The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Professional Perverts

What kind of people want to talk dirty to children? Perverts, and also government sex educators. But I repeat myself: The former Ontario deputy education minister who oversaw the development of a controversial sex-ed program before facing child sex charges will plead guilty to a number of those charges. Benjamin Levin, born 1952, was arrested […]

Feminist Author @PennyRed Quotes Bolshevik Commissar’s Anti-Love Advice

In her most recent book, controversial British feminist Laurie Penny treats her unsuspecting young readers to Soviet propaganda, quoting a Bolshevik commissar’s denunciation of romantic love — without bothering to identify Alexandra Kollontai as the top female official in Vladimir Lenin’s Communist revolutionary regime. A contributing editor for The New Statesman, Penny attacks “the neoliberal […]

France and Terror

Reacting to Ross Douthat’s New York Times column about the plight of France, I deployed my usual caustic sarcasm: If the fate of the West is in any way dependent on the French, then our civilization is doomed beyond all hope of redemption. This could create the impression of thoughtlessness, and I don’t wish to […]

How to Win Wars

Once, during Stonewall Jackson’s famous 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, some Union cavalry charged the rear guard of Jackson’s column and were nearly annihilated by a deadly volley of infantry fire. The officer who reported this action to Jackson was Col. John Mercer Patton (an ancestor of the famed WWII General George S. Patton). […]

Hard-Boiled And Hard Core

— by Wombat-socho This week was spent reading a lot of naval history – Morison’s The Two-Ocean War, of course, because it’s enormous, and James Hornfischer’s The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, an excellent recounting of the Battle of Samar, in which half a dozen escort carriers with their puny screen of destroyers […]

Postmodern College, Postmodern Love

Otterbein University is a small, private liberal arts college in Westerville, Ohio, near Columbus. Like most such schools in America, it began with an explicitly Christian purpose: The university was founded in 1847 by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. . . . The university is named for United Brethren founder the Rev. […]

One Hundred Years Ago

Anniversaries often slip my attention. A.O. Scott has a long essay in the New York Times about World War I, which began in August 1914, so that we are now living in the 100th anniversary of the last summer of peace before that bloody atrocity. Scott points to a startling fact: On July 1, 1916, […]

‘Hold Until Relieved’

Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and Americans rightly take pride in the heroic courage of our troops who saw that historic day’s bloodiest fighting on Omaha Beach. However, one of my favorite stories of D-Day — vividly told in Cornelius Ryan’s classic The Longest Day — is of the British glider troops who […]

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