
If They Don't Want to be Policed, Don't Police Them
It is obvious, is it not, that all of the recent problems with the police have occurred because cops keep meddling with people. If the fuzz had left Rodney King alone, Los Angeles would not have burned. If the cop in Ferguson had not stopped Michael Brown after he robbed the store, the town would...
Read MoreOn the Fifth day of Christmas tradition demands that you send your true love Five Gold Rings. Even with a small circle of readers, this could prove expensive. The next best thing is to send five special findings regarding genetics and intelligence differences, as an end of year gift. (1) The heritability of intelligence increases...
Read MoreIn July of 1870, King Wilhelm sent Foreign Minister Bismarck an account of his meeting with a French envoy who had demanded that the king renounce any Hohenzollern claim to the Spanish throne. Bismarck edited the report to make it appear the Frenchman had insulted the king, and that Wilhelm rudely dismissed him. The Ems...
Read More
Netanyahu Should Leave Us Alone as a New Year's Present
I little more than two years ago I wrote an article for antiwar.com that was entitled “Why I dislike Israel.” The editors were a bit nervous about running it but eventually allowed it to appear after I agreed to some minor deletions. It turned out to be by far the most successful piece I ever...
Read MoreRon Unz • December 29, 2014 • 200 Words
Last week, several of the commenters on the most recent John Derbyshire column expressed tremendous enthusiasm for his writing and one of them mentioned how nice it would be if his collected articles and columns were somehow made available at The Review. The idea seemed like a good one to me as well, and I...
Read More
Did the U.S. and the Saudis Conspire to Push Down Oil Prices?
Are falling oil prices part of a US-Saudi plan to inflict economic damage on Russia, Iran and Venezuela? Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seems to think so. In a recent interview that appeared in Reuters, Maduro said he thought the United States and Saudi Arabia wanted to drive down oil prices “to harm Russia.” Bolivian President...
Read More
A Conservative Analysis
Anyone who has followed the ongoing crisis in Eastern Europe and Ukraine knows the very hostile view that the establishment news media and Washington political class have of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his policies. In the halls of Congress and in the mainstream press—almost every night on Fox News—serious charges are proffered against...
Read More
Washington has shaped 2015 to be a year of conflict. The conflict could be intense. Washington is the cause of the conflict, which has been brewing for some time. Russia was too weak to do anything about it when the Clinton regime pushed NATO to Russia’s borders and illegally attacked Yugoslavia, breaking the country into...
Read MoreRon Paul • December 28, 2014 • 600 Words
One hundred years ago last week, on Christmas Eve, 1914, German and British soldiers emerged from the horrors of World War One trench warfare to greet each other, exchange food and gifts, and to wish each other a Merry Christmas. What we remember now as the “Christmas Truce” began with soldiers singing Christmas carols together...
Read MoreDespite billions spent on weapons, the US has not been able to counter the militants' gruesome tactics
There is a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice meets the White Knight who is wearing full armour and riding a horse off which he keeps falling. Alice expresses curiosity about why he has placed spiked metal anklets on his horse's legs just above the hoofs. "To guard against the bites...
Read MoreDescribed by a critic as "one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way," "A Christmas Story," directed by Bob Clark, debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts:...
Read MoreEveryone wants good news, so the government makes it up. The latest fiction is that US real GDP grew 4.6% in the second quarter and 5% in the third. Where did this growth come from? Not from rising real consumer incomes. Not from rising consumer credit. Not from rising real retail sales. Not from the...
Read More
If one rounded up all the usual suspects to explain today’s failed social engineering, the absence of personal responsibility would top the list. In a nutshell, government initiatives will invariably come up short if the recipient of this largess refuses to take blame for his or her tribulations. Education is a perfect example—an unprepared youngster...
Read MoreFor decades the Boeing company has been quietly transferring large tranches of advanced U.S. aeronautical technology to Japan. The deal – which has gone almost entirely overlooked by the American press – is that Boeing engineers teach Japanese companies how to make more and more of each succeeding airplane model, and in return Japan’s state-controlled...
Read MoreDear Mexican: The other day, my Italian boyfriend and I were sitting in a cafe in Santa Monica. He asked me an interesting question: “ If you had the choice to be any nationality in the world, which one would you choose?” Being the proud Latina that I am, I said, “Mexican.” Then he said,...
Read More[Update: An Islamabad court has issued an order for Aziz' arrest. Judging from the Guardian report, characterize the police reaction as "gingerly": If you've been following the @chinahand twitter feed, you know I've been retweeting a stream of tweets from Pakistan civil society stalwarts trying, with some success, to put the focus on Abdul Maulana...
