In South Africa, the ratio of voters to taxpayers is now a stupefying 11 to 1, and growing. The equivalent ratio in the U.S. is still approximately 2 to 1. But the numbers of the unproductive are increasing steadily. As Mr. Buchanan notes, almost all the immigrants replacing the host population in the U.S. come from "Asia, Africa, and Latin America." Given America's preference for welfare-dependent, third-world immigrants, pillage politics will proliferate.
I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty, but I'll start with the good.
Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you'll find today. It's quite long, and it's simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein's juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You'll have a good time reading this book.
If the United States had a "swear jar," it would be full to bursting right now.
Indicating a further erosion of the difference between public and private spaces and behavior, an increasing number of publishers are following the lead of songwriters and Broadway by including profanity in their book titles.
I still haven't entirely warmed to Michael Connelly's “Lincoln Lawyer” character, Mickey Haller, who strikes me as somewhat irresponsible (a useful quality, perhaps, in a criminal defense lawyer). But The Reversal, “A Lincoln Lawyer” novel, is as much a story of Mickey's half-brother, police detective Harry Bosch, as it is one of Mickey's, so I had no problem getting on board. And the story as a whole seemed to me as engaging and sympathetic as anything Connelly has written in some time.
Back when I was in college, there was a TV miniseries (I never actually saw it myself) called “Sybil,” starring Sally Field. It told the story of a woman who suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder, induced by horrendous childhood abuse. It was based on a “fact-based” book, with names and locations disguised. Still, the word got around as to what the (supposed) facts were. The real Sybil was a woman named Shirley Mason, and she’d grown up in the little town of Dodge Center, Minnesota. Dodge Center is a neighboring town to my own home town, Kenyon. I remember riding through Dodge Center around that time, thinking, “It all happened here.” Only it didn’t. According to this New York Post article, the whole thing was a fraud, perpetrated by a disturbed woman who loved attention, a drug-happy therapist looking to make a reputation, and a sensationalist writer. A new book, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, written by Debbie Nathan, tells the story of how it happened that Shirley Mason went to school in New York, and came to be under the treatment of therapist Connie Wilbur. One day, Shirley started talking about blackouts in
Andrew Klavan is one of the most perceptive cultural analysts of our day, and his Klavan on Culture at Pajamas Media is a frequent stop of mine. In a recent post on a new book called Willpower, Klavan takes the Baby Boomer generation to task for ruining American culture. I suppose Boomers can be an easy target for such a charge, but Klavan does it in a way that shows how our liberties are lost at the door of license. Without personal responsibility, as the Founders of our country knew, true liberty is unattainable. Klavan understands and argues well that when we throw away moral values for a self-centered freedom to do whatever we want, we in fact get statist coercion running our lives. A great writer, he knows how to make his case: ehaving well, behaving responsibly, learning the norms of politeness and refusing to abandon them without good reason tend to make you a more self-controlled, successful, and finally better person. This is precisely the wisdom my generation threw away. Their promiscuity, adolescent foul-mouthedness, bad manners, and disregard for tradition — all of which they claimed were a new kind of freedom — were in fact the precursors
Interesting interview with Aldous Huxley, describing how the tyranny of 1984 can slide into the more agreeable tyranny of Brave New World. His reasoning is different than de Tocqueville’s analysis of the “soft despotism” that can arise in democracies, but both require centralized political power and lead to the same place. Two prophetic warnings from different centuries, as we approach 2012.
