“Does Moses prevail too much in the hearts of the people? Something must be found against him. If we can find nothing against him, yet we will find something against his wife . . . But now we are resolved to pick out whatever we can get information of, though it is about things done …
This Goes Way Back
“Israelis tenaciously hold on to the occupied territories of the West Bank because of promises made millenniums ago to the patriarch Abraham; Iraqis invade the lands of fellow Moslems in order to settle grudges that date back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar; Iranians stir up revolutionary passions that have lain dormant since the demise of …
Moral Dyslexia
“Mary Shelley, at this point in our narrative, did not understand all this, but by the time she had finished writing Frankenstein she did not see things Shelley’s way, either. She had by that time experienced the sadistic consequences of her sexual profligacy. Frankenstein was her attempt to make sense out of the conflict between …
Something Will Stick
“This has been an old dividing way: if we can besmirch the chief of a party, we shall do well enough with the rest; wherefore let us make as ill interpretations of what they do as we possibly can. Let us fasten as ill things upon them which we can have any pretense for. Let …
Should Be Obvious
“The difference between Osama bin Laden and Eric Rudolph is the difference between aberrant acts and aberrant teachings. Any human being with a belief system can do abominable things. But abominable acts are more likely to come in greater numbers and frequency when they are encouraged and perpetuated by religious texts and those who teach …
Porn As Revolution
“The revolutionaries simply put to their own use the libido that Versailles had unleashed. Sade, who more explicitly than any other in France described and reveled in the link between pornography and political revolution, was not an aberration of eighteenth-century French culture, but the culmination of the French predilection for pornography” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters …
No Unique Logres
I want to begin this next section of my review of Gelernter’s Americanism with a healthy reminder from C.S. Lewis. This comes from That Hideous Strength. “So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?” “Yes,” said her husband. “Don’t you feel it? The very quality …
Facts Be Stubborn
Turns out that fewer than half of scientists who have published on climate change in the last few years believe that there is something to the global warming hooey. Looky here. Turns out that the icebergs may not be melting, and that the totali-science that some are trying to practice these days may be melting. …
An Earlier 9-11
“Finally, they besieged Vienna again, only to be turned back by Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski and thirty thousand Polish hussars on a day that marks the high point of Muslim expansion in Europe: September 11, 1683” (Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), p. 157).
Horror as Cultural Guilt
“The fact that the creator of the horror genre is celebrated as a proponent of sexual liberation indicates that our culture still does not understand horror. If our culture could make up its mind about sexual liberation, it would not need horror. It would either embrace sexual license wholeheartedly, as Mary’s husband did, or repudiate …