There is some evidence that Poe sporadically had more than just two drinks. What is less well known is that he had very low tolerance for alcohol and usually drank less in a year than the likes of Taki or I do in a week. Poe’s posthumous reputation for chronic drunkenness originated in a smear-job obituary by one Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a frustrated envious hack who was a forerunner of today’s Christopher Hitchens.

The number of Chinese Christians in churches approved and unapproved has been increasing exponentially. Pope Benedict’s ingenious response to this situation has been a kind of Kung Fu move: At once, as he refuses to concede any ground whatsoever to the enemies of the Church, he also avoids attacking them directly. His letter to all Chinese Catholics, including those who practice in the schismatic “€œpatriotic”€ church authorized by the Communist Party, is a brilliant piece of verbal martial art: He does not attack the enemy, but rather holds his ground in a flexible way, patiently waiting for the enemy to exhaust itself.

A mere seven years after Boris Yeltsin’s Pink Elephants were dispossessed of Russia’s nuclear football and something approximating political and economic stability began to reign in Russia, now Vladimir Putin the most intelligent, liberal and reliable head of state Russia has seen since Tsar Alexander II, with the possible exception of Gorbachev — has come under the cross-hairs of the Trotskyite Neocon War Party. Meanwhile the unctuous skinhead kleptocrat Boris Berezovksy has heeded his own hubristic hallucinations and openly called for the violent overthrow of the elected government of Russia. How did it come to this? How did America lose the Cold War to the heirs of Marx and Trotsky?