December 19, 2021

Irony and Ascension

As many have discovered in their sojourns, life viewed solely through the lens of death and its attending fear can shatter us, and the corresponding fragments of self-recrimination and despair can leave us unequal to the task of moving forward. It ha...

February 20, 2017

Self-deception and evil

The refusal to recognize fundamental aspects of reality does not absolve us from the laws or authority that govern them, just as stepping off a ledge with the belief that one may not fall will prove catastrophic.  Ignorance of the rules of the w...

January 1, 2017

Can You Hear It?

2016 will go down in history as the time when the West’s inexorable march towards oblivion halted in its tracks. It was the year that the tyrant’s mask slipped and showed the world that its Global City was really a poisoned ant hill. It w...

December 25, 2016

That Wonderful Tree

Christmas, if not a time for utter extravagance, is at least a season for pulling out some of the stops. This year is the first that my daughter and her husband will spend in their new home, and what better way to highlight that vaulted ceiling than ...

December 20, 2016

What Is Truth?

Truth has always been accompanied by a doubled-mindedness. It is something that people claim to want, but few can bear. Socrates searched for it. Jesus bore witness to it, and Pilate answered, albeit rhetorically, “What is truth?” Truth i...

December 18, 2016

Job in the Dock

To every life comes a time of sackcloth and ashes, for who has fully escaped those catastrophes that send their torments into our deepest chambers of being? And when life’s walking-wounded level their white-hot accusations against the Living Go...

December 10, 2016

Last Year’s Man

The Bible tells us in the Gospel of Matthew about a merchant, who having found a pearl of great price, sold all that he had to buy it. As a seventeen-year boy coming of age in the mid-1970s, I was that merchant, and the late poet-songwriter Leonard C...

December 4, 2016

Nakedness and necessity

Until we stand naked before the Living God, we shall not have assumed the proper perspective for building the foundations of an everlasting relationship. It ultimately comes down to a question of how vividly and honestly we perceive our need in Him. ...

November 29, 2016

Flunking higher education

Peace Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, even Marijuana Studies.  These "Sensitivity Degrees," from 40K-plus-a-year universities, are coming home to roost – as our youth begin taking their surly bite o...

November 27, 2016

A Belated Thanksgiving Meditation

Even though I am a stumbling disciple of Jesus Christ, the inclination to offer praise for His blessings when my circumstance is a net positive, or even tolerable, is strong. But how does one do it when things turn very bad? How, in all sincerity, do...

November 27, 2016

Tyrants at Room Temperature

Want to know the difference between a degenerate capitalist system and a degenerate socialist system? One fights tooth and claw over marked down Big Screens while the other commits fratricide over the staples that sustain human life. The former queue...

November 16, 2016

A Strong Delusion

Because it is ideologically ill-disposed to understand the motives that inform human nature, socialism's grasp of the human sciences is mortally flawed. Thus, politics, culture, history, and economics are viewed through a warped prism that distor...

November 16, 2016

Doubling down on a nightmare

The Affordable Care Act, more than any other legislation, betrays both the left’s hubris and its trademark cynical condescension toward Americans so typical of elites.  Indeed, Progressives assume that since their ideology on the surf...

November 12, 2016

The Jerusalem wall

As the voluntary institutions of civil society atrophy, to say nothing of the notion of a transcendent Deity with an objective moral code, the state expands to fill the vacuum, and with it, the power of the American Executive.  Those of the Prog...

November 6, 2016

Heroism in a Postmodern World

Postmodernity would seem to be an era wherein heroes and the heroic are anachronisms, unless the cause is related to the emancipation of the passions or the demolition of ancient moral restraints. Thus, the epithet of hero can be laid at the feet of ...

September 3, 2016

The Child on the Cross

Without taking into account those pregnancies terminated in lieu of the mother's health, which in real terms are less than negligible, selective abortion as a form of birth control is a heinous sin akin to murder.  In admitting this, should ...

August 28, 2016

The Theory of Nothing

The Philosophy of Science is a seedbed ripe for rich speculation. But perhaps the most profound questions the renowned scientist Stephan Hawking could wrestle with are not related to a multiplicity of bubble universes, but that fantastic Singularity ...

August 27, 2016

Science: A graven image

How ironic that science – a supposed neutral methodology – has taken on the status of an authoritative graven image, with all the dogmatic accoutrements that accompany a religious system.  Nothing illustrates this more than its stanc...

August 21, 2016

Exits and Advents

A female on my running team spent the last few months caring for a father who had been a peripheral character throughout her entire life. By every measure of earthly justice, she should have turned her back on him -- as her sisters eventually did. Ne...

July 10, 2016

The Path of Good Intent

During the heyday of our Republic’s more exacting youth, when the circumspection of men who would rule still pointed in the direction of prudent liberty, the apologetics of vice could gain little traction once the rug was turned back, and the s...

June 29, 2016

Myths and Europeans

In calling down from Heaven the first postulate of prudent government, England’s own G.K. Chesterton once exhorted us that “It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.” And in light of last week’s even...

June 26, 2016

The Jihadi’s Dilemma

I wonder if in the cool and quiet of the evening, long after the muezzin’s final call to prayer, the jihadi mulls over the actions he either perpetrates or gives assent to in the name of his cold and distant deity? Does he pray as I do? Does he...

June 25, 2016

Escape from a clay-footed king

When you finally gin up the courage to extricate the fangs of the parasite from your throat, there is bound to be some blood spilled, and the European Union has been that monster.  It is a utopian construct impressed down upon the diversity of t...

