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.
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...
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,...
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....
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...
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...
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...
The wealth of information and the power of prejudice would make it more difficult, though hardly impossible, to trace the degeneration of the United States from the limited republic of Adams and Jefferson to the imperial plutocracy of Lincoln and Grant to the national socialism of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors to our own miserable and degraded condition today, when conservatives have abandoned even the fig leaves of law that used to protect us, in theory at least, from our rulers in Washington. Is there a single moral, social, economic, constitutional, or even environmental principle that would deter people like….Feel...
We had snow in Palermo for the first time in fifty years, and the young barman in a truck stop where I go for coffee whenever Signor Baldo, my provider of choice, is indisposed, finally spoke to me of something other than the weather. “You’re Russian,” he said, because that’s what I’d told him the day before. Then, in a confidential tone, as though imparting some lifesaving news, he continued: “In Russia, you beat Hitler.” I often wonder about what the average man knows. Reading Russian viewer comments on YouTube the other evening, after watching some stupid police drama, I...
Not too long ago I would have seen two or three of the five movies up for best picture at the Academy Awards, and heard something about the others. This year, as in most recent years, I haven’t seen any of the nominees, now inflated to eight, although I do recognize a couple from ads or the minor controversies they started in our PC-obsessed so-called culture. I also used to go to one or two movies a month. But I stopped doing that maybe 15 years ago. It isn’t that I watch them on TV now; I don’t even have...
