It is a quiet, country road going uphill. I had a beer for breakfast in the train station at the foot of the hill. I’m on the road to Vierzehnheiligen. The professor of European literature from England wanted me to stay on the train with him and go to Coburg, the hometown of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. The night … [Read More]

Take note of a compelling article in the London Review of Books late last month by Jim Holt entitled “It’s the Oil, Stupid”. I did plan to comment upon it and bring it to the attention of the readership of Taki’s TD, but got sidetracked. Matthew Engel beat me to the punch last weekend in the Financial Times, in its wonderful … [Read More]

Greece was not green like I had expected from Renaissance poetry about Arcadia. Delphi and Athens were a bust. Stones and tourists in the searing summer heat. So it was off to the islands. I met Count de Stefano on the flight over to Mykonos. He was from Venice, born in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Charged, fantee, and girl … [Read More]

Rest assured that the subject matter of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 will be revisited in the near future, with some further comparisons, parallels and speculation. For the moment, allow me to return to the immediate tragedy at hand, viz., the quagmire of Iraq and its purported justification, the “war on terror”. The American expatriate and Korean War veteran William Pfaff writes … [Read More]

There is a Washington insider named Michael Gerson who wrote speeches for the Cheney White House and who supposedly was Bush Jr’s favorite speechwriter. He now writes for Newsweek and the Washington Post. Gerson was a guest on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” program on CNBC last Friday evening, November 2nd. Since leaving his desk at the White House, Gerson has written a … [Read More]

Unlike Taki, I understand the fascination with the very rich. For the first time in 2007, all of the Forbes 400 richest persons in America are not just rich, but are billionaires to boot. In the world at large, Forbes calculates that there are exactly 891 billionaires. We are talking about a staggering amount of personal wealth. A billion dollars is … [Read More]

Another one of those important books which I have failed to read is Professor Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, and the Last Man, published in 1992, on the heels of the full-scale implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book was an amplification of his 1989 essay, “The End of History?” which appeared in the “neoconservative” journal, National Interest, founded … [Read More]

There have been two intriguing book reviews over last weekend in the establishment press. Both concern the overriding topics of war and peace and the future of America. The first article was in Friday’s New York Times, written by the inimitable Michiko Kakutani, perhaps the most influential book reviewer in the country. The book under review was Norman Podhoretz’s World War … [Read More]

It is time to contemplate, post “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the reality and the implications of “regime change” with respect to Iran. One fact has been made perfectly clear by the American reaction to the Iranian President’s recent visit to the UN and to Columbia University in New York. The de facto U.S. policy toward Iran is “regime change.” Nothing less. It … [Read More]

The most authentic human being I have ever known was the father of a classmate in elementary school.  That classmate has remained a friend to this day. His father was a handicapper of thoroughbreds, an aficionado of the racetrack. His name was Vince, born in 1898 in Connecticut, of parents who had both arrived on a boat from Ireland in the … [Read More]