June 24, 2016

Put On the Full Armor of Man

In simpler and perhaps more enlightened times, every warrior defending hearth and home who had ever taken the field knew well that the battle won is first enjoined in the mind. Moreover, one does not risk life or death for a cause that did not first ...

June 9, 2016

Sauce for the Gender

Having an unquenchable thirst for irony and the justice it affords to clay-footed idols who are hoisted from their own petards, I was propelled into full “I told you so” mode last weekend when a boy won honors in two girls’ events a...

June 8, 2016

A New Transvaluation

In the decades prior to our great descent into this hypertolerant hamster cage of the West, homosexuals lived their lives in a state of uneasy tolerance as general society averted its gaze and made peace with the accommodation. But as time passed, th...

June 5, 2016

The Judgment of Servitude

From the 20s to the late 40s of the last century, the Western elite's flirtation with Socialism/Communism was fashionably in vogue, and it took our near extermination by Collectivists and Darwinian pagans to relearn the recitation of every slave...

May 26, 2016

Beside the waters of Babylon

In the quarrel between progressives and conservatives, so many of the former believe that we are mired in a nostalgia for white privilege or some Norman Rockwell painting of an America that exists only as a furtive dream. Before men wore their pol...

October 13, 2014

Despairing of Political Perfection

All institutions of Men are in flux -- and the Republican and Democratic Parties, as they are now constituted, are mere vehicles for the distinct ideological movements that animate them. The Democratic Party has long moved away from its once strong P...

September 30, 2014

Negotiating the Lion's Den

A few weeks ago, while filling in as a “guest teacher” at a local continuation school, I received that dreaded call that no educator ever wants to receive. According to the union representative, I had been accused by a middle school ...

September 27, 2014

To Revive a Phoenix

As mankind continues to relentlessly explore those uncharted regions of his Labyrinth of Horrors, have we any inkling of what we have bartered for his final tumultuous Main Event? We, who have grown anesthetized to the anthropomorphic-spawned tremors...

September 21, 2014

Authority, Justice, and Law

We tread on a potential minefield whenever we attempt to divine the Hand of God in our peculiar conceptions of law and human governance. In particular, we must use wisdom and reason in the prudent application of Paul's words in Romans: a teaching...

September 17, 2014

Foreign Policy and Roosting Chickens

Are we fated, as drowsy creatures who delight in drink and lovemaking, to awaken only after the house is ablaze? After all, who appointed us judge, jury and executioner? Is it inevitable that the strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what th...

September 13, 2014

An Old Soldier's Last Farewell

Being mortal, there are limits imposed on the flower of our flesh that are non-negotiable. We thrive in the sun for a short season, only to submit to the inexorable decay from which there is no appeal. Death is a curse. It is a monstrosity that we ca...

September 9, 2014

Chicken Sandwiches and Moral Eclipse

I suppose that having no intimate firsthand knowledge of the manifold virtues of sodomy, nor a desire for its normalization, would disqualify me, at least in the jaded opinions of Progressives, from commenting on the Chick-Fil-A Wars. Future textbook...

September 7, 2014

The 'Baby Daddy' God

There is a good reason why Jews and Christians set the world’s teeth on edge, and it is not their conservative fashion sense. The spirit of the world is hostile to the message that humanity is the product of Special Creation. Surely, the awe-in...

September 1, 2014

Slouching Towards the End of History

The famous (or once famous) psychologist Emile Coué initiated a school of hypnotic auto-suggestion that can be summed up with the phrase: "Every day and every way, things are getting better." This mantra raises optimism to the calibe...

August 31, 2014

Art and Habit

Upon viewing The Nun’s Story (1959) the other night on TCM, one is certain that such a film could never be made today. There are no half-dressed strumpets parading, no explosions, and no exaggerated drama that comes from the meanderings of a sh...

August 27, 2014

Conservatism's Family Snapshot

What is termed “Social Media” can be a vast desert of sorts: an endless vista of parched and barren land, interspersed at sparse intervals by the occasional refreshing oasis. Negotiating Facebook’s plethora of silly cat memes and th...

August 18, 2014

Riding the Tiger

Given my druthers, being on the receiving end of a policeman’s sidearm is not the way that I would prefer to shuffle off this mortal coil. However, there is a profound difference in suffering that indignity as an innocent, or in the malici...

August 13, 2014

Mr. Williams

They say that in order to make them laugh, you need to know how to make them cry. Robin Williams was of this mold. While he charmed and delighted with his frenetic style of comedic mayhem, his best roles were sad, contemplative, and serious. His...

August 10, 2014

Muslims and Morlocks

It is the stuff that nightmares are made of. Science fiction is replete with tales of creatures rising up out of the earth -- abducting and murdering humanity in terrifying fashion when their doom was least expected. The film Tremors introduced us to...

August 6, 2014

U.S. Diplomacy and the Spartan Kick

By the first decade of the fifth century B.C., Darius the Persian had grown exceedingly proud, and the insolence of that power lifted his eyes to the West for the acquisition of greater empire. Thus, he sent heralds throughout Greece asking for ...

August 5, 2014

Muslim Contributions to America and the World

I have been waiting intently for that catalogue of much vaunted accomplishments which Islam has bequeathed both to America and the world — benefits that have been chirped about ad nauseum by Barack Obama for years. But since this, like all his ...

August 3, 2014

Sheep and Goats: Impure Thoughts on the Gaza War

Waging a war with moral trilobites is always nasty business, and no nation state knows this truth more fully than Israel in its current conflagration with Hamas. The Gaza regime is a pitiless beast whose primitive instincts compel it to commit acts t...

