1,899 words
If you are searching for conclusive evidence of the total collapse of America’s educational system, search no further. I invite you to read the remarks of President Joseph Robinette Biden to the Virtual Munich Security Conference (MSC) this past February. That such a pathetic confection of banal sentimentality can be passed off unchallenged as serious thinking (more…)
1,344 words
If you’re new to high finance, then the concept of “shorting” is bizarre and convoluted. People actually make money from stocks falling? How is this possible? Why is it legal? Does this contribute anything to society? Am I missing out? Here’s how shorting works.
Let’s say you have a neighbor who is a cat lady that collects Beanie Babies. She has one prized beanie called Roary the Lion, worth $5000 (according to the intellectual darkweb, where these things are traded). (more…)
2,101 words
Daniel Okrent
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
New York: Scribner, 2019
The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth 400 years ago this week. This monumental anniversary has largely gone unremembered. In the past, the Plymouth anniversary was a great event that drew our nation’s foremost orators to speak of the glories of America and its settlers. (more…)
1,770 words
E. Digby Baltzell
The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America
New York: Random House, 1964
The WASPs can never get any love. Their power once evoked equal amounts of admiration and resentment in American society. Now they’re just a relic and a punching bag for every other group’s ethnic grievances. (more…)
2,220 words
Picard: Well. . . I suppose that is the end of Q.
[with a flash, Q appears on the bridge with a trumpet, accompanied by a mariachi band]
Q: AU CONTRAIRE, MON CAPITAINE! HE’S BACK! (more…)
He doesn’t even have shoes on.
1,349 words
The McCloskeys waving what amount to toys in the hands of the untrained was the single most impotent display of fear and guilt that has graced the screens of the West this month. This incident was laughable in and of itself, but was made even worse by the couple’s spineless cope of a public statement on the matter: (more…)
2,950 words
If any further proof were needed that our “experts” and “leaders” know nothing, the coronavirus crisis provides an abundance of it. While the media and certain public figures keep ladling on the doom and gloom with a trowel, projecting many more months of death and economic shutdown, all signs indicate that death and hospitalization rates in the US may have peaked and are now declining. (more…)
6,486 words
Errol Morris’ American Dharma, which is a documentary about Steve Bannon, is probably the most elusive film ever produced by a major filmmaker. Although it premiered at film festivals in September 2018 and received a great deal of press (most of it negative) at the time, it was impossible to see for over a year thereafter. The distributors refused to bring it to theaters, it wasn’t shown on television, and you couldn’t find it streaming or on DVD. (more…)
Jeremy Corbyn
1,207 words
Part 3 of 3
God save the Queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H bomb
God save the Queen
She’s not a human being
and There’s no future
in England’s dreaming
— The Sex Pistols
5,290 words
Martin Gurri
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018
Though the recent wave of social media censorship has been particularly harsh, those active in Rightist politics are well aware that the struggle between corporate and governmental information controllers and political dissidents is not new. (more…)
2,062 words
DSM V is the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The book first appeared in 1952, and the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes DSM, calls it “an authoritative volume that defines and classifies mental disorders in order to improve diagnoses, treatment and research.” The glib might call DSM V the psychiatrists’ bible. The cynical might view it as a retail catalogue for the big pharmaceutical companies.
77 words / 1:26:31
Greg Johnson joins Fróði Midjord on the latest Guide to Kulchur to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which is about elite societies involved in occult sex rituals in modern-day New York. (more…)
James Burnham (1905-1987)
2,363 words
A man from Mars visiting the United States at the beginning of 1997 might have thought that the country was wobbling on the brink of political crisis. He would have learned that the White House was occupied by a gentleman immersed in so many scandals that even supermarket tabloids could not keep track of them and that this same gentleman, having been re-elected without a majority of voters behind him, faced a Congress controlled by an opposition party sworn to working a revolution in government. (more…)
J. P. Morgan
2,244 words
One of the more exciting prospects for the Dole-Clinton presidential contest should have been the “presidential debate,” which, ever since the Kennedy-Nixon slugfest of 1960, has titillated the mass electorate with the delusion that the voters actually have a real choice between two different viewpoints. The only reason a Dole-Clinton debate ought to have been exciting, however, is that it should have been interesting to see what the two participants could possibly disagree about. What exactly were they supposed to debate? (more…)
2,296 words
One of the ironies of American political discussion in the last generation or so — indeed, of the last century — has been that, for all our boasting and braggadocio about being a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, it is almost impossible to find any significant American social thinker who really believes it. (more…)
2,475 words
One good way to ruin your Christmas this year would be to spend the holidays reading a new book entitled Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class since World War II, by two law professors at the University of South Carolina, William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell. Maybe you don’t want to ruin your Christmas, and that’s understandable, but if you do read the book, you will at least be prepared to understand what is likely to happen to you and to what remains of your country in the coming years. (more…)
1,867 words
With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. (more…)
Thomas Ernest Hulme, 1883–1917
3,338 words
Some day a wonderful book will be written on the art of persuasion, a new sophistic. One may suppose that psychology will ultimately become as complete a science as geometry and mechanics are now. It will be possible then to predict the effect of an argument on a man’s mind as surely as one can now predict the eclipse of the moon. On the basis of this developed science will be built an infallible set of rules for converting a man to any opinion you like. (more…)
Statue of Cola di Rienzi by Girolamo Masini, erected in 1877 near the Campidoglio, where he was killed
3,172 words
Ronald F. Musto
Apocalypse in Rome:
Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003
A young Italian nationalist leads his followers on a march through Rome, seizing power from corrupt elites to establish a palingenetic regime. Declaring himself Tribune, his ultimate aim is to recreate the power and glory of Ancient Rome. However, a conspiracy of his enemies topples him from power, and he is imprisoned. (more…)
