June 2013
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From Donald Kagan's farewell speech upon his retirement from Yale: Whatever the formal religious attachments of our students may be, I find that a firm belief in the traditional values and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of…
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Well, this story came as a bit of a shock. It's been 17 years now since flight TWA 800 mysteriously exploded shortly after taking off from JFK Airport. When I saw the headline it took me a moment to remember what it referred to. At the time of the event I was a member of…
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Here's something else I've revisited in the process of selecting Sunday Night Journals for inclusion in a book: a series of posts from 2006-7 called "The Liberal Conservative," in which I lay out at some length my notion of a meaningful conservatism. It covers a lot of the ground we've visited here in recent discussions…
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I just watched the first of a new Inspector Lewis series on PBS. Lewis, as you may know, was Chief Inspector Morse's sergeant in the old series based on the Colin Dexter novels. That much-loved series having ended some years ago, and John Thaw, the actor who played Morse, having died, the milieu has been recreated…
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Weekend Music I'm a bit late with this, because I had to work late yesterday and most of the day today. Rockwell: "Somebody's Watching Me" "The NSA