July 26, 2014

Israel's Perplexity: Scipio or Samson?

Though Arab and Jew are by lineage the rival sons of Abraham, any connection binding their brotherhood seems to have evaporated long ago in the arid climes of a region that gave birth to monotheism by way of the crucible of environment -- a landscape...

July 19, 2014

Knock-Knock and the Bumblebee

In differentiating between those significant distinctions that comprise the tribes of men, there is little we can learn by considering solely the hue of one’s skin or geographic locale. In fathoming a civilization’s ruling essence, we are...

July 16, 2014

On Rainwater and Sewage

The nature of Schadenfreude can be manifested in many interesting and perverse forms. I must admit that savoring the long-awaited comeuppance of an American regime, albeit a Progressive one that has breached its constitutional limits and grasped at p...

June 22, 2014

Eternity Versus the Lie -- Thoughts on the Ninth Commandment

There is no question that the sin of bearing false witness, either during a trial or as a tawdry means to blacken the good name of another for personal gain, is reprehensible and counter to the harmony of the City of God. The fact that this injustice...

June 21, 2014

Some Heretical Thoughts on Politics and Economics

The belief that the raw mechanics of Capitalism, uninformed by any moral penumbra of ethics, religion, or philosophy, has alone caused the great material increase of the West, is of itself suspect. Indeed, the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea of fair ...

June 15, 2014

The Murder of Innocence

Before the time of the Great Disenchantment, when the Sun of the Risen Lord still hung heavily in the hearts of the Western Kingdoms. Where the thundering miracle of life still held its solemn gravity in the Houses of God, and the greatest gift from ...

June 15, 2014

The Two Cities

Augustine's City of God, perhaps the greatest work of literature springing from the Latin tongue, offers us a treatise on the nature of human and heavenly government by positing two dichotomies: The City of God and The City of Man. Among its them...

June 14, 2014

The Treasure He is Mining

Perhaps I will be misunderstood in this, but Conservative Christians run the risk of passing into idolatry when they hold that their particular political ideology is consistent with the Mind of God. I do not say this lightly, for only God knows how i...

June 13, 2014

The Withered Arc of the Socialist Dream

I think that deep within myself, in a place deeper than the not inconsiderable layers of books, meditations, and lectures that have collectively formed my worldview, I should desire that the earth be a place of plenty, equality, happiness, and harmon...

June 10, 2014

Gloria Steinem's Final Solution

Many women have had abortions and I dare say that the great majority of them feel a gnawing sense of loss, if not worse, at having arrived at this decision. But those who evaluate this silent murder as some emancipated badge of courage that flows fro...

June 8, 2014

'The City of Covetousness'

It is written that the totality of the Law and the Prophets is contained within the following: to love the Lord God with an unwavering zeal and to hold the love of one’s fellow men in similar, albeit lesser esteem. This hierarchy is legislated ...

June 3, 2014

White Privilege and Black Conservatism

In the quarrel between Progressives and Conservatives, many of the former believe that we are nostalgic for some Norman Rockwell rendering of an America that exists only as a furtive dream. Therefore, it is no surprise that the calculated meme of Whi...

June 1, 2014

'The Importance of Being Earnest'

How difficult it had to have been for Jay Carney. Even if one is a True Believer of the Progressive faith, the constant drumbeat of incompetence and scandal had to have been wearing on him -- like a bulletproof vest that has been used too many times....

May 25, 2014

Graduation Day

What a pleasure it is to finally have the opportunity to speak my mind about the monumental obstacles that await these young graduates. This once venerated Capital city of the Inland Empire has for the last few generations been a rough town to live i...

May 21, 2014

The Age of Academic Ruin

Now that we can see through a glass more clearly, which of us can deny that the American Academy surrendered without a shot to its barbarous and intellectually unwashed, following a rough descent into slavish cultural Deconstruction?  As such, t...

May 10, 2014

Straight on Till Morning

Can I share a secret with you?  Being young isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It wasn’t till I had reached the leeward side of 50 that I started figuring things out. Believe it or not, there is a joyous virtue in ag...

May 3, 2014

The Will to Annihilation

What are we, as intelligent sentient beings, to say about the incineration of over fifteen thousand aborted children for the production of electrical power in a U.K. hospital? Similarly, how are we to come to terms with the knowledge that Oregon...

April 22, 2014

Social Conservatism and the Public Square

If you believe that America can successfully sever social from fiscal conservatism and call the resulting abomination some species of prudent constitutionalism, then you, my friends, are gravely mistaken. By attempting to do so, we prove that we have...

April 20, 2014

Ecce Homo

Behold the Man in ruins. Because we have not drank deeply enough of God, this spectacle of Passion -- bathed in blood and ribboned flesh set before us every spring, has been relegated by a bloodless Modernity as either a callow backdrop for childr...

April 13, 2014

The Education of Captain America

It is first important to note that the film, Captain America: the Winter Soldier, which opened up recently to rave reviews, owes its pedigree to an older branch preceding what has been termed the "Marvel Universe." Having emerged from ...

April 10, 2014

A Serial Knifing

When commenting on freshly-minted current events such as the Pennsylvania high school “Knife Massacre,” it’s probably prudent to tread lightly, since blood and passion are a volatile mix and any attempt at exposing the philosophical...

April 9, 2014

Memo to History...

Thomas Sowell, that “Solon of the Hoover Institute” can sure turn a phrase. As evidence of his ample powers, he offers us this gem: “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering...

