Wednesday’s Child: Base Notes
I am not writing this on pagan Lemuria or on what to the Catholics in Italy is Ognisanti, in other words, on All Saints’ Day, but apparently on what is now a Russian state holiday called Bailiffs’ Day.
Category: Access
China and America Won’t Go to War Over Taiwan – or Anything
The U. S. generals are huffing and puffing over Taiwan, making sure the defense companies they soon will be consulting with for millions of dollars get new billion-dollar contracts.
My Jerkless Knee
Since the knee surgery of two weeks ago, I have been living in a fog of discomfort and confusion through which, occasionally, a dim light shines with enough brightness to permit me to revise a few pages or post something I have rewritten. I on’t feel terribly guilty about my sloth, but I have decided to share my tedium with others,
Wednesday’s Child: Last but Not Least
The gentle reader would be rightly shocked if, after last week’s dramatic personal appeal in this space, his unruly correspondent changed tack and let fly with something about Russian shenanigans in West Africa.
Play the Russia Card Against China
The foreign policy crowd is in a tizzy over China threatening Taiwan. If Beijing invades, should we go to war to defend Taipei? I don’t think a war is going to happen.
Wednesday’s Child: The Glass Veranda
This week my wife is expected to give birth to our child. How can I not recall the moment in my beloved Pasternak’s Spektorsky, when the poet says….
Wednesday’s Child: Devil May Care and Does
As there is little hope that the gentle reader can recall a post of mine from four years ago, I will quote its closing paragraph. That week I had just returned from London from the funeral of a close friend where I came across an old acquaintance – novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d’Or and other light masterpieces – and this led me to reminisce about our last meeting many years earlier, at a Chinese restaurant of my choosing.
Resisting Evil, V: The Fundamental Things of Life
Instead of plunging headlong into the tedious history of self-defense legislation, let us rather begin (as Plato or John Locke might) by imagining a state of society in which there is no legitimate authority or, at least, no legal power to protect the innocent or punish the guilty. We do not have to dig into the ethnographic accounts of such violent peoples as the Ifugao of the Philippines or the Yanamano of South America. The Celtic, Slavic, and Germanic peoples of Europe provide a rich record of violent periods in which self-help and vengeance were a normal means of protection...
Wednesday’s Child: From an Old Notebook
The other day, sorting through some files, I came across a notebook of mine from exactly thirty years ago, a foppish little thing from Smythson of Bond Street, its robin’s-blue pages and black leather binding lending it the air of authority so becoming an unsuccessful writer in his prime.
Fiona Hill Explains It All for You
I can’t remember the last time a Foreign Affairs article made a stir among the commentariat. But this week it was Fiona Hill’s “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline.”
