It is rather late in the day, granted, but perhaps we can learn something from the track record of the British, especially from their mistakes. The British went everywhere, it seems, for various reasons, some good some bad, and created along the way the greatest empire the world has ever seen or ever will see. The problem was, they lost all … [Read More]

The publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, a book-length version of the now-famous essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is—naturally!—an occasion for the Lobby to go into high gear, and the intimidation tactics are already well along. Mearsheimer and Walt were invited by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to speak before the group, but the event … [Read More]

A demonstration against the “Islamicization of Europe” scheduled to take place in Brussels on September 11, 2007 and put together by the umbrella organization Pax Europa has been prohibited by the socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans. The intended demonstration, which was supposed to march by the headquarters of the European Union, has been declared to be a hostile gesture against the city’s … [Read More]

Sixty two years on, American and European commentators continue to blather on about the unwillingness of Japanese prime ministers to apologize about World War II. The Yasukuni shrine, where Japan’s 2.5 million dead soldiers are buried, has the same effect on our all-knowing ones as a man sucking a lemon in the front row of a concert has on a flutist … [Read More]

What are we to make of Hugo Chavez’s decree that the clocks of Venezeula shall all be set forward by half an hour—in order to increase the “metabolism and productivity” of workers? My question is: why only half an hour? If the government can regulate metabolism and productivity in this manner, when why not accelerate time by an hour or two, … [Read More]

                                An Obvious Omission In his latest column for Tribune Media Services, Jonah Goldberg deals with the question of why in recent years “conservative” websites have not fared as well as “liberal” ones. Apparently back in the salad days of the Clinton administration, everyone who counted … [Read More]

George Szamuely is an absolutely brilliant writer, whose acerbic columns for Antiwar.com, entitled “Decline of the West,” took the viewpoint of a supremely realistic, pitilessly objective observer whose grasp of history, and especially the history of human folly, gave his readers a uniquely informative and entertaining perspective on world events. I first read him when he was part of the old … [Read More]

Russell Kirk is in the news again, and it does my heart good. If I were to attempt to write of what I owe this great man’s writings and example I would be indulging my ego at the reader’s expense, something I am sure Kirk would gently deprecate. Let me tell you rather of how he fits into the big picture … [Read More]

”Home to Houston,” one of the great antiwar tracks on country rocker Steve Earle’s album The Revolution Starts Now, tells the story of a soldier stationed in Basra who day after day drives a supply truck along routes threatened by suicide bombers: I wound ‘er up and I shifted her down and I offered this prayer to my Lord:Said, “God get … [Read More]

It is a good thing to be out of the loop; that’s what a vacation is for. Recently I attended an invitational croquet tournament in the New York area. Between playing and running off to various social activities, there was no time left to think about the problems of the wider world. It helped that I did not have a … [Read More]