Month: December 2010

1,841 words

French translation here

Recently I re-read William Pierce’s classic 1971 essay “Why Conservatives Can’t Win.” Like Pierce, if forced to choose between liberals and conservatives, I would side with conservatives. Conservatives have the indispensable political realism necessary for the preservation of any civilization. Liberalism, I will grant, does attract the best brains, blood, and spirit of our race. But though liberal idealism and imagination may adorn the heights of our civilization, they are undermining its foundations.

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William Pierce

1,621 words

French translation here

Some of my best friends are conservatives. I sincerely like them and I admire them for their genuine virtues: for their sense of propriety and personal integrity in an age of corruption, for their independent spirit and their willingness to stand on their own feet in an increasingly paternalistic society.

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Andrew Wyeth, The Last of the Mohicans, 1919

5,821 words

Chapter 5 of Studies in Classic American Literature

In his Leatherstocking books, Fenimore is off on another track. He is no longer concerned with social white Americans that buzz with pins through them, buzz loudly against every mortal thing except the pin itself. The pin of the Great Ideal.

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Amy Biehll, 1967–1993

2,618 words

Translations: French, German

News events and political interpretations of news events rarely coincide exactly. Life is generally messy and complicated, whereas political analysis aims, often legitimately, to simplify life’s complexity into a coherent pattern with a convincing political meaning.

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James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851

3,806 words

Chapter 4 of Studies in Classic American Literature

Benjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:

Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.

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1,465 words

The United States and other ex-European nations appear to be preparing a war against Iran.

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1,252 words

Israeli officials, neoconservatives, and Zionists are pushing relentlessly for the military destruction or internal overthrow of Iran. (more…)

1,405 words

German translation here

It was about twenty years ago when I first noticed that the greeting “Merry Christmas” was being replaced by the bland, neutral “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays.”

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2,042 words

Geoffrey Miller
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
New York: Viking, 2009

When I was asked to review this book, I half groaned because I was sure of what to expect and I also knew it was not going to broaden my knowledge in a significant way. From my earlier reading up on other, but tangentially related subject areas (e.g., advertising), I already knew, and it seemed more than obvious to me, that consumer behavior had an evolutionary basis. (more…)

1,925 words

Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
New York: Random House, 2000

Darwinian evolution is seen as a cold, ruthless struggle for survival that shaped what we eventually became. But, the critic responds, whence kindness, humor, language, playfulness, art and creativity? Scientists have tried to explain altruism towards relatives as kin selection and other forms of morality as based on reciprocity, but we all often help people who are not related to us when there’s nothing to be gained. (more…)

722 words

Now that we’ve reached December, it’s the time of year to observe (and suffer from) that familiar Jewish attitude toward Christmas: hate.

VDARE is now running its excellent War Against Christmas exposé of assaults on Christmas by “multicultural” haters of a holiday hundreds of millions of Americans love and cherish. For my money, it’s the best source of information on this particularly hurtful aspect of the war on Western cultures and people. (more…)