Do Try This At Home

The cultural contrast between intriguing guests and apparently brain dead yack TV hosts has John Derbyshire lamenting :    ” It’s not the dumbing-down that bothers a lot of us fogeys so much, it’s the loss of interest in things and stuff.” I"€™ll say- gone ...

Alcohol-Tobacco-Firearms: The Hunt For Red November

The road to the White House often intersects the path of rapidly moving projectiles.  Bravely volunteering to put themselves and their horses, naval vessels and airplanes into the way of arrows bullets , cannonballs torpedoes, and the odd destroyer launched Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln, ...

Threat Deflation

In Leaderless Jihad, former Foreign Service Officer Marc Sageman, now a University of Pennsylvania professor,distills what he learned from years of reading the daily feed of intelligence, both classified and open source,  streaming through the State Department. But Sageman is no mere desk ...

What al Sweilem party it Is

In what may count as the first wine commercial starring a Wahabi mullah, Omar Al-Sweilem waxes lyrical on what awaits the suicide bombing classes on the first 72 of their 1001 Arabian nights in Paradise: the text hardly does credit to Al Sweilem’s performance, which I suggest you lay back on ...

The Standard at Sea

This morning, a bottle hit the Manhattan island shore, containing a rather distressing log from The Weekly Standard‘s annual Caribbean Cruise. It seems that things have gone terribly awry aboard the dreadnaught HMS Hegemonic. Bimini: Great news—no going back to Fort Lauderdale. The ...

The Protocols of the Elders of Bryan”€”The Discovery Institute Inherits the Wind

After the 1964 election a book appeared damning Conservatism's debut as a "€œbrute assault on the entire intellectual world"€ and charging, "€œRepublicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy."€ This withering critique of the ...

The Demarche Hare

Kim Jung-Il’s dictatorial taste in cinema, cuisine, and above all public sculpture remains deeply mysterious, witness the fusion of folk culture and socialist realism in the Lunar Rabbit Zodiac Memorial installed at Pyongyang’s uninhabitable 105 story Pyramid Hotel. While a symphony ...

Through A Glass Darkly

They dream strange academic dreams in far Northern Norway, where the Aurora Borealis can blaze until the Midnight Sun rises over a seat of learning equidistant from Rome and the North Pole. When the sun does rise over the University of Tromso, the air up there will start to warm more avidly ...

Climate of Here

Is a conservative climate consensus possible? If hard cases make bad law, soft science makes sensible politics even harder. The Climate Wars present legislators on both sides of the aisle with few certainties, among them that one side is prone to construe any human impact on climate as tantamount ...

The Rest Is Silence

Though I was later to appear on “Firing line,” write for his magazine,and find myself embroiled in his public diplomacy, my first meeting with Bill Buckley was by far my warmest. It was the morning of the Apollo 11 moon launch, and the July temperature and humidity at Cape Canaveral ...