Our World

The most serious political question is whether we want our nation to survive

A third world war is not possible in our time. Or at least, it is not possible in the way that any mainstream scholar or pundit thinks about such a thing.

There are many grave evils that threaten the international order and, by extension, the United States. Some of these dangers are quite likely in fact. A global conventional war between the great states like China, Russia, and the United States on the scale of the two previous world wars is not one of them.

Senator JD Vance on December 11 suggested that Ukraine surrender land in order to obtain a peace settlement with Russia.

“It ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn’t want to give up,” the Ohio Republican said to reporters. “No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries.”

When someone dies at the age of 100 it is rarely deemed to be premature. In the case of Henry Kissinger, he maintained his unique aptitudes right to the end of his life and his insights on foreign and strategic policy matters were so perceptive and original and his gifts for repartee and aphorisms were undiminished; his demise would have been untimely even if he had lived for another 25 years. He was both one of history’s great foreign ministers and one of the world’s outstanding academic historians of international relations and great power strategy.

Thought it best to add an opposing viewpoint…

The two faces of Henry Kissinger – This nice Jewish boy was a natural liar

In the coming days, many will lavish praise and blame on Henry Kissinger for what he did and did not do. A prime example is the coup in Chile that removed Salvador Allende in 1973, which Kissinger welcomed but did not cause. With thousands of US academics teaching the falsehood of his guilt as truth, Kissinger just had to live with the calumny.

The Irish-American officers of the New York Police Department Pipes and Drums band had never heard of The Pogues on the night that they featured in the band’s most famous and beloved music video.

Fairytale of New York was filmed in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park in November 1987 on one of the coldest days of the year, recounts drummer and bagpipe player Kevin P McCarthy.

McCarthy, a now-retired NYPD detective, says the group arrived for their second gig of the night and were surprised to discover that they would not need to play their instruments during the frigid two-hour film shoot.

It’s no secret that for years, the Drudge Report drove conservative (and often mainstream) media news cycles. If Drudge was talking about it, you could bet everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to PJ Media was also discussing it. In fact, there was a symbiotic relationship between Drudge’s aggregated links and the pages of most conservative media outlets. Pretty much everyone was either getting story prompts from Drudge or sending him stories (often via AOL Instant Messenger) hoping he’d link them.

Never had a Drudge link. My first big link way back when came from Little Green Footballs to a story on a meetup held by local Islamists and Liberal-Left types.

I was fortunate to receive several from Instapundit over the years, the first being a story on the TDSB teaching that only white people could be racist. This was long before anyone mentioned CRT or DEI. Heady times indeed.

Axis and Allies in the Eurasian rimland

With the Middle East primed for a conflagration, American policy-makers must recognize two realities. First, the United States is embroiled in a major Eurasian rimland war, one that must be fought and won to preserve American power. Second, the benefits of fighting forward — and fighting limited small wars rather than purely focusing on “the biggest threat” in Asia — are on full display in the Middle East today. The U.S. must stay the course in Europe and the Middle East to win the struggle for Eurasian mastery.

As the series marks its 50th anniversary, another conflict is breaking out

In one of the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the central character Guy Crouchback vacates his Italian castle in 1939 once the approaching conflagration can no longer be ignored. “He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness,” Waugh writes of his honourable, fallible stand-in. “But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” The looming catastrophe was, in all its awful novelty, the birth pangs of our own age.

In a famous lecture delivered in 1939 at the University of St. Andrews, On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien stated one of his profound convictions: “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-story.” Tolkien’s idea anticipates Northrop Frye’s theory from The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, which states that all universal literary “archetypes” are contained within the Holy Scriptures. This thesis prompts us to reflect on the possible influence of the Bible in general, and the Gospels in particular, on Tolkien’s literary creations.

History is rearing its ugly head, and it would best not to look away. Time to put away our foolish utopian dreams and face the harsher, more divided world, predicted in Samuel Huntington’s 2011 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order .

In the heady days following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many public intellectuals, as well as presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, embraced the notion of an ever expanding, liberal and democratic world order. Some, like political scientist Francis Fukuyama, even preached the “end of history,” prophesizing “the good news” of democracy’s inevitable spread and insisting that tech growth favours “a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism.”

Thirteen powerful families allegedly determine our collective destiny

Many years ago a friend of mine insisted we go to a bookstore so I could purchase a copy of a book that had her howling with laughter. The title of the book itself suggests the source of her amusement, “Nothing in this book is true, but it’s exactly how things are.” Published in 1994, the book is an audacious farrago into everything from massive alien intervention to pop metaphysics. One of the book’s premises, if one is to assign that much coherence to it, is that not one, but dozens of extraterrestrial races currently intervene in the affairs of humanity. It is now a cult classic.

We have all been turned into cloud-serfs

I once heard an elderly Friedrich von Hayek begin a tirade against socialist planning with a charming personal tale. “The other day,” he said playfully, “I went into a shop. I left with an item that, previously, I had no idea I wanted!” Like all the smartest defenders of capitalism, he thought of the market as a benevolent creator whose job no human-made system could replicate. Hayek’s point here was that we, ourselves, do not know what we want until we enter the market. So how could a government official, or indeed anyone, know what society wants.

There was a time when disputes between intellectuals made headlines and provoked editorials.

One of our young staff, Luther Ray Abel, raised an interesting point the other day in one of our subscriber-only letters about the kinds of issues that divide conservative intellectuals, causing long-time friends to turn on each other and become ex-friends.

Always one for comity and all hands on deck, it occurred to me: Is the quarrel Abel referred to, between one of our contributing editors and a fella at National Review Oliver Anthony, critical to our survival as a free society? Or is it of the academic politics variety, wherein intensity and stakes are inversely proportional?

… The gay rights movement succeeded in realizing its goal of removing the stigma of being a gay man. For this, I am ever grateful. I am mindful of the past–not to dwell on and wallow in emotion–but to remember it is crucial to be vigilant in the present.

This marks the return of Pongo, the Gay Gun Toting Hunting & Fishing Librarian and one of this blog’s earliest readers who offers us his take on the state of play in the LGB world.

The United States continues to set records under the Biden administration, but few if any of them are anything you’d want to brag about. We’ve broken records in terms of illegal immigration and gas prices. But an even more depressing statistic emerged this week. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more Americans died by suicide in 2022 than at any previous time in the nation’s history.

A TikTok depicting the downsides of wedlock has gone viral

A viral TikTok video doesn’t pull any punches in depicting the so-called negatives of marriage and motherhood for young women.
The video, that has been racking up millions of views, shows a Generation Z woman seeming to accept a marriage proposal before switching to a series of shorts showing the same woman toiling away in domestic drudgery — washing dishes, caring for a newborn baby, and cleaning the house. The clip ends with the woman rejecting the proposal, daunted by the future life of domestic servitude that just flashed before her eyes.