A correspondent, Mr Michael Hendry, calls our attention to the fact that today is the 100th birthday of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. (Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of his death.) As a website that aspires to be Canada’s leading forum of Gómez-Dávilism, & all-round reactionary intransigence, we really ought to say “Eh!” & get tanked or [...]
Gentle reader will forgive a little lapse, a little traipse, in the nature of a hit-&-run, into mundane politics. There is no point to this post whatever; which perhaps qualifies it, nevertheless, as a legitimately idle effusion. I will be perhaps the 489th pundit to say what I am about to say: that it is [...]
The smaller a man’s mind, the easier it is to drive him out of it, as I have observed passim over the years. In certain academic, sherry-drinking milieux, it could be done only a generation ago with just five syllables (“As Leo Strauss says, …”) & sometimes with just three. Unfortunately today they no longer [...]
My Chief Texas Correspondent, a great enthusiast for the burning of fossil fuels, ping’d me yesterday a link to Charles Hugh Smith’s blog, on “Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism, & Peak Production.” To my surprise, he pronounced himself amenable to it, “except for the knock on fossil fuels.” I proposed a compromise, in which we continue to dig, [...]
I love to quote the opening line of Praeterita, John Ruskin’s uncharacteristically light & playful book of autobiographical sketches, happily completed just before he went insane: “I am, & my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; — Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, & Homer’s.” As pendant to my [...]
If one has been aboard a sailboat during a good blow, one will appreciate the stress on windows. It increases dramatically with the size of the window, a potentially catastrophic problem compounded by the need to support the accumulating weight of the window itself. The lead joining the coloured pieces in the transparent mosaic of [...]
“Civilization begins,” according to the poet Ezra Pound, “when people start preferring a little done right to a great deal done wrong.” Like the capacities for speech, art, music, & sanctity, this is written somewhere in our DNA, deep down where it can be forgotten. As Pound decried, that “great deal” comes out in the [...]
The older I grow, the less I know. And yet, by way of compensation, the more certain I become that I know little. Such, anyway, was my thought in the wee hours of last night, as I acknowledged the arrival of my sixtieth birthday. By morning, there was still no evidence that anyone had published [...]
It has been a “ha!” week in the news. Today alone, after a quick sweep of the Beeb, Mop & Pail, Drudge, & so forth, I count about a dozen easy marks for Idlerine mockery. Lord grant me the power to resist, as most of these “stories” have “tragic” undertones, if not overtones, & my [...]
“Think globally, act locally” could be taken as the slogan of any radical ideological cult, but it applies with special force to Islamist terrorism. It provides an adequate answer to the question, “Why, why, why?” now being asked in e.g. Boston local media. I had plenty to say on this, right after the surprising conclusion [...]
I did not lie to gentle reader when I said, nearly a month ago, that I was “likely to become more ebullient again after Easter.” It was indeed likely, though my discomfiture, amounting almost to a “writer’s block,” evaporates more slowly. Only narcissistic writers have blocks, of course, & I’ve noticed even they have them [...]
Arguably, politics is the oldest profession. By convention, we acknowledge prostitution instead, but I wonder if the two aren’t closely related, even different versions of the same enterprise: politics being the masculine way, prostitution the feminine way, to obtain things not legitimately available. Which is hardly to say the two provinces of human activity are [...]
Let us add our voice from the High Doganate to those of the world’s more prominent statesmen & cultural figures, regretting the death of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, the retired research chemist & barrister. We are all so terribly sorry. She was also, as I vividly recall, wife to the late Major Denis Thatcher, MBE, [...]