It is a sign of the times that one of the most talked-about reality-TV shows of the season centers on a woman who desires to lose weight. Lots of weight. The show’s star, Ruby Gettinger, now tips the scales at around 500 pounds, having once climbed to 700. She has adult-onset diabetes, thyroid problems, and...
5282 search results for: The+Old+Right
The Conservative Roots of Conservation
New York Times junkies would have noticed an August 28, 1991, story headed “Woodstock Journal.” Reading on they discovered that the story was datelined Woodstock, Vermont, and that it reported a proposal by Laurance S. and Mary Rockefeller to donate their 531-acre Woodstock estate as a National Historical Park. Although the Rockefeller family has a...
Did You Hear the One About Syria?
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
The Mexican Bailout
The Mexican bailout was a bipartisan scheme, meaning that its details were kept shrouded in secrecy. The White House and the congressional leadership conspired with the banking industry, and Alan Greenspan even telephoned Rush Limbaugh and ordered him to support it. Limbaugh did not need to be told. Almost alone, Senator Alfonse D’Amato started looking...
The Middle East: The Current Score
“Peace in the Middle East” is like the unicorn: we can envisage the beast, paint it in detail even, but we can’t groom a living specimen. The problem transcends geopolitics and ideology, it is also metaphysical. The people inhabiting the region are vying for limited resources, such as land and water. In addition, many also...
The Motives Behind the Massacre
“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!” These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before. Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such...
Family Finances
Parasite may be both the most amusing and the most horrifying movie of the year. That is, if you can get past its inept attempt at making a political statement. Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho, Parasite recently became the first foreign language film to win the Academy Award for best picture. Bong’s investigation of...
Riding the Minotaur
The townhouse at 18 Belgrave Square consisted of 74 living rooms, salons, corridors, servants’ pantries, staircases, anterooms, and closets, and in 1866 it was deemed suitable to become the new London residence of the Austrian ambassador. The commodious townhouse had gone up early in the century as part of Thomas Cubitt’s development of Belgrave Square,...
The League Against the South
York, Alabama, is a sad little Southern town. Though it is small, it lacks the typical charm of the South. Not much happens there, but what does happen happens in the typically Southern way. The wheels of justice grind not with something as tacky as money, but with the more genteel means of connections: It’s...
The Pope, the “Poor”, and the World
A reader not of the Faith who happened, since the installation of Pope Francis, to glance through almost any issue of L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s official newspaper, might well conclude that the conclave that met in the Sistine Chapel last spring elected a social worker instead of a cardinal as the successor to Benedict XVI. ...
The Barefooted Faulkner
Faulkner’s work was deeply embedded in the oral tradition of the south, and has a strong sense of place.
Shrink the Party to Save It?
Entryism: the very word is like a knell. It conjures up the many efforts by Moscow Central to take over British politics. They had successes. In the general election of 1945, two Communist M.P.s were returned to Westminster. They were heavily backed by Moscow, not unreasonably, considering the vast numbers of Communists in France and Italy. But those two had...
Trump: America for the Americans!
As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came into view. We are two nations now, two peoples. Though bracing, President Trump’s inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of...
Fiddling Around
All of the enchantment of the violin and its repertory, the provenance of Russia and specifically of Odessa, the pedagogy of Leopold Auer (who also taught Jascha Heifetz, Efrem Zimbalist, and Toscha Seidel), and decades of international celebrity—that’s a lot in common. But these books, one about Mischa Elman and one by Nathan Milstein, are...
Pop Idols
The English middle orders from Ruskin onward have had an inbred prejudice against America. True, they may dress like mutant versions of Kurt Cobain and bundle themselves and their cloaca-tongued broods off to Disney World, but when you say “U.S.A.,” much of the professional class still thinks of headlines like “NEW JERSEY BABY BORN WITH...
The Liechtenstein Academy
“Courage,” said the Philosopher, “is the prime philosophical virtue” (by which he meant the moral kind) “lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice.” It is a notion from another time, in accord with which it came to pass that the philosophical cream of my...
Sylvan Socialism: The U.S. Forest Service
The U.S. Forest Service has custody over 192 million acres of national forest and rangeland—an area nearly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined. Like the National Park Service, the Forest Service is commonly viewed as a stellar example of Progressive Era legislation. However, the Forest Service clearly and recurrently violates the spirit of its stewardship...
White Out
Hand it to Ann Coulter and Donald Trump: They know how to send the left into an apoplectic conniption. Coulter’s contribution to the left’s unhinged tantrum is her book on immigration, ¡Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. Coulter has gone “full racist,” we are told, because she...
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 ...
Still Waiting
A Harvey Weinstein Moment for America’s Wars? What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least...
Envy and the Consumerism of the Have—Nots
You can make a good argument that, by the late 20th century, the Seven Deadly Sins had become the Seven Lively Virtues. In the 1960’s, the media lauded the anger of students who bombed police stations and set dormitories on fire. Hollywood glorified lust the way it had once glorified chastity. Government at every level...
Anti-Imperial Judo
The basic principle of judo, so I have been told, is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be to...
Mr. Manning Goes to Ottawa
Imagine a political party that favors the withdrawal of troops from Bosnia and formal debate over whether to remain in NATO, yet in the next breath opposes government-imposed privileges for homosexuals and other politically correct groups, among them Sikhs demanding to wear turbans to work. This party not only supports cutting corporate welfare and abolishing...
The News
A.D. Sertillanges’ advice to anyone who wishes to accomplish intellectual work includes the following admonition: As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little; and it would be easy to learn...
