Category: Access

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The Paul Ehrlich Half-Century

People like to give names to periods. During the span from 1968 to 2018, numerous events happened: the end of the Cold War, the rise of the computers and so on. But one thing now stands out: demographic collapse in almost every country. So I’m calling it the Paul Ehrlich Half-Century because 1968 was the year his book “The Population Bomb” was published by the Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, whose publicists had a flair for marketing.  The paperbook version included a lit bomb on the cover, along with the subheadings: “Population Control or Race to Oblivion?” And, in shouting...

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Wednesday’s Child: Easy Listening

Another impression I took home after that fortnight in London was of being trapped in an elevator of the 1980’s.  This is really a new thing in the city most people associate with reserve, politeness, and tranquility, that one is everywhere and at all hours surrounded with “music.”  Needless to say, it’s not music at all, but a cousin of what during my American years I heard played in elevators, shopping malls, and offices of the more vicious kind of dentist. I read recently that the American original was called Muzak because its inventor had been so taken with Kodak...

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New From the Forum

A paragraph from an irresponsible rant on the murder of a Saudi journalist. …. It is quite possible that the murder took place exactly as the press, claiming the CIA as the ultimate source, has described it.  On the other hand, there is no reason to believe anyone in the media, whether Jim Acosta or Sean Hannity,  and after the past few years it is pretty clear we have no reason to believe the FBI, and if the FBI is specializing in political propaganda, can the CIA–the agency that appears to have engaged in massive drug smuggling in order to...

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Wednesday’s Child: A London Postscript

 While I was in London, an old friend of mine and I had what can be described as an emotional misunderstanding, and since then I’ve thought of little else. Particularly in view of the fact that had it not been for this friend’s nearly infinite kindness to me over the years, I probably wouldn’t be here now writing about it, or about anything else for that matter. So I could do worse, I figured, than to extrapolate the misunderstanding and extract a moral out of its reflective depths. The moral is that modern civilization has compromised sentiment. In about the...

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The Early Church: Heretics and Puritans

In the time of Christ and his Apostles, it was enough to accept Christ–that is, the promised Messiah–and Him crucified, but it is a thoroughly human trait to draw conclusions, which are then treated as first principles.  In the Golden Age of the American republic, many, perhaps most Americans believed in liberty, both in the sense of political independence and in the sense of moral and social freedom.  If a man had a skill by which he could earn money, then–subject to legal, moral and social constraints–he could expect to practice that trade.  Then wise guys came long and raised...

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

Like those time-lapse nature photographs that show the flower bud opening into a full-blown blossom only to shed the petals one by one in a matter of seconds, each successive visit to London reveals an acceleration of its decomposition. We may be horrified by the ravages of time on the features of an old friend when we meet a him after many years on different continents, but should his face have the same effect on us after a mere month’s absence, then either we need better glasses or else we’re looking at a picture of Dorian Gray. The scandal upon...

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The Decline of the American Empire: Recessional I

I am revising a series of articles and lectures I wrote on American Imperialism.  In some places I have deleted political references that have lost their significance, in others I have expanded and developed an argument in light of later events and more serious consideration.   The first version of this was written in (so far as I can tell) 2002.  While the Trump administration may, viewed in retrospect, represent a lull in the imperialists’ Grand Design to wipe the old America from the face of the earth, no President willing to hire John Bolton or Nikki Haley can be regarded as a defender of the American Republic.