Read MoreThe Roman Empire did it. The British Empire copied it in style. The Empire of Chaos has always done it. They all do it. Divide et impera. Divide and rule – or divide and conquer. It’s nasty, brutish and effective. Not forever though, like diamonds, because empires do crumble. A room with a view to...
Read More
My young paleoconservative friend Jack Kerwick has posted on his website his own distribution of blame for what befell two police officers shot by a black thug in Brooklyn last Saturday, as revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Jack has extended the burden of responsibility from protestors screaming “kill a cop”...
Read MoreThe Climate for 2015
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But...
Read MoreNo one would call TomDispatch a traditional website. Still, we do have our traditions. Among them, none is more “traditional” -- a full decade old at a website that just turned 13 this November -- than having Rebecca Solnit end our year. Sometimes as the year winds down, she’s dreaming of the future, sometimes thinking...
Read MoreIntroduction: China is in the midst of its second ‘cultural revolution’ in a half century. While the first (under Chairman Mao Tse Tung) was intended to ‘revitalize socialism’; the current is directed to ‘moralizing’ capitalism. The first CR was a frontal attack on the hierarchy of power and privilege inside and outside of the Communist...
Read More"NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?" That was one of the chants of anti-police protesters in New York City. Another was, "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!" Well, the marchers got their wish Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant when Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, firing into a patrol car, murdered...
Read More
It's All-American
Christmas week is possibly a good time to reflect on what kind of nation we have become. Americans are much given to think of themselves as exceptional, so much so that “exceptionalism” as a national attribute has entered the political vocabulary. Americans also like to think of themselves as generous, fair minded to a fault,...
Read MoreNote: In this article the times given are Eastern Standard Time. The software that generated the graph uses Mountain Standard Time. Therefore, read the x-axis two hours later than the axis indicates. The Federal Reserve and its bullion bank agents are actively using uncovered futures contracts to illegally manipulate the prices of precious metals in...
Read More
American pundits are often most interested in scoring points against their partisan rivals.
Among honest and knowledgeable people, there really isn’t much doubt about what happened in Ukraine last winter. There was a U.S.-backed coup which ousted a constitutionally elected president and replaced him with a regime more in line with U.S. interests. Even some smart people who agree with the policy of going on the offensive against...
Read MoreAs is the habit of my tribe, along the valley to the 13th Century Church of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem we went again, in that Doomsday village that was home to Waleran the Hunter in Saxon times and, after the Norman conquest, Payne de Turberville (mentioned with transliteration by Thomas Hardy in Tess of...
Read MoreJayMan • December 21, 2014 • 1,600 Words
One of the greatest pieces of evidence demonstrating that the family/rearing environment has no effect on eventual outcomes is the absence of birth order effects. Birth order is an excellent test for these effects: it is something that systematically differs between siblings and is bona fide non-genetic (mostly). Hence, it's a great way to see...
Read More
The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama
As we end another year of endless war in Washington, it might be the perfect time to reflect on the War That Started All Wars -- or at least the war that started all of Washington’s post-Cold War wars: the invasion of Panama. Twenty-five years ago this month, early on the morning of December 20,...
Read MoreRon Paul • December 21, 2014 • 600 Words
Last week we learned that the key to a strong economy is not increased production, lower unemployment, or a sound monetary unit. Rather, economic prosperity depends on the type of language used by the central bank in its monetary policy statements. All it took was one word in the Federal Reserve Bank's press release --...
Read MoreSo many years and wars later, it’s easy to forget what a total television hit the first Gulf War of 1991 was. Just in case you no longer remember -- and why should you? -- that was the war that was to bury America’s defeat in Vietnam forever and signal the arrival of the greatest...
Read MoreShips don’t come bigger than the Pieter Schelte. They don’t come more controversial either. Built in Korea at a cost of nearly $3 billion, the gargantuan new ship is now sailing towards the Netherlands, where it will soon enter service in the European offshore oil industry. A huge catamaran, it is expected to boast a...
Read MoreFor some reason, the Powers that Be imagine you will be out shopping this Saturday, little comprehending that you have eschewed such conspicuous consumption for the pleasures of staying at home and reading about digit span. In one of Pliny the Younger’s letters (you will know the precise reference, dear reader) he writes an aside...
Read MoreEven facing what under any circumstances is a perfect storm; President Putin delivered an extremely measured performance at his annual press conference and Q&A marathon. The perfect storm evolves in two fronts; an overt economic war – as in siege by sanctions – and a concerted, covert, shadow attack to the heart of the Russian...
Read More
Last year, around this time, friends and acquaintances offered me all sorts of religiously neutral salutations: Seasons Greetings! Happy Holidays! Joyeuses fêtes! Meilleurs vœux! Only two people wished me Merry Christmas. One was Muslim, the other was Jewish. They meant well. After all, isn't that the culturally correct greeting? In theory, yes. In practice, most...
