Podcast: Why Lefties Don’t Breed
“The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!” I can’t bear to bring children into this world, much less spare the time to bring them up.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Two Oinks for Democracy, Part I of II
Over the years, much of our critique of American imperialism was made on the level of principle: Preemptive wars, inherently wrong in themselves, would eventually justify the militarization of American life and the final destruction of our constitutional order. Reconstruction abroad, we argued, would inevitably justify reconstruction at home.
Wednesday’s Child: Not So Loverly
“I have never been so keyed up!” I think I won’t be very far from the truth if I say that what most Americans know of Royal Ascot is Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of this line in My Fair Lady, in 1964 the most expensive film ever made. Remember? “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here, ev’ryone who should be here is here,” she gavottes, At the gate are all the horses Waiting for the cue to fly away. What a gripping, absolutely ripping Moment at the Ascot op’ning day! When I lived in England, I never missed a day...
Take Five: Taxation With Representation Still Tyranny
Ruling elites, which historically collect 10-15% in duties and fees, now confiscate 50% or more of the income of hardworking men and women, robbing them of their time and their power over their lives.
Generations of Impotence, Conclusion: The Cruelty of Nerds
Like so many modern American males, the Marquis de Sade was incapable of taking pleasure in the ordinary things of life. Morally and intellectually feeble, he wallowed in fantasies of sexual violence. The history of civilization might be written as a series of social inventions for the proper application of violence: boxing matches, duels, warfare. When civilizations die, men cannot fall back on the killer instincts of barbarians who control their violence. They are like the jackdaws studied by Konrad Lorenz: Not genetically programmed to fight and kill, they do not have the ritual off-switch to stop violence, once it...
Ilhan and the New Face of America
CSPAN coverage of the House of Representatives may soon replace Comedy Central. Within a short 24 hour period, House Democrats proposed giving the vote to illegal aliens and refused to condemn outrageous statements made by Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar. Born in Mogadishu, where she spent her early years, Omar and her family were granted refugee status by an American government whose kindness exceeded its wisdom. Omar was brought up in the most ridiculous state of the American Union—Minnesota—where she eventually became a policy fellow at the Hubert Humphrey School of extraterrestrial Marxism, “community nutrition educator” at the state’s parody-university,...
Wednesday’s Child: A Spaghetti Tragedy
Young Nietzsche declared that tragedy was born from the spirit of music, but this proposition – as in the case of most nineteenth-century paradox mongers – may also be safely read in reverse. Surely one can argue that music was born from the spirit of tragedy? In fact, in an essay written a year earlier than The Birth of Tragedy, this is just what Nietzsche himself seems to have argued. Anyway, my wife, who is a musician, agrees, which is why she told Mario’s father that what the boy needed was to be better acquainted with the idea of tragedy....
Generations of Impotence, Part II “Stone Cold Dead in the WWF Market”
Big John Canaday may not have had brains, but with or without a gun he had grit, and to this day I do not know why he befriended me, much less why he picked the least athletic person he knew to take Coach Butts out to dinner. It may have been something as simple as the fact that my father owned a sports team, or–as I should prefer to think–that he knew I was at ease with grown-up men. Another bar (The Keg) in Charleston was owned by a Jewish prize-fighter who did not want kids in what was more...
Fake News All Around on Trump, Cohen, Kim Summit
Pat Buchanan say America isn’t a serious nation because its major media ignore matters of global war and peace for the tit-for-tat with President Trump. This screenshot confirms Pat. It’s CNN’s entire front page on my computer on the afternoon of February 27: The Bezos Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran similar front pages. The real story should have been Trump’s summit with Kim in Hanoi. But the fake news media won’t let Trump have even one good story, but instead obsess over the ludicrous “testimony” by a convicted perjurer before a Democratic committee in...
Generations of Impotence, or, Everything is Jake, Part I
My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them. He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly. He used to say, of a certain type of tuft-hunting spongers that they were the sort who called Hemingway “Papa.” Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first and best novel, The Sun Also Rises is an American’s Good-bye to All That, to manhood as well as civilization. In the novel poor Jake...
