Archive for July, 2010

Regional Cinema

Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and captures the attention of us all, high and low, wise and foolish. It is also arguable that movies, like literature and architecture, reflect something of the soul of the particular nation that produces them. If so, we indeed need to be concerned about the American soul.

Conservative Credo: Abortion, Conclusion

If the state is to protect life at any cost, doesn’t this imply a financial obligation to preserve the life of any child, no matter how deformed or hopeless, no matter what it takes?  That means a considerable outlay of tax money, and in parallel cases, when the state assumes the burden, it also lays [...]

To Teach or To Sneer

Authentic conservatives and their libertarian allies have long been a small minority in a larger movement that, for the most part, rejected their radical critique of the managerial state. The “paleos” were singled out for attack by the neoconservatives, that exotic sect of ex-leftists prophetically described by Russell Kirk as “this little Sacred Band—which had made itself exclusive, and now finds itself excluded.”

The War on Arizona

Not since President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and JFK sent U.S. marshals to the University of Alabama has the federal government seemed so at war with a state of the union.

The Constitutions in Our Brains

Tee-hee. Such is the line in liberal circles concerning the federal district court decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act on, among other grounds, those of “States Rights.” Including Massachusetts’ right to allow gay marriage without prejudice to the partners’ right to federal benefits.

Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime

For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should mean something.

Is Democracy Overrated?

With the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, and Beijing’s abandonment of Maoism, anti-communism necessarily ceased to be the polestar of U.S. foreign policy.

For many, our triumph fairly cried out for a bottom-up review of all the alliances created to fight that Cold War and a return to a policy of non-intervention in foreign quarrels where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled.

You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh

In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America and Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit.

Winning Is Everything, Isn’t It?

A review of Vincere, written and directed by Marco Bellocchio; produced by Offside and Celluloid Dreams; distributed in America by IFC Films.

Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane person must resist.

Hitchens and Israel

The print issue of National Review has a very revealing review of Christopher Hitchens’ autobiography by Ronald Radosh.  It comes as no surprise that Radosh praises the book and its author as a “voice to treasure”; Hitchens has been enjoying neocon praise since he emerged as a very vocal supporter of the neocon project of [...]