Putin’s Collapsing Credibility (Updated)
Tens of thousands of Armenians converged on the capital Yerevan on Wednesday morning, blocking roads and government buildings in protest over the ruling party’s reluctance to transfer power in the country to opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan. Protesters said they would stay on the streets for as long as it takes to oust the ruling Republican...
Of Genes, Vowels, and Violence
Why do the British speak English and not a variety of Welsh? Philip Jenkins, having fallen under the sway of a Harvard medieval historian, Michael McCormick, believes it is because the invading Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries killed all the Celtic-speaking male Britons in what is now England. (See “Once There Was a...
New York vs. New York
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . .is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin for hayseeds.” —George...
Disney Is Going To Lose (Again) To Florida and Ron DeSantis
Disney hasn't learned its lesson the first time, and will challenge Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over its special legal zone in the state. Mickey the Groomer is about to lose, again.
Something Both Brighter and Darker
Doing Hearts in Atlantis Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment Directed by Scott Hicks Screenplay by William Goldman from Stephen King’s novel Released by Warner Brothers I went to see director Scott Hicks’ Hearts in Atlantis not having read the Stephen King novel on which it is based. The little I knew of King’s other fiction...
A Pocket Full of Sovereigns
Downtown Montreal was full of revelers last March 10. Despite subzero temperatures, they hit the streets, some wearing little more than a smile. But each had a maple leaf somewhere, on a flag, a piece of clothing, a sign, or even in place of the proverbial fig leaf. Such was the scene described by Macleans...
The Trump Taps: The Surveillance State in Action
President Donald Trump has a habit of commenting (or tweeting) on topics that “trigger” globalism’s minions in the main stream media. In knee jerk fashion, the MSM will throw a hissy fit over a Trumpian remark, claiming the president is making baseless claims, that he “cites no evidence” (a habit they should be familiar with)...
The Visitors
The first chill of autumn, which reminds us locals to order firewood from the mainland for our illegal fireplaces, is always a moment of reckoning. Not for nothing does the Russian Aesop, Krylov, in his fable of the socially responsible ant and the bohemian dragonfly, suggest that such a moment has arrived when a wintry...
The Poetry Lover
Laurence Lieberman’s two dozen essays on contemporary American poets—some (Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren) well known, others (Mark Strand, Frederick Morgan) not—are written in the self-expressive and dithyrambic mode of D.H. Lawrence and James Dickey. Lieberman wants literary criticism to be “personal and instinctively charged,” to carry an “electric pulse that is nakedly alive.” He...
DEMOCRATISM
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
Hate Speech Makes a Comeback
Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in which...
The Alternative Candidate
Several thousand feet below a smoke cloud 20,000 feet thick and 1,500 miles in diameter, the American West looks so peaceful, so at ease, so normal, no matter that over a million acres of it are on fire. The fires, most of them started by dry lightning strikes and burning out overmature forests thickened with...
The Path of Less Resistance
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) since 1983, has exercised enormous influence within the Catholic Church. In late 2002, he was elected dean of the College of Cardinals, a largely ceremonial and honorary position to be sure, but one that reflects his continuing influence...
Opera Near & Far
My relationship with Barnes & Noble is fraught with emotion simply because it is a big bookstore, among other things. And I am one of those types—an inveterate reader—who is easily hooked. I was once embarrassed when a lady told me that she had caught herself reading soup-can labels: As one who had done the...
An Englishman in New York
The subway train clanked and screeched out of the darkness at last into stretched autumnal sunshine. I rattled northward in an emptying carriage gazing down on nameless, nondescript streets, and sometimes straight into ex-offices within which the same endeavors had probably been carried on from when the building had been erected in the early 20th...
Prosperity
Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury goods, or even by the Gross Domestic Product. It is amazing how in a few short...
The Late Unpleasantness
There is nothing so painfully ironic as a war between countrymen. So when nurse Kate Cumming speaks bitterly in her 1864 diary of “our kind northern friends, who love us so dearly that they will have us unite with them, whether we will or no” it is hard to blame her. Cumming is one of...
Richard Holbrooke, RIH
On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” Perhaps the story is true. After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the...
After Vatican II; Drinking the Holy Spirit Neat
It’s Charismatic Prayer Sharing, Thursday nights at 8:00 P.M. in the Community Room of the large Catholic church I attend with my family. Because I’ve been wanting to learn to pray better, I went recently. Lou, the man I’d talked to on the phone, walked over and greeted me. Another, Stan, a seraphic, unkempt. round...
On Seeing America’s Wars Whole
Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger March 20, 2018 Dear Mr. Sulzberger: Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation’s—and arguably, the world’s—most influential publication. It’s the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn’t exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution...
Terrorist Attacks: Causes and Implications
In his latest RT interview Dr. Trifkovic considers the state of play following the announcement by Russia’s FSB security agency that the plane crash over Sinai was a terrorist attack. RT: Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine, is in Belgrade . . . What are you thoughts on the new information about the plane...
Recessional
If drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address was a remarkable performance in many ways: It simultaneously marked the zenith of American triumphalism and the nadir, not only...
We CAN Have a Blacker Math
Since woke academics insist on imposing equality on math history, there is one thing left to do: declare the ancient Greek mathematicians to be black men.
Ashli Babbit’s Warning for 2024
Jack Cashill’s “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6” exposes the weaponization of the law against citizens.
What’s Sweet and Proper
Stage play premiered June 9, 2017, the Sheen Center, New York City • Producer: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P., Blackfriars Repertory Theatre • Director: Peter Dobbins, Storm Theatre Company • Assistant Director: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P. • Choreographer: Jennifer Delac • Cast: Nicholas Carrière (Sassoon), Sarah Naughton (Death), Michael Raver (Owen) Joseph Pearce has...
Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...