April 6, 2014

Looking Fore & Aft

Man is a fish out of water. And because of this state of affairs, he acquires a certain pathos that underscores his predicament as an eternal being that for the moment has been tethered in time. And while one can draw a crude analogy between humanity...

April 6, 2014

A Sober Thought for the End of an Age

Fortunately, for those of the true Conservative attitude, politics is only partially what we are about.  If I were to hang my star on America exclusively, I should be the most miserable wretch on earth.  We are flesh and spirit; and th...

April 5, 2014

Remembering Simba

Holding his still warm and limp body in my arms, I could not even force myself to shed tears.  He had been ill and we knew that he existed on borrowed time. Yet when the reality of his passing washed over me, the shock of it all was too immense:...

April 3, 2014

The Wages of Political Correctness

We live in a prickly age that wears its indignations on its shirt sleeves so that the world will behold our sensitivities and marvel. One that has the world walking on egg shells -- lest some raw nerve be aggrieved by the mention of an “inconve...

March 29, 2014

The Existential Man

If one were to catalogue the man-made horrors of the twentieth century, then those bastard sons of the secularized state: Nazism, Fascism, and Socialist Collectivism would surely top the list.  And viewed from a vantage point other than that of their...

March 9, 2014

Wagons Ho! In Search of Seth, Flint, and America

When that last trump has sounded, and all that has been hidden has been revealed, I should not be surprised to find that the America’s great media and entertainment outlets were conjoined by subterranean pipelines leading directly from Pandemon...

March 9, 2014

A Bridge to Transcendence

C.S. Lewis once stated that it was a shorter distance for a believer in myths and mystery religions to travel to the One True God than for a soul who views life from the vantage point of disenchanted materialism.  Even so, one often requires a b...

March 2, 2014

Being Good

Let it be said: the Christian has no absolute claim over morality. Indeed, I agree wholeheartedly with the statement that affirms that people can be quite moral whether or not they are believers. And moreover, such people may often surpass the Christ...

February 27, 2014

The Spirit of Idolatry

The Spirit of Idolatry is a subtle lure. In some ages, men bow to Dagon and Baal and in others it is Abstract Freedom and Empirical Knowledge. Placing any forbidden obsession at the apex of human consciousness and desire causes an ontological distort...

February 23, 2014

America's 'Tools' of Engagement

No set of rules can exist without pinching our freedom of action, and in effect, administering some semblance of restriction or pain. And when we bring our rules and values down from their lofty seats of abstraction, we find sometimes that they can l...

February 16, 2014

A Nation of Bastards

Of all the suffocating maladies that America has suffered under the past 50 years, none even comes close to inspiring a sense of cultural dread as the quantitative explosion of single-parent families in this country. Indeed, no other institutional be...

February 14, 2014

Cupid's Erotic Meditation

It is Valentine's Day, and I have -- sheep-man that I am -- have purchased the obligatory items for my wife so that she does not feel slighted on the day that commerce has decreed should be the "Celebration of Passionate and Affectionate Love." Not t...

February 11, 2014

Ted Bundy and the Logical Consequences of a Dead Universe

Many years ago, one of my esteemed graduate professors, Claremont McKenna's illustrious Harry V. Jaffa, wrote a brilliant but pithy dialogue highlighting the pitfalls of conventionalist morality in which he pitted the charming and debonair Mr. Ted Bu...

February 11, 2014

A Progress into Decline

Why is it that, as we are beset within a technological garden of machines, anticipating and catering to every nook and crevice of our collective desires, where the evolution of specific knowledge increases exponentially in an accelerating rhythm here...

February 7, 2014

No Mere Fluke?

In the world of human events, what passes for information on the 24 hour NEWS cycle can either lift us into a state of euphoric bliss or bring us crashing down to the depths of despair -- depending upon the caliber of one's politics. With that said, ...

February 2, 2014

The Nazarene and the Prophet

It should not seem surprising that as the curtain begins to close on the History of Men, that two great universal systems of apprehending the Divine have commanded center stage: Christianity and Islam. Although both posit their ends in the worship of...

January 29, 2014

Libertarianism and the Public Good

By virtue of its very definition, libertarianism has what they refer to in political philosophy as a neutral or attenuated vision of the public Good; or more fully, an understanding that the Right stands prior to the Good. To this mindset, expansive ...

January 26, 2014

God's 'Silence'

Earlier today, a man on Facebook queried me as to why the Creator would allow evil to occur, if he is as good as we deem Him to be. If the great panorama of wars, murders, thefts, rapes, and the entire host of human-manufactured horrors, both great a...

January 19, 2014

The Dream Castle of Oz

In the wake of Ariel Sharon's passing, amidst the many glowing and disparaging words that have ever been uttered about this true Israeli battlefield hero and unwavering politician, it is surprising that the following quote I came upon by Jewish poet/...

January 16, 2014

The Primal Bitch of Income Inequality

Being an Economic Progressive apparently means rarely having to say you're sorry. For even when the jig is up in some liberal Promise Zone fantasyland, you're still the top vulture of the carrion food chain. On the other hand, in the world of account...

January 9, 2014

The Cart Before the Horse

There are granite consequences to being so resolutely wed to an ideology that you are unable to interpret the real world as it stands. As a product of such folly, the null perspective of moral-political blindness, much like a tumor, attaches itself t...

January 6, 2014

Clever Beasts Who Have Lost Their Claws

In fashioning animals from the generations of men, the secular regime reasons that it is only necessary to whisper into their ears the tale that they are but clever animals -- ultimately answerable to no judgment more elevated than their own passions...

