A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by Tony Blair and George Bush over the Iraq War. The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started. It flies in the face of the Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ – in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals. The classified document also discloses that … Continue reading →

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam’s past and predicted, in his book The Great Heresies, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic revival, … Continue reading →

Remnant Review I begin with an aphorism: “Moral ideas without institutional sanctions are impotent. Institutional sanctions without moral ideas are tyrannical.” Every civilization attempts to deal with this aphorism. So does every political movement. There is never universal agreement on either the content of morality or the efficiency of the sanctions. This is a battle for the minds of men. It never ceases. I have been active in the conservative movement ever since 1956. By 1960, I had come to this realization: American conservatism after World War II has lacked anything remotely resembling a consistent philosophical defense. This has made it … Continue reading →

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- ‘Tis the season for elections and campaign promises. Unlike most, my campaign promises are practical. If elected President, I’ll actually stick to them. Here’s my primary platform message: A Ruger 10/22 Rifle, or maybe two, in every home. What do you think? If you don’t already own a Ruger 10/22 Rifle, then vote for me as a write-in candidate because everyone should have a Ruger 10/22. They’re not only fun but useful. That’s why Ruger has sold somewhere more than six million of them over the past 51 years. Way back in 1964, Ruger released this gun, and … Continue reading →

When socialism finally collapsed all around the world in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s the academic Marxists did not just throw in the towel and face reality.  Indeed, not one of them has ever apologized for providing intellectual support for some of the worst mass murderers in world history – Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the rest of the communist/socialist gangsters.  Instead, they reinvented themselves in several different ways, including posing as “environmentalists,” and as “cultural Marxists.” Taking their cue from socialist economist Robert Heilbroner in a September 10, 1990 New Yorker article entitled “After Communism,” many Marxists began promoting socialist central … Continue reading →

In this week’s debate, Bernie Sanders claimed that the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty. CBS reports that Sanders said: “We should not be the country that has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country and more wealth and income inequality than any other country,” As even CBS notes, according to UNICEF, which is probably the source of Sanders’s factoid, the US has lower childhood poverty rates than Greece, Spain, Mexico, Latvia, and Israel, all of which are OECD countries or regarded as peer countries. The US rate (32.2 percent) is also more or … Continue reading →

An attentive LRC reader has alerted me that in David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, the author alludes to the groundbreaking Rolling Stone article, “The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA From WWII to Watergate,” by Howard Kohn, in discussing CIA covert funding of American domestic political campaigns. (My copy is slated to arrive early next week from Amazon and I can’t wait to delve into it.) Younger LRC readers need to be critically aware of what they undoubtedly consider “ancient history” in shaping the world in which … Continue reading →

Every profession has its in-group ways of using language, but not every profession requires native speakers of many different languages to communicate with each other every day. The European Union requires just this, and the people who work there, hashing out, drafting, and translating documents use English in a very particular way. A 2013 EU report outlined some of the unusual qualities of EU English, pointing out that, “over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English.” Much of that unrecognizable vocabulary is the result of translations or non-native-speaker errors … Continue reading →

I wonder whether Americans realize just how closely the United States is coming to resemble a country of the Third World, not just in its corruption and attributes of a police state, but in the incompetence of governmental bureaucracies. Federal agencies don’t work. They are rotted by affirmative action. The bureaucrats are inattentive, unaccountable,  anonymous, can’t be fired, and get paid whether they do their jobs or not. Congress is not interested. A few examples, from my experience or that of people I know, mostly involving veterans, but typical. Nightmare the First: Incompetence at State A few weeks ago my wife and I, … Continue reading →

Mainstream media outlets are systematically disregarding the hazardous health impacts of widespread U.S. military burn pits on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby playing a direct role in“legitimating the environmental injustices of war,” a harrowing new scholarly report concludes. “During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense burned the majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches, producing large amounts of potentially hazardous emissions,” noted Eric Bonds, assistant professor of sociology at University of Mary Washington, in his investigation, published in the journal Environmental Politics. “It is well known that the uncontrolled burning of plastics, … Continue reading →

For many it is a guilty pleasure, an indulgence saved for the weekend. But, rather than feel bad about securing yourself a couple of hours shut eye during the day, a team of scientists are suggesting regular daytime naps might actually boost your health. Their research reveals that memories associated with a reward are preferentially reinforced by sleep. Even a short nap after a period of learning is beneficial. Lead researcher, Dr Kinga Igloi from the University of Geneva, said: ‘Rewards may act as a kind of tag, sealing information in the brain during learning. ‘During sleep, that information is … Continue reading →

There is no quality more fleeting than modernity and nothing staler than an analysis of a past crisis that was written at the time it was happening. The problem with our present economic crisis is that it has been going on since 2007 (or is it 2006 or 2008, one tends to gets a little muddled in one’s chronology), so that it has become less a crisis than a way of life. No doubt at some point in this crisis national income per head declined by 5 percent from its peak, but before that it must have risen 5 percent … Continue reading →