Death (Metal) of the West
Alright, you win. Reading all these blogs, I can"t avoid the subject of fist-pumping Heavy Metal any longer. A metaller since the tender age of 13 (coincidence?), I"ve been worshipping the gods of ...
Alright, you win. Reading all these blogs, I can"t avoid the subject of fist-pumping Heavy Metal any longer. A metaller since the tender age of 13 (coincidence?), I"ve been worshipping the gods of ...
As I may have mentioned, I have a friend who sends me links to New York Times pieces she thinks I might find interesting. Those occasional snippets aside, I don’t read the Times. Why mess with my digestion at this ...
I can't see any reason he shouldn't be honored like other Presidents, and I would dearly like to see someone, sometime stand up to these self-righteous ...
Not too long ago, Christopher Hitchens was busying himself justifying George W. Bush, the neocons, and the Iraq war"er, "liberation""on avowedly Marxian grounds. (It would seem justifying Dubya, Frumy, and ...
A Genealogy of Morals One of my fundamental beliefs about culture and humanity is that morals and folkways are subject to natural selection. You need not believe in sociobiological bilge to share this belief; you merely ...
As the story goes, an obscurantist church, blinded by dogma, hounded and condemned Galileo because church officials could not square the idea that the Earth moved around the sun with such scriptural declarations as ...
Several of my American friends expressed to me their outrage at the recent trial of Donald Trump, his sons and associates, in New York for civil fraud, resulting in a huge and possibly ruinous fine; so I decided to read in ...
The U.S. total fertility rate briefly exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman’s lifetime during the Housing Bubble of 2006–2007 but has since dropped steadily, hitting a new record low of 1.62 in 2023. ...
Nixon in China, John Adams's opera based on Richard Nixon's détente-seeking 1972 visit to the People's Republic, has Kissinger pirouetting, Chairman and Madame Mao dancing the tango, and Pat Nixon touring a factory ...
Could it be that union bosses are finally waking up to the cold reality that the greatest threat to steel workers, the United Auto Workers, miners, machinists and the Teamsters is the radical climate change agenda of the ...
To many onlookers, the recent disorder on the streets of Leicester probably looks like a bit of a black swan. Hindus and Muslims from parts of Leicester and beyond have gathered to fight each other in one of Britain’s ...
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." So wrote William Butler Yeats in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918 that had ravaged the Christian civilization he had known. In France on Sunday, the center held, as ...
GSTAAD—From my study’s wide-open, icicle-covered windows, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell but with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come. The horizons are totally white. Clouds and ...
Premiering in a few months is a film entitled Dolphin Tale. It is the story of the only known instance of this animal having lost its entire tailfin and surviving to “beat the odds.” A small boy is involved, two parents ...
There isn’t a shred of evidence that deranged Tucson massacre suspect Jared Loughner ever listened to talk radio or cared about illegal immigration. Indeed, after 300 exhaustive interviews, the feds “remain ...
It will be Twitterized! Leave it to the neocons, their congressional allies, and much of the "conservative" blogosphere to make Barack Obama look like an elder statesman of Burkean inclinations. As the newly ...
One of the great pleasures of retirement is that one can lie abed in the morning and read Agatha Christie without any feeling of guilt—guilt about being late for work, for example. It doesn’t matter in the least if one ...
When he arrived at Christ the Savior Cathedral to pay his respects to the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had died of COVID-19, Russian President Vladimir Putin carried a clutch of red roses. The man beside him ...
It is said that there is a world shortage of bees, but it has not so far affected our house in France, where most summers, when we return, we find a swarm that has constructed a nest between one of the windows and its ...
When Tom Wolfe harpooned Leonard Bernstein in his famous 60s essay, he did it by directly quoting from those attending the infamous cocktail party Lenny gave for the Black Panthers. Wolfe had finagled an invite to ...
Once there was a ruler who held his vast land together with an iron fist. For decades the people in one of his disparate regions had pursued peaceful methods to codify their way of life as it fit into the national fabric. ...
Opening my copy of the French newspaper Le Figaro recently, there was a long article titled “With Gustave Thibon in the Ardèche: the Saint and the Peasant.” I was in the Ardèche at the time and therefore decided to ...
Why is this recession different, and likely much worse, from all the recessions of the past? Imagine a Paleolithic village which has no children. When all the adults grow too old to work, everyone dies. Now imagine a ...
Welcome to our regime of political capitalism, where merit matters but political connections matter even more. In an unalloyed capitalist system, money flows to those who offer goods and services of value to consumers. In a ...