January 1, 2014

Conservatism and the Moral Calculus of Abortion

Murdering nascent life is one thing, and perhaps we as a Conservative force cannot fully cauterize this abomination. But we can make it rare. Moreover, we can also make it so that taxpayers will not have to fund this horror from public redistributed ...

December 27, 2013

City of the Lowered Gaze

Lying within the works and days of the Utopian Heart is nestled the black stone of presumption -- a conceit that all that is false or wicked on earth can be redeemed by secular human hands and that every tear can be wiped clean by virtue of its persi...

December 25, 2013

Finding My Way to the Incarnation

Ah, it is Christmastime once more in the vast wasteland of the Inland Empire. The bell-ringer at our local Wal-Mart is wearing a t-shirt and shorts as he sings of warm fires and snow-covered rhapsodies in a beautiful baritone -- hoping to persuade th...

December 14, 2013

Will the Mockingjay Catch Fire?

The more ripened I become, which is really just that self-delusionary way of saying I am "ontologically antique," the more I realize the fact that self-deception is a double edged feature that helps conserve our psychic equilibrium -- tentatively off...

November 28, 2013

Gratitude and Grace

As another Thanksgiving has come full circle and we again come face to face with a bounty of foods set before us that in most ages would have been relegated to princes and rajahs, let us not forget that this day flows naturally from the wellspring of...

November 11, 2013

A Veteran's Day Meditation

Some months back I wrote, buoyed by the persistent fears of a father, how my son the Army Special Ops Captain was leaving for Afghanistan to begin yet another tour of duty. Indeed, in "Wrestling with a Young Man's Duty," I attempted, amongst other th...

November 5, 2013

A Post-Obama World

Some time back I caught sight of a photo of our "Philosopher-King-in-Training" holding in his effeminate hand a copy of Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, and took no little satisfaction in articulating to others that the title was more wishfu...

October 26, 2013

Of Frogs and Kings

"Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?" So said Prince Charles. Depending upon your point of view, nature and convention have been either astonishing beneficent or stunningly cruel to Prince Ch...

October 20, 2013

My Father's Book

My father was born on Nov. 18th 1933 to Fred and Mary Fairman in the Los Angeles area. They have both since passed on but their marriage produced seven children: My father Fred Jr., My lovely Aunt Marylyn, My handsome uncle Mike, My uncle Dennis the ...

October 16, 2013

The Audacity of a Failed Diva

In order to put into perspective the political pathology that is our current President of the United States, it is perhaps instructive to contrast how the previous Democratic Chief-of-State might have approached the current governmental impasse. Whil...

October 10, 2013

Sacraments of Cavernous Despair

I have found that the further men move in a vector away from the Living God, the more they eschew life and the institutions rooted in biological necessity and divine revelation. Hence, the malignant symptoms of this divorce from reason are inexorably...

October 5, 2013

In Defense of Breaking Bad

In the aftermath of last Sunday's series finale of the controversial and phenomenally acclaimed series, Breaking Bad, a host of commentators and wags have been offering their own post-mortems dissecting its peculiar moral zeitgeist and speculating on...

October 2, 2013

Dark Times

Dark times have fallen upon the republic. Bleak times when men must furtively glance back over their shoulders before speaking their minds in laconic candor. Evil times of midnight votes and treacherous mandates contrived in embittered back-chambered...

September 29, 2013

'Waxing Wicked'

"Say my Name" "Heisenberg!" "You're God damned right!" These last five years, a growing cult-following of viewers have bit their nails to the quick while anxiously speculating as to the ultimate fate awaiting a former mild mannered New Mexico high s...

September 28, 2013

The Art of Subversion

To Those Brave Souls: The Progressive Vanguard! Allow me to thank you for your recent request for my counsel. Even though I have long since retired from Subterranean Public Service, I still remain quite active in the Terrestrial Political Wing: dispe...

September 25, 2013

Dancing to the Wayward Prophecy

Some time back while surfing the Internet, the following article concerning the Florida Board of Education came to my attention from the Palm Beach Post: On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 perc...

September 23, 2013

For The Mall Butchers in Kenya

How is one to understand Islam in light of this weekend's Nairobi Mall butchery? Since 9/11 and the aggressive resurgence of Fundamentalist Islam, the tens of thousands of attacks by Jihadis have served only to blacken whatever was left salvageable i...

September 11, 2013

Reclaiming 9/11

Having careened down the rabbit hole into the Bizarro world of America 2013, wherein half the population has consumed their full draught of the Waters of Moral Forgetfulness, we are now come to a great crossroads: whether to claw our way back up into...

September 8, 2013

Requiem for a Sacrificial Life

My mother, Carole Ann Fairman, was born to Eugene and Gwen Field on May 15, 1937 in the Los Angeles area. Although her parents have long since passed, she is survived by her sole sibling, Eugene, who is 7 years her senior. She attended Garfield High ...

August 18, 2013

A Hospice Tale

Miles away from my lonely garret, far off in the bleak and still night, my mother lays dying in hospice. In truth, she is beyond the hope of men and science: as an invisible lesion inside her brain feasts and expands exponentially -- all the while cl...

May 12, 2013

The Schizophrenic's Recitation

Fourteen centuries past, in a cramped 12 x 5 foot cave known as Hira on a mountain called Jabar-al-Nour on the outskirts of Mecca, it is said that a young illiterate orphan prone to epileptic fits from his youth beheld an angel named Gabril hovering ...