Read MorePresident Barack Obama announced this week that the United States will reopen diplomatic relations with Cuba, thawing half a century of cold – and sometimes hot – war. The first time I visited Cuba was in the almost unbelievably remote years before “el Maximo Leader,” Fidel Castro. My parents and I went most evenings to...
Read More
More Witlessness from the Yankee Capital
Vi and I spent a couple of weeks in Cuba a few years back for The American Conservative. Nice place, good people, government a mixed bag mostly... Varadero, Cuba. Photo: FOE Staff Some things surpass all understanding. Why in the name of God and little catfish are we embargoing Cuba? The revolution occurred in 1959,...
Read MoreAs the dust from the Ferguson outrage-a-thon settles, we enter a lull in what I have dubbed the Cold Civil War: that is, the conflict between whites who see things like this and whites who see things like that, with colored auxiliaries recruited by one of the sides to groom the horses and dig field...
Read More
Barbarossa 2
Russian President Vladimir Putin suffered a stunning defeat on Tuesday when a US-backed plan to push down oil prices sent the ruble into freefall. Russia’s currency plunged 10 percent on Monday followed by an 11 percent drop on Tuesday reducing the ruble’s value by more than half in less than a year. The jarring slide...
Read MoreThe celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami tell you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro's Cuba. In JFK's metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit. We got back Alan Gross before his Communist jailers killed him, along with an American spy, in exchange for three...
Read MoreDespite its elegant simplicity, the libertarian law is difficult to grasp. This I realized pursuant to the publication of"Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law."Some of the smartest, polymathic readers a writer could hope for were easily bullied into believing that by failing, first, to submit to the sovereign and question Him later—Eric Garner had...
Read More
In his remake of King Kong, Peter Jackson dragged out the big ape’s death so long it felt like a lifetime. At the time, it merely seemed like a lapse of taste. In hindsight, it seems like the beginning of a whole new career characterized by megalomania, greed, one-upmanship, self-indulgence, and bad taste. It was...
Read MoreNormalization of relations with Cuba is not the result of a diplomatic breakthrough or a change of heart on the part of Washington. Normalization is a result of US corporations seeking profit opportunities in Cuba, such as developing broadband Internet markets in Cuba. Before the American left and the Cuban government find happiness in the...
Read MoreIn 1948, Israel had its strange birth, and the newborn was greeted immediately by soldiers from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as they tried to snuff out the monster in its crib. They failed spectacularly, and an ink-drawn Star of David flag was raised on the shore of the Red Sea. Screw you,...
Read MoreLooking Back on Washington’s War on Terror
It was December 6, 2019, three years into a sagging Clinton presidency and a bitterly divided Congress. That day, the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long fought-over, much-delayed, heavily redacted report on the secret CIA drone wars and other American air campaigns in the 18-year-long war on terror was finally released. That...
Read More
A key element of the old Soviet culture, familiar to both Russian immigrants and Sovietologists, was samizdat, the combination of the Russian words "sam" ("self") and "izdat", the common Soviet abbreviation for "publishing office" (e.g. Politizdat, Lenizdat, Gosplanizdat). Usually produced using a typewriter and cheap paper, it was then copied using the archaic copy machines...
Read MoreWho was the great villain of the 20th century—the person most to blame for the evils of those decades? The stock answer is the person whose name is an anagram of “HEIL! OLD FART.” I disagree. It seems to me the title properly belongs to Lenin, the guy who really got the totalitarian ball rolling....
Read MoreWhen the government is waving at us with its right hand, so to speak, it is the government's left hand that we should be watching. Just as a magician draws your attention to what he wants you to see so you will not observe how his trick is performed, last week presented a textbook example...
Read MoreGentle cabrones: Behold my annual Mexican Christmas guide, where I recommend the best Mexi-themed libros for you to give to your loved ones this Navidad instead of yet another tamale to unwrap. Buy them at your local bookstore, or order online, but do buy! Lowriting: Shots, Rides & Stories from the Chicano Soul: Stunning collection...
Read More
Elie Wiesel presents himself as a humanitarian whose personal narrative gives him special license to sermonize about tolerance and non-violence. Wiesel: “Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.” More Wiesel: “Never again becomes more...
Read More[Update, Dec. 19: I am not blown away by the US attribution of the hack to North Korea. On technical grounds, there’s problems like this, pointed out by Jeffrey Carr (h/t to “@SaiGonSeamus), who wrote a book on cyberwarfare: The White House appears to be convinced through "Signals intelligence" that the North Korean government planned...
Read More