A new number of this excellent literary journal is available. Editor William Luse writes: “The current issue of The Christendom Review is now online. In this issue we have Todd McKimmey’s own beautiful photography, the poetry debut (I believe) of a talented young woman out of Bryan College (something good’s going on up there), Elena Lee Johnson, and of the essays I’d particularly recommend Lydia | Read More »
Cross posted at What’s Wrong with the World (a) The danger to a political cause when one or more of its factions begin to dogmatize to the point of excommunication is especially evident in minority status. A cause that, whatever its merits, can only gain the assent of a minority of the rulers or voters will be an increasingly failed cause to the extent that | Read More »
I anticipate that we will see more and more court decisions like the one described here by Yves Smith. The mortgage industry, in connivance with bankers and financiers of all shapes and sizes, introduced into the political economy, by means of innumerable frauds and sophistries, a whole field of unhedged risk: namely, the risk that the documents do not demonstrate what the securities confected out | Read More »
Whatever the outcome of the current contests of political force, or even the drama of the run-up to the next major context, it behooves us to review certain basic features of the world at war. The key principles in the intellectual fight against the Jihad, so far as one citizen, having studied and argued the subject at length, may venture with confidence, are as follows.
The origins of the American Civil Liberties Union are deeply entangled with Communism. Not the idealistic “liberals in a hurry” stuff of fellow-travelling fairy tale, but the bloody-minded sedition and revolutionary terror of hard historical reality. [ACLU founder Roger] Baldwin’s radicalism caught the eye of the FBI, which quoted him in a 1924 report as having said: “The right to advocate a violent revolution, assassination, | Read More »
Several of my colleagues at What’s Wrong with the World have begun a hard-hitting series of posts entitled “Disinviting Islam.” Why “disinviting”? Because our country, having already rashly invited Islam, now faces a grueling challenge: will we or will we not allow the Jihadist faction to consolidate and expand within growing sphere of Islamic influence? Even under the supposedly hawkish anti-terror warmongers of the Bush | Read More »
Some months ago on a lively email list of which I am a member, a discussion of some controverted legal doctrines digressed into a debate over the status of the Preamble to the US Constitution. Several incisive lawyers insisted that its status, legally, is nil. They allowed that the phrase “We the People” establishes the legitimacy of the document as having been made by consent, | Read More »
Perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference is to say that if you’re in business enterprise, you’re exposed to very high risk of failure and bankruptcy, while if you’re in finance capitalism, you’re protected from such risks by means of an astonishing proliferation of machinations and arcane subtleties. What if virtually every variety of debt security were still overvalued? What if, to put it | Read More »
The plain pulverizing fact is that our war is religious war. It matters not one lick how much our modern mind recoils from this; it matters not one lick that Liberalism barely even has the vocabulary to talk about it, and will react with blind fury against most anyone who does want to talk about it. Looking over the modern world and all its proliferating | Read More »
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, the German newspaper editor Josef Joffe contributes an intriguing if somewhat ungainly little essay; its subject is the mosque in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and other September 11th conspirators plotted their treachery. German authorities recently shut it down. One of its jihadist preachers was finally tried and imprisoned. “This is where Imam Muhammad al-Fazazi used to preach venom and murder | Read More »
Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard Coeur de Lion, who in turn | Read More »
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute was founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Frank Chodorov. Its purpose is to reorder the American university toward liberty, rather than the gaggle of derangements into which it has descended, and thereby to “sustain a free and virtuous society.” With particular emphasis on the rising generation of students, the good folks at ISI undertake their charge with vigor | Read More »
The Moroccan government has begun what amounts to an expulsion of all Christian missionaries. Considering that the speech of a Dutch politician said to be anti-Islamic, or a Swiss law to curtail the building of minarets, is the kind of thing that attracts extensive and often hyperbolic press coverage, one might expect that this new Moroccan policy might be worthy of notice. Alas, aside from | Read More »
It appears that, for all the supererogatory publicity, all the celebrity promotion, all the doomsaying, all the prevarication, the green agenda is breaking on the shoals of reality. Recently, the (British) Institute of Physics — as Mencius Moldbug wryly comments “only the national physics society of the country that invented physics” — released a statement on the Climategate emails which begins with about as thorough | Read More »
Outside Nashville, Tennessee, September 19, 2009. Leon Wolf is trying to starve me. I’ve been living for 16 hours on a diet of Bushmills, Guinness Stout, and sunflower seeds. But at least I’m on the golf course. The rain is coming down now, but it will clear soon. My companions are Leon and his son, who are just learning the game, and who, in their | Read More »
ISI Books has inaugurated a superb new historical series. Each volume is a slim, elegant, crisply-written study of what we might call the Lesser Founders. These are the men who built America but who, obscured by the towering giants of that age, haven’t been properly given their due. In comparison with Washington or Hamilton, few men measure up. But these Lesser Founders were impressive men | Read More »
One thing we know about the last Great Depression is that it unleashed some of the most awful political ideas ever known to man. Economic dislocation and crisis often have that effect: provoking and liberating that which is most base and wicked in the politics of man. Here, for instance, we have a comment on the faithlessness set loose upon the world in the 1930s, | Read More »
In one of Redstate’s previous iterations, several years back, some of us maintained a running debate on the meaning of patriotism. The old archive site does not lend itself to facile searching, so I fear that much of what follows will be both repetitive and inadequate; but this was always (for me at least) a fruitful conversation, despite its many difficulties and frustrations, and I | Read More »
Out amongst the usual street theater that follows a meeting of world economic powers like that held last week in London, the observer will behold a good sample of debased political idiom. The banners read like cant on stilts: “Abolish money” and “One currency, one government, one world” and “The government lies” and “Democracy is an illusion” and — my favorite — “No borders anywhere.” | Read More »
G. K. Chesterton, demonstrating his genius at the art of paradox, once referred to optimism as “morbid.” Since the moment I read that (it appears in the second chapter of The Everlasting Man, I have felt in my bones that it is true, and have accordingly nurtured a healthy repugnance for the braggarts of optimism. But as with many paradoxes, it is difficult to explain | Read More »
The almost singular driving purpose of our American economic policy should be* to encourage productive capital to move here. (Not high finance engineering, but actual means of production, to use the old terminology.) In fine, the driving purpose of our policy should be Hamiltonian through and through — the difference being that while he had to build a base of productive capital all we have | Read More »
I have heard and read a lot of panic and resignation out there. On the edges of it are despair. Hedge fund operators talk of the new economy of canned food and ammunition, and buying farmland in Canada. Normal family men evidence a peculiar despondency, retreating from the world. What is this? Today is the last day to capitulate to despair. Today is the last | Read More »
Anyone familiar with the lineaments of the debate over same sex marriage will have encountered what we might call the Libertarian Variation. This is the view that all the commotion surrounding this dispute could be avoided if only we could persuade the state to have done with marriage altogether, leaving it a strictly private affair. Most commonly the it will be advanced with a kind | Read More »
A woman with a peculiarly mercenary streak is auctioning off her virginity for a considerable sum of money: $3.7 million, according to this Telegraph report. It’s one way to beat the recession, I suppose. The idea of enterprising degradation came to her, it is further reported, because her sister was able to pay for “her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.” | Read More »
Damon Linker thinks there were (I almost said are) two Fr. Richard John Neuhauses. The good one and the bad one. Very generously, Linker writes that “I’m not mistaken, the first, more thoughtful Neuhaus has reasserted himself in the past two years.” What a relief that is. But what did that other one do? What are the second Neuhaus’s crimes? Well, he encouraged “the American | Read More »
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