May 9, 2013

Homage to a Down Low Brother

I don't know Jason Collins per se, nor do I think I would ever wish to. Contrary to the fanfare that gushes from our Media Powers, he is not courageous or heroic in any sense that conveys the spirit of both words' original meanings. It is perhaps one...

May 6, 2013

America's Bad Seed

Any parent who has ever raised a child with serious character and moral issues, perhaps as a consequence of what turns out to have been a persistent and reckless infusion of adulation and unconditional love, must soon come to the realization that as ...

May 4, 2013

Conspiracies and Delusion

It would seem that there is some faculty in the human consciousness that thrives on conspiracy theories -- the idea that there is a secret truth that lies just below the surface of perception waiting to be unraveled like a woven fabric. So often, we ...

April 30, 2013

The Blessing of an Aborted Child

It requires a certain quality of moral opacity for our Dear Mr. Obama, who stands in the breach as tribune for all things weak and powerless, to pronounce God's Blessing on a room filled to the brim with those mighty champions of nascent selective in...

April 27, 2013

Bracing For the Real Marathon

For a period of four days following hard upon America's most chilling act of terror since 9/11, America was dividing itself into heated twin factions over where to assign blame. The extremists of both camps were tripping over themselves as to whether...

April 25, 2013

The Composite Presidency

Composite girlfriends, composite birth certificates, composite intellect, composite childhood, composite facts from which a sanitized version of a shadowy life is composed and crafted for public consumption. The compression or adulteration of Mr. Oba...

April 21, 2013

Band-Aids for Nihilism

Should we be surprised that a large segment of a culture that has divorced itself from the traditions and moral norms of Judeo-Christendom should go haywire and engage in self-destructive and socially pathological actions? It is an act of illusory hy...

April 18, 2013

The Language of Terror

It would take the foulest of all the black ironies entertained by the human imagination to place ball-bearing packed bombs at the finish line of our beloved Boston Marathon. Instead of celebrating the swiftest and sturdiest legs that are the crowning...

April 17, 2013

The Engineer and the Harlot

Imagine a horrendously overloaded locomotive slowly climbing a steep mountain grade. The engine has been called upon to perform a task that it was never designed to accomplish; and as a result, it is overheating and manifesting symptoms that augur an...

April 16, 2013

The Uncanny Union of Kermit and Miss Maggie

As I write, inside Room 304 of a Philadelphia courthouse there sits a 72-year-old bespectacled grandfatherly type who by all accounts smiles with an air of cool reserve as an avalanche of testimony from former patients and employees brings his unspea...

April 14, 2013

'Last Men' and Atheists

A few days back I did something that I generally loathe doing: entering into discussions with atheists on the existence of God via the Internet. They say that arguing on the internet is like participating in the Special Olympics: even if one were to ...

April 8, 2013

Wrestling With a Young Man's Duty

As I write, the little son whom God had once given to me as one gives a diamond to a vagabond is set to begin another tour in that loathsome Middle Eastern meat grinder of Men. He is a West Point commissioned Special Ops Captain who cannot even tell ...

April 7, 2013

Constructing Babel

It is with great regret that we should find ourselves in such evil times; and I wish from the deepest cavity of my heart that it were not so. But the great City of Human Liberty, whose strongholds were once thought impregnable, is slowly dying -- not...

March 31, 2013

The Leveling Spirit of Equality

In a waning society where the burden of jagged truth can no longer be endured and whose preponderance of fools and functional illiterates tips steadily towards critical mass, questioning the sacred cattle of a people's thoughts is tantamount to impie...

March 30, 2013

The Patriot's Dilemma

Any aficionado of Golden Age comic magazines circa WW ll will tell you that their writers and artists of that era were not kind to America's Axis enemies. Indeed, characterizations of the Nazis as monocled Teutonic monsters and the Japanese as yellow...

March 25, 2013

The Pool of Narcissus

In the third book of Ovid's Metamorphosis, the reader is charmed with the tale of Narcissus and Echo: a beautiful young man who spurned the raptures of love with a cursed water nymph. Having despised the affections of countless suitors through aloofn...

March 23, 2013

The Politics of Utopia

For a wide-eye boy growing up on the cusp of the Space Age, rockets and time travel were the stuff that filled daydreams and stoked romanticized possibilities of daunting discovery. Optimism was in vogue in America then and it seemed that even a worl...

March 20, 2013

Deconstructing America

Certainly it can no longer be denied: the progressive infiltration of our Fourth Estate and our intellectual academies are effectively complete. Although both were once highly regarded institutions, they have been thoroughly compromised as willing or...

March 17, 2013

C.S. Lewis: A Faith Observed

On November 22, 1963, America was shaken to its foundations by the murder of a young and virile president at the apex of our nation's power. But lost in that maelstrom of mourning were the passing of two wildly influential men: the writers Aldous Hux...

March 16, 2013

Human Excellence and Dependency: Who Built What?

It was not long ago that the zeitgeist of America was the Horatio Alger story, a patchwork of tales serving as the reigning motivational compass pointing towards individual success. It was the time of the Bootstrap Ethic: the notion that a man was li...

March 13, 2013

The Monkey's Parable

I have always been astonished by the tale of how certain Asian tribes catch monkeys. Upon placing a piece of fruit into a hole carved in a tree trunk that the monkey can easily reach his hand in and grab, he soon alarmingly learns that he cannot extr...

March 11, 2013

Nurse Ratched and the Therapeutic State

In the history of American cinema, few characterizations of female villains have been so artfully played as Louise Fletcher's "Nurse Ratched" from One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Bloodless and detached, psychologically opaque, calculating and as ser...

March 9, 2013

Fear and Trembling on the Scimitar's Edge

Given the history of mankind, few generations escape the threat of civilizational darkness in one form or another, and the Free West has had perhaps more than its share of challenges. If blessed or fortunate, these forces of destruction are met ...

March 6, 2013

Hangmen and Abortionists

I don't suppose I will ever understand the logic that progressives utilize in striking moral equivalence between the death penalty and selective abortion. Time and time again, I have encountered some acolyte of the Left who firmly believed he had unc...

March 3, 2013

The Case for Morality and God

While moderating a website that has a preponderance of Conservatives and Christians posting, I came upon a post by a fellow I shall refer to as Captain X. The Gentleman stated that he was a commissioned West Point officer who had served overseas and ...

March 1, 2013

Beautiful Sociopath

Upon first gazing upon her, Jodi Arias appears to be a lovely young woman. She has that endearing charm and welcoming smile one sees in the carefree countenance of twenty-somethings whose world lies before them like an oyster. Speaking glibly and wit...

February 26, 2013

Prudence or Purity? A Political Dilemma

If true, the post-mortem realization that the Republican Party's bid to oust Barack Obama was sealed by internal schism and faction is a bitter pill to swallow. With so much at stake, mortal necessity required that the party marshal its forces in ord...

February 24, 2013

Is Race Equivalent to Thought?

It is no revelation that the Nazi ideology held fast to racial determinism: the idea that race was consistent with mind and thought. Having grown from the Darwinian spore that heralded men to be as fated as flies of a season, this biological fatalism...

February 18, 2013

A Man for all Extremes

Living at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains below Big Bear, the palpable fear that accompanied a desperate fugitive wanted for perhaps the cruelest of murders was not lost on our community. Indeed, our proximity to the manhunt stimulated that ...

February 17, 2013

A Blind Pendulum

Without the anchor of a moral center, politics and culture move in tandem to and fro inexorably like a living pendulum -- first migrating to one extreme at a glacial velocity and always alighting on the tempting antipode that evades moderation l...

February 14, 2013

Liberalism's Blighted Fruit

Hot on the heels of Christopher Dorner's twisted odyssey of murder and revenge, how early on the Progressive news apparatus picked up and ran the headline-grabbing subtext that he was a rogue cop out for vengeance against a system that had stacked th...

February 10, 2013

The Faux Virtue of Tolerance

Our age's faux virtue is tolerance: but it is a tolerance that has degenerated from its original application relating to religious matters of conscience and morality. Such tolerance, driven by the influence of the Gospels, the Enlightenment, and the ...

February 6, 2013

Burkas and Babies

Trolling through Drudge a day or so ago, I caught hold of a headline that piqued my curiosity entitled "Burka Babies." Having an inquiring mind that is not immune to sensationalist headlines or the National Enquirer racks at the market, I bit on the ...

February 3, 2013

Saving Us from Our Degenerate Selves

The Founders, in the Enlightenment spirit that sought to breathe life into the sage wisdom of the ancients, intended to found a mixed regime consisting of a popularly elected House of Representatives (the "Low") and a quasi-Aristocratic body (rule of...

January 30, 2013

The Lupine Socialist Dream

"A society of sheep begets a government of wolves."  -- Bertrand de Jouvenel In his short but profound work, The Ethics of Redistribution, the 20th Century French Philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel uncovered the ontological core of collectivism's...

January 29, 2013

The Political Gospel of Pain

Experience, C.S. Lewis tells us, is "that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."  I have been getting more than a few e-mails as of late whose gist runs in the vein of intense dissatisfaction at what has occurred sinc...

January 27, 2013

The Moral Force of Fatherhood

I have been seriously reflecting of late on my Father's passing, and in doing so, mining the precious nuggets of who he was and what his relation was to our family. Like all kids who grew up and became aware of life in the late 50's to late 60's time...

January 22, 2013

Red Lines and Boiling Frogs

If one were to look at a pressure or temperature gauge, the red line situated towards its outer limit indicates a zone of danger or consequence if that boundary is broken or ignored in a concerted and repeated fashion. No machine can long withstand n...

January 20, 2013

Of Babes and Bio-Ethics

Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. -- Luke 12:7 As we embark upon the Brave New World of government mandated health care, there is no denying that we will wrestle with the ne...

January 17, 2013

The Tango of Decline

How true that political decline mirrors the individual and social erosion of a people. It begins as men draw away from the traditions, icons, and virtues that symbolically set a people in motion. Since unaided Human Reason cannot account for the supe...

January 14, 2013

Orphans of Perfection

In the pallid light of America's last election, how then shall we make sense of such a monumental absurdity, where half our countrymen broke ranks with reason and saw fit to continue on a course that most assuredly will send us on an accelerated cour...

January 13, 2013

The 'Closed Circle' of the Arab

Viewed through the prism of the West, which draws its sustenance from the twin fountains of Athens and Jerusalem, the character and plight of Arab existence has been viewed as romantic, tragic, and uniquely foreign to our sensibilities.  The fac...

January 13, 2013

Jean Valjean and the Forgiving Heart

Scant days ago, in that chilly time after Christmas, I strolled into our local theatre in the expectation of being entertained by an established well-loved musical that had just been rendered to film. I had no idea I would emerge from the darkness th...

January 2, 2013

Hunting the Unicorn of Moderate Islam

In hunting the unicorn of moderate Islam, the West has occupied itself by passing through a mental gauntlet of Herculean moral contortions in separating the proverbial sheep from the goats. As I see it, those "moderate" voices of Islam, which have be...

December 31, 2012

The Devil You Don't Know

"Dwell on the past, lose an eye...." Russian Proverb When we consider the specter of Islam ascending, the Left is truly conflicted. Their knee-jerk reaction is to jump on the Anti-Imperialist bandwagon and to give support to what in the 50's and 60's...

December 29, 2012

The Leeward Side of Christmas

It had been our best Christmas in recent memory. My son and his new bride had not been home for five years due to the constraints of his location at the far end of America and the jealous whims of his first begrudging wife, the United States Army. Ev...

December 29, 2012

Sam Colt and the Law of Self-Preservation

 "God made man but Sam Colt made them equal." It is said that the 2nd Amendment follows hard upon the 1st so as to serve as its bodyguard -- providing the added incentive of coercive force by a wary citizenry to guarantee that those initial che...

December 25, 2012

My Stingray Christmas

A scant lifetime ago, when the world had not yet lost its luster, I was a young boy from a large family growing up happily in the East San Gabriel Valley region of Southern California. My memories begin to solidify in the early 1960's with the era of...

December 22, 2012

Transcending this Suffering

Without freedom, there is no love.  Without choice, there is no freedom.  The choices we are offered?  Either follow the light or burrow into the darkness of self-will.  In this existence, liberty will be ever interconnected with...

December 18, 2012

Hobbits,Orcs, and the Human Condition

It was with a burdened and weary heart that I made my way to the IMAX theater to catch the premiere of Peter Jackson's rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit." The stormy night had blackened my already dour mood, having arisen that morning to anot...

December 16, 2012

The Prodigal and The Political

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the reprobate descends to the squalor of the pigsty before he comes to his senses, repents, and returns to the Father. It is in the concrete realization that one has either abysmally squandered his resources or tha...

December 9, 2012

Education's Great Divide: My Time in the Trenches

In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California...

December 8, 2012

The Prerequisite for Servitude

Slavery begins with a posture of mind that, like a fine mist, imperceptibly washes over the land -- permeating and tainting what it touches.  One would be foolish to expect that it arrives in violence and with manacles, for these days, servitude...

December 1, 2012

Acting Intelligent

Katharine Hepburn's famous dictum: "Acting is the perfect idiot's profession," sheds a humorous but robative illumination on the aesthetics of stage and screen, and perhaps allows us to put into perspective the widely circulated commercials feat...

November 30, 2012

Israel and the Carthaginian Peace

The great Roman historian Livy informs us that during the times of the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder ended every session of the Roman Senate with the phrase, "Carthago Delenda Est:" Carthage must be destroyed. Having suffered bitterly while battlin...

November 26, 2012

The Parchment-Thin Veil of Civility

It had all the makings of a summer cinematic blockbuster -- where the seemingly arbitrary whim of nature casts her capricious lot on the urban Northeast and afflicts these high-density communities with untold malicious vehemence.  Indeed, like s...

November 25, 2012

The Cairo Express

Of all the major Arab states, Egypt had once appeared the most "liberal" because of:  the ameliorating influence of the Coptic Church, a relative cultural modernity, the pride associated with their Non-Islamic Golden Age, and an earnest desire t...

November 24, 2012

Black Hearted Friday

While making my way home sleepily following a Tryptophan-laced gorging of Herculean proportions, my wife and I passed by the local Wal-Mart at an ungodly hour and I remarked that the parking lot was filled to capacity. "Black Friday," she mumbled dro...

November 22, 2012

Socialism as Religion

In perusing the philosophic documents relating to theoretical and practical socialism, one glaring theme running through the corpus of books and tracts is how transcendental traditional religion is an unvarnished blight upon the face of humanity. Aco...

November 19, 2012

Two Vital Lessons

"Time," so the saying goes, "is the cruelest teacher. First she administers the test then she teaches the lesson." America is on the verge of learning several vital lessons in the realms of economic and moral economy: lessons saturated in pain ...

November 18, 2012

Becoming Antique

In the last year or so, I have come to the irrefutable conclusion that I am becoming an antique.  Like those old boxes of 65-year-old comic books that languish in my closet, I am a relic of an age that is rapidly becoming a distant memory for so...

November 7, 2012

Surviving the Political War

A quick cursory glance at the television informs us that we are at a culmination.  It is readily apparent that anyone who was honestly receptive to our moral suasion arguments had either been emboldened to embrace our rhetoric or had broken ran...

November 6, 2012

Obama's Machiavellian Ploy

I suppose it is written somewhere in the Machiavellian Handbook of Political Stratagems that when you need to win an election and your entire record in office is a smoldering hulk of ruin reminiscent of the Twin Towers aftermath, one needs to let the...

November 2, 2012

Mormon 'Just So' Stories

As the political fortunes of our Marxian messiah appear on the wane, no stone is being left unturned in rallying the faithful to his defense.  As a consequence, candidate Mitt Romney is being tarred with the brush of "racism by proxy" and facing...

October 31, 2012

October Surprise

Can anyone not see through the desperate stratagem of the quadrennial October Surprise: the American institution where either political party makes a calculated last-minute touchdown surge (or knife thrust) deep into its opponent's soft white underbe...

October 31, 2012

Despising America

"I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators." -- Mitt Romney Although he vehemently denie...

October 30, 2012

The Fall of the House of Soetero

The ancient bards tell us that "whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." Having exceeded this century's allotment for narcissism and fatal hubris, our third-millennial Sun King is now reaping the ironic and convulsive wrath of both man and n...