Across the country last weekend, there were antiwar demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him. I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, Calif. My neighbor...

The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state. The U.S. government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest...

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.” Formed in...

Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reports that none of these aides faced Senate confirmation. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers. The...

Before President Obama even landed at Andrews Air Force Base, returning from his mission to Copenhagen to win the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago had been voted off the island. Many shared the lamentation of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, “What has become of America, when Chicago can’t steal an election?” A second and more serious battle...

The double standard under which the Israeli government operates is too much for everyone except the brainwashed Americans. Even the very Israeli Jerusalem Post can see the double standard displayed by “all of Israel now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report”: This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to...

September’s unemployment figures were not only disappointing—they were grim. For the 21st straight month, Americans lost jobs. Fifteen million are out of work—5 million for more than six months. But as the Washington Times asserts, “America’s jobless crisis is much worse than the 9.8 percent unemployment rate.” The U.S. economy actually lost 785,000 jobs in...

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”—Karl Marx If Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics. Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination...

Humility is the great moral skandalon (stumbing block) of Christianity, in much the same way that Christ—the God who became man, suffered, and died a humiliating death—was the skandalon to the Jews.  Thus it is a little amusing to read the complaints of so many uneducated neopagans—most of them anti-Semites—against ...

Jonah Goldberg has a piece in yesterday’s USA Today defending television loudmouth Glenn Beck from his critics.  In the course of his piece, Goldberg takes a swipe at Pat Buchanan for not being a Republican and for writing a revisionist history of the start of World War II, making the same sort of arguments that...

The Institute for American Values gives us the news that—all right, they don’t say it in so many words, but two and two are easy to add, and there seems no way not to understand that David Letterman didn’t inadvertently become a cad and a bounder and Roman Polanski a rapist on the run. Our...

The Pentagon’s pre-emptive strike came with the leak of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s confidential review of the Afghan war to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. McChrystal’s painting of the military picture was grim. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where...

Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “mainstream media” about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that...

Obama is by nature a booster—like the first stage of the missile lofting its payload into the upper atmosphere. A huge bang, a mighty whoosh and then a few miles up, a fizzle as the Obama-booster burns out and drops back to earth. Who knows what happened to the payload? He doesn’t seem to have...

More Lies, More Deception by Paul Craig Roberts • September 30, 2009 • Printer-friendly “What does imperialism mean? It means the assertion of absolute force over others.”—Robert Lowe, 1878 The G-20 ministers declared their meeting in Pittsburgh a success, but as Rob Kall reports in OpEdNews.com, the meeting’s main success was to turn Pittsburgh into...

PERSPECTIVE Remembering Who We Were by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Exporting Political Correctness by Justin Raimondo Through force of arms. Obama's Right-Wing Cheerleaders by Leon Hadar Rah-rah government intervention! NEWS Dissolving Britain by Mary Ellen Synon The Lisbon Treaty's Eurojustice. REVIEWS Supernova by Derek Turner Charlotte Mosley, ed.: In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor Matthew A. Roberts on Dora L. Costa's and ...

That Iran is building a secret underground facility near the holy city of Qom, under custody of the Revolutionary Guard—too small to be a production center for nuclear fuel, but just right for the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade—is grounds for concern, but not panic. Heretofore, all of Iran's nuclear ...

Lord knows I’ve had my run-ins with Andrew Sullivan, who seems to think that a devotion to gay rights and Obama constitutes a form of “conservatism,” and yet I’ve got to give the guy credit for writing this ...

In a previous contribution to Chronicles' Filmlog,

At the Heart of Darkness by Samuel Francis • September 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.”—Cotton Mather H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography by S.T. JoshiWest Warwick, Rhode Island:Necronomicon Press; 704 pp., $20.00 H.P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous WritingsEdited by S.T. JoshiSank City, Wisconsin:Arkham...

Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with 1 million schoolchildren now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over. The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer ...

In August, the Georgian navy seized a Turkish tanker carrying fuel to Abkhazia, Georgia’s former province whose declaration of independence a year ago is recognized by Russia but not the West. The Turkish captain was sentenced to 24 years. When Ankara protested, he was released. Abkhazia has now threatened to sink any Georgian ship interfering...

You know—you must—you can’t help it—aren’t you alive?!—that the marketplace isn’t perfect. Haven’t we all been told often enough, amid the political chatter concerning how to crack down on Wall Street? Bad, bad bankers whose pay should be regulated and selfish brokers—not to mention negligent directors of corporations—are among the current targets. John Maynard Keynes...

World War II has provided a vast amount of material for cinema in Europe, America, and Japan.  Some if this is superb.  Much of it is hokey entertainment and propaganda.  We perhaps did not realise how hokey until the horrors of D-Day were portrayed in Saving Private Ryan.   That useful ...

It helps to read history. We know, or should, that American life shows us nothing like the social and political conniptions that Germany experienced in the 1920s, France in the 1790s and the United States in the 1850s. But something is cooking. Indignant people—I’m sidestepping the adjective “angry” so as to avoid connotations—don’t mysteriously materialize...

The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them. The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the...

Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down. Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs. The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post...

“You may all go to Hell; I will go to Texas,” said David Crockett to the voters before departing for San Antonio and the Alamo, where he, Jim Bowie, Buck Travis, and 186 other brave Americans gave their lives for liberty. As the entire United States seems bent on following Davy’s instructions, a few brave...

If the aphorism holds—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose—the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan. Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And their...

We should have

When one William Kostric walked into a protest outside a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which the President of the United States was present, carrying a loaded gun—“Of course it was loaded,” he told Chris Matthews later, “what kind of fool would carry around an unloaded gun?”—he ...

In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week, Netanyahu called for

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known ...

The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas...

America is a strange place. Liberals get emotionally distraught that the Founding Fathers stuck Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. For American citizens to possess firearms is considered to be dangerous. Yet, it is quite all right for Americans to possess deadly green mambas. Mambas are large, fast and very poisonous African snakes whose bite...

The “Prince of Darkness”—aka Robert Novak—who died this week of a brain tumor, was the Hunter Thompson of the right, albeit with predictable differences. Thompson, like Rimbaud, espoused a total disordering of all the senses—with materials as varied as ayahuasca, LSD, cocaine and tequila whereas Novak stuck to booze. Thompson blew his brains out, whereas...

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Share This Add to Favorites

PERSPECTIVE Stepping Backwardby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Deconstructing Miss Dixieby Michael HillEducating for the planetary community. Educating for Faith and Communityby Thomas J. KorcokA Lutheran success story. The School of Historyby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.California, here we come! NEWS Berlusconi’s Will To Fightby Alberto CarosaBetter late than never. REVIEWS An American Prophetby George W. Liebmann Lee Congdon:...

“We just can’t afford it!” Not long ago, every America child heard that, at one time or another, in the home in which he or she was raised. “We just can’t afford it!” It may have been a new car, or two weeks at the beach, or the new flat-panel TV screen. Every family knew...

“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.”—R.L. Bushman “Rapidly you are dividing into two classes—extreme rich and extreme poor.”—”Brutus” Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The...

What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that ’60s stuff! Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate...

Recently at NRO, Mark Krikorian drew critical attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal which described how minor league baseball teams are now importing foreign players.  According to the Journal, “For decades, minor-league rosters seemed the essence of the American heartland.  But thanks to growing numbers of foreign players . . . the...

White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society, which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatter plot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as...

“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus: “The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict...

Wake Island (1942)Directed by John Farrow, B&W, 88 Minutes Go Tell the Spartans (1978)Directed by Ted Post, Color, 114 Minutes Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983)Directed by Stephen Frears, Color, 106 Minutes Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World War II without...