The conviction prevails, in privileged circles that, if we study history without reshaping it to our contemporary prejudices, history will corrupt us. May I suggest that the opposite is true? …Those who deny history die of myth. In that quotation from his Introduction, Ralph Peters sums up much of the lessons he propounds in his 2010 collection of essays and columns, Endless War. The first section of the book consists of a series of essays on early Islamic victories in the historic struggle with the West, followed by a series of Western (dare I say Christian?) victories as Muslim civilization went into decline. Then he draws conclusions, and proceeds to analyze various aspects of our contemporary “War On Terror” (a designation he loathes). Our great mistake, as I read him, is our insistence on “understanding” our opponents. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the way our academics and academically-trained soldiers do it is so informed by postmodern secularism that they end up violating both fact and logic. Better than academic anthropology and political theory, these people should read original historical and religious texts, and myth. Our enemies are fighting for a dream, not an ideology. Peters expresses some
Cliff Kincaid at USA Survival offers us his take on the ‘Days of Rage’: There are Marxist-oriented “Occupy Wall Street” protests underway. These demonstrations deliberately miss the point and constitute a re-elect Barack Obama movement. They are pawns of Obama and the progressive movement. Zubi Diamond, a black critic of Obama , properly distinguishes between the good Wall Street and the bad Wall Street. He writes that an example of the good Wall Street would be someone like Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple: “These people create, run or finance money-making companies and serve the community with much-needed jobs and employment, products and services. The good Wall Street includes the general public mutual funds, retirement portfolios, common investors, banks and venture capital investors who finance and fund the loans for our homes and businesses. They fund and finance economic growth and expansion.” By contrast, “An example of the bad Wall Street would be someone like George Soros. These people are the financial hedge fund short-selling operators who make money by betting on company collapse, economic calamities and catastrophes.” Zubi says: “The only financial reform needed today is to regulate and monitor the hedge
Halloween approacheth, a season in which it is particularly appropriate to read horror stories. One of the more unusual sub-categories of such tales is the one that melds the supernatural tale with the detective story (e.g., the Dr Taverner series by the occultist Dion Fortune). The fact that these elements are essentially incompatible make the successful ones rather remarkable. Perhaps the best one is the 1937 novel The Burning Court, by John Dickson Carr, republished this year by Langtail Press (www.langtailpress.com). Carr (1906-1977) is one of the giants of the detective story, on a par with Agatha Christie. He wrote well and specialized in seemingly impossible crimes, like corpses found in locked rooms, and often combined this with an eerie atmosphere. However, he rarely wrote tales that partook of the supernatural. I would say The Burning Court is Carr at his best. There is no impossible murder; instead, the body of a man, possibly murdered, impossibly disappears from its tomb. Ted Stevens, the central character, whose friend’s uncle is the dead man, winds up being concerned about his French Canadian wife, Marie, who seems to be the descendent of two murderous witches. The love between Ted and Marie is depicted
The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth — Vincent Cornier (1898-1976) — Mike Ashley, editor — Crippen & Landru Publishers — 2011 — Short mysteries collection: 11 stories — #33 in C & L’s “Lost Classics” series — Trade paperback: 163 pages — ISBN: 978-1-932009-98-9. Vincent Cornier (real name: Vincent Corner) was a British newspaperman and mystery writer who could, on occasion, produce stories with the complexity and atmospherics usually associated with John Dickson Carr. Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru has collected most of the known stories featuring Cornier’s series sleuth Barnabas Hildreth and his “Watson”, newspaper editor Geoffrey Ingram, with indefatigable researcher Mike Ashley acting as able editor. If it weren’t for Frederic Dannay, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), Cornier’s fiction might never have come to the attention of American readers. Dannay reprinted the stories in the immediate post-World War II period, after having Cornier revise them — and/or changing them himself. (Note: It would be interesting to compare the original stories with their EQMM “revisions” to see how many changes, if any, Dannay wrought on them — he was known for making editorial alterations at will. One story in particular, “The Monster”,
In The Freeman Online, Bruce Edward Walker brings to mind a once-popular mid-20th-century author: Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions. . . . . As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies. Marxism proved, not for Koestler alone, a harsh mistress to please, one incapable of returning his devotion. Stalin’s purges in the ’30s — including his grotesque show trials — effectively ended Koestler’s affair with Communism, provoking his fictional jeremiads in the ’40s and thereafter. Walker’s article is here. Several
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