September 5, 2024

What She’s Really Like—The Harris Mystery Solved

Something just doesn’t add up in the ascension of Kamala Harris to the Democrat party’s presidential nomination. A key link is missing in the chain of events. Consider the facts of the case: (1) By no means was Harris the first draf...

June 15, 2024

Tribalism Among the Sophisticates

“Our democracy is safe for now,” she wrote. This was a Facebook post from someone I know, who was gloating over the guilty verdict in the show trial of Donald Trump. It was followed by several gushing comments. Neither my acquaintance nor...

November 18, 2023

Our Institutions No Longer Curate Civilization

Public commentary, because of recent events here and abroad, has been notably sprinkled with numerous references to “civilization.” It’s to be hoped that, before new headlines are made and attention shifts to new topics, some though...

November 19, 2022

Maybe denial is the driving factor in the 2022 election outcome

The starkest image emerging from the 2022 midterm elections, in my view, is the electoral map of the gubernatorial race in New York.  The criminal-friendly Democrat incumbent, Kathy Hochul, who succeeded Andrew Cuomo upon his resignation, w...

October 13, 2022

The Transnationals And Their Ideological Smoke Screen

Back in the 1980s (yes, a long time ago), I wrote a science fiction story set somewhere between contemporary times and the Star Trek era. I imagined humans having the run of our solar system and breaking out a bit further in the Milky Way. Since h...

April 25, 2022

In the Russian DNA

A Russian friend of mine managed to escape from Moscow and relocate abroad with her family.  A close call, she writes — one family member was in danger of a stiff prison sentence.  He had been arrested for blogging against P...

March 7, 2022

Putin keeps promising to drop the big bombs

Vladimir Putin is making menacing noises.  If we interfere with his conquest of Ukraine, he tells us, there will be "consequences."  If we establish a no-fly zone, he warns us, we will be considered an "active parti...

February 7, 2022

The Thin Man solves the COVID case

Dashiell Hammett's urbane sleuth, Nick Charles, was brilliantly portrayed by the suave Golden Age actor, William Powell, in the celebrated Thin Man movies of the 1930s and '40s.  The sleek, radiant Myrna Loy played his perfect wife,...

December 4, 2021

How America Survived Biden

(To prevent confusion, this essay imagines how we might change America’s current trajectory.) Some said it started with the circulation online of quotations from the 46th installment of the Federalist Papers. In Federalist 46, James Madison ...

November 4, 2021

Business as unusual: COVID in perspective

I live in the New York metro area.  When the pandemic first struck, I would go to my window and notice what I didn't see.  I didn't see ambulances lined up on my block, and I didn't hear drivers calling, "Bring ou...

October 26, 2021

Shaking Off the Leftist Philosophy

The whole Progressive, Leftist enterprise can be characterized as the astonishing practice of trying to improve things by making them worse. It has always been so. A hundred years ago, half of Moscow, at one time or another, languished in jail, wh...

September 10, 2021

The Case for Merit, Character, and Capacity

The politically correct write the three-word mantra “diversity, equity and inclusion” with capital letters and refer to it in acronym form as DEI. This is a distinction never accorded to such familiar triads as “duty, honor, country...

March 30, 2021

The Beyond Amazing Life of Merian C. Cooper

Now that King Kong is back in action in a new blockbuster, the super-hyped Godzilla vs Kong, with a mammoth budget matching the scale of the two protagonists (some $160 to $200 million), patriots should note who the real hero of the Kong saga is. ...

February 5, 2021

Once There Was A Country

Are we still living in America? One wonders. But we’d better recognize the source of the problem and confront it before they cancel John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. America was once a proud country, a gracious one, and an accomplished one. That...

September 13, 2020

Progressives don't really want the revolution they crave

I wonder if my progressive friends and colleagues would believe me if I told them that a hundred years ago, Soviet prisons were full of good socialists and good Marxists.  They too at first cheered on the riots and the revolution. What t...