dangerous disorder.
The Quest for Community
“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. —Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily...
Axis to Grind
Terrorists have turned down the heat in my office. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economy took a header, tax revenues in Illinois declined, and my university’s budget was cut. One of our cost-saving measures has been to turn down thermostats all across campus. Supposedly, this heat recision is targeted to just 68...
A Purge Before Brexit
“The name is Pride. Colonel Pride.” Out of the mists of English history a figure emerges whom we can recognize today. We would call him an “enforcer,” a man ordered to carry out a harsh policy determined by his superiors. In December 1648 Colonel Pride rid the Long Parliament of members unwanted by the Army...
Regrets Only
“Any loss of life is regretted,” announced Col. Manfred Freytag, after a NATO pilot fired a missile into a bus carrying civilians across a bridge about ten miles out of Pristina. The official voice is unmistakable, even in Our Man Friday’s unnerving accent. In the official language of the New Order, true statements arc always...
Rock Music Lives On
Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...
The Pterodactyls of Lima
“Whitman can sing confidently and in blithe innocence about democracy militant because American Utopia is confused with and indistinguishable from American reality.” —Octavio Paz, Walt Whitman As we left for Ayacucho, Lucho Monasi Cockburn took out his machete from under his car seat and put it between the two of us. “It’s a bad road,”...
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...
Friends With Benefits
The week after the murdering scum of ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya—their crime was being Christian—the European Commission opened an investigation of Christian schools in Britain for allegedly “discriminating” against nonreligious teachers. In other words, the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels want to force Christian schools to stop giving preference to religious staff while...
The Case for Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
L’Affaire Assange
Julian Assange’s arrest inside the embassy of Ecuador in London would not have been possible had that country’s government not authorized the British police to enter its theoretically sovereign territory. The lesson is clear: if you plan to seek asylum in a foreign embassy, you should be careful to choose the diplomatic premises of a...
I Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello
Barack Obama, you’ll recall, campaigned as the antiwar candidate, at least insofar as Iraq was concerned. Iraq was a “war of choice,” according to him, one that should not have been fought, and he defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries precisely because of her support for Bush’s war. Not that there was anything principled about...
Never See His Kind Again
My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day. He was 87. Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior? Who is...
The One Civilization
Popular culture in the West, and especially in North America, is an illusion, mostly electronic, that does not feed the soul. Indeed, it claims to do nothing but feed the senses, and as such it tends toward universal barbarism, fostering ignorance and encouraging violence. Beneath the illusion there is, however, one great civilization, and it...
The Cowardly American Corporation
The woke bullies of American capitalism are not really bullies at all. The current corporate aborti-mania is driven by abject fear and quivering compliance with cultural authoritarianism.
Is Trump’s Agenda Being Eclipsed?
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942. True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation. When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945,...
The Wrongs of Women’s Rights
The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex. Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in...
Impractical Solutions
Mark Levin, in his best-selling book The Liberty Amendments, is absolutely right about two things: First, the Courts, president, and Congress are not playing the roles assigned to them by the Constitution. The Court is deciding the country’s social and cultural issues; the president freely amends laws and drops Tomahawk missiles on people without going...
Politicians Seem Loath to Let COVID End
Two weeks to “slow the spread” proved to be a lie as state government stay-at-home orders stretched on and on, being taken away and reintroduced at the whims of governors rather than by acts of the various legislatures. Even when we were permitted out of our homes, they imposed rules on who we could visit,...
The Islamic Republic of Egypt
The most important foreign event in the final days of 2012 was the ramming through of Egypt’s new, Sharia-based constitution by President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. The cultural, demographic and geographic center of the Arab world is now set to become an Islamic Republic. Egypt’s transformation, after 60 years of secularist...
Is the War Coming Home?
Faisal Shahzad sought to massacre scores of fellow Americans in Times Square with a bomb made of M-88 firecrackers, non-explosive fertilizer, gasoline and alarm clocks. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit with a firebomb concealed in his underpants. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot dead 13 fellow soldiers at Fort...
Who Was Watching the Watchers?
One cannot reasonably assume that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a seamless conspiracy. Even a successful plot is not a well-oiled machine, and, whatever the plotting behind the scenes, as Shakespeareans say about Romeo and Juliet, the skyjackings of September 11 were, in some ways, tragedy snatched from the jaws of comedy. Take,...
1865: The True American Revolution
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead
While working my way through traffic snarls on the freeways of Los Angeles I listened intently to a radio talk show, when a caller urged that all citizens should go about armed, the program host exclaimed, “My God, that would be like the Old West. We can’t go back to that.” The host obviously thought...
Ohio Gets Nice on Crime
In my new home of Ashland, Ohio, there is a sign that welcomes all comers to “The World Headquarters of Nice People.” It seemed to me as if the entire town conspired to make my move as pleasant as could be. This is “Midwestern Nice” in a nutshell. But I’ve found the flavor of American...
The Fire Next Time
Morgan Norval shares with this reviewer one characteristic both of us may soon have cause to regret: We live near Washington, D.C., one of the prime candidates for a major terrorist attack with unconventional weapons in the near future, an attack in which the victims will be numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Among those...
Video Clones
Television created a subgenre of music a few years ago that can be designated as “artificial, nonexistent, techno-pop,” which must be differentiated from the succeeding, garden variety of techno-pop aired today by the human/machine combinations known as the Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, etc. The original includes the music of The Monkees, that group of well-scrubbed...
A Genuine Centrist
Joseph Lieberman, Al Gores pick for vice president, is supposed to bring the Democratic ticket back to the center. Gore secured his presidential nomination by pandering to leftist interest groups, from radical feminists and “gays” to supporters of abortion and Sharptonite hate purveyors. But to have any chance of winning in November, he needed a...
It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girls
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
What’s Missing from Journalism: Journalists
Too many of today’s “journalists,” on both the right and the left, have no drive for pursuing the story or finding what is interesting in their subject. This, more than anything, is killing journalism.
One Moment in Time
“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?” “Over a hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private.” Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building. Turner School, built in 1898, is...
Moving Beyond Myths
“The difficulty in life is the choice.” —George Moore Please excuse the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this essay. As a woman, I found it difficult to write a standard third-person review and instead drew on my own experiences and emotions in responding to this book. Rejecting rationality, logic, and “vertical” thinking, I recognized that my...
Fritz Lang’s Liliom: Less Catholic, still Christian?
“. . . there are three things that last for ever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love.” 1 Corinthians, 13:13 (The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, 1970). On February 7, 2011, Art Livingston posted to this blog a discussion of the early Hollywood talkie, Liliom (1930), based on the...
Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
What We Are Reading: May 2022
Reviews of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard and Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society by Paul Hollander.
Wounded Warriors
Reviews of two new films: The Contractor, directed by Tarik Saleh, and The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience. I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour later, I realized how naive I had been about higher education. I had...
Educated at Home
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern...