Archive for June, 2009

Making a Monkey Out of Darwin

“You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science,” wrote Thomas Huxley. “Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be.”

As “Darwin’s bulldog,” Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master’s theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

Who’s Laughing Now?

There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week—Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina.

Politics, entertainment—you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other takes up.

New Haven’s Poor Little Lambs

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in favor of white firemen who claim to be victims of discrimination gives us an opportunity to attempt a little political casuistry, even before we have finished outlining a set of essential principles. It is not the details of the case that matter—what do I care about what happens in New Haven—but the rationale for making moral and political decisions.

Surviving the Next Depression—July 2009

Thomas Fleming on how we might still live well, Tom Landess on the New Deal’s destruction of agrarianism, Wayne Allensworth on Russia’s past and America’s (possible) future, and Greg Kaza on the history of distributism and how it can help us. Plus, Justin Raimondo on the dismissal of charges in the recent AIPAC espionage case.

What is History? Part 38

A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sin, but his own. —North Carolina newspaper, 1854

A Credo for Authentic Conservatives and Other Sane People

Morality and politics are a reflection of and extension of our nature which is not infinitely perfectible or subject to reinvention. This is not to say that social, cultural, and technical improvements are not valuable, only that they do not override the basic facts of life.

California, Here We Come!

PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall.

And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading.

I Become an American

We’ll come momentarily to Obama’s discovery that it’s not all fun being president, but first a bulletin on regime change for co-editor Cockburn. Though the U.S. Constitution seemingly blocks my path at this time, I have taken the first necessary step in my own quest for the White House by becoming a citizen of the United States at approximately 10 a.m. Pacific time, last Wednesday, June 17, in the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, Calif.

Dumb and Dumber: Sanford and the Conservatives

The meteoric rise and fall of Mark Sanford, conservative hero, has been a depressing spectacle. It is not the fate of Governor Sanford—a run-of-the mill pol convinced of his own superiority over the rest of humanity—that depresses the spirits but the instability of the conservatives and Republicans who put their trust in him—without knowing anything, really, about the man—and then backed him to the end that any normal person knew was inevitable.

What is History? Part 37

It is said, and it is very true, that the moment when vice becomes the custom marks the death of a republic, for the dissolute persons cease to be regarded as loathsome, and all baseness becomes normal. —Arturo Perez-Reverte

“Hell” ain’t cussin’, it’s geography. —Harry Carey, Jr. in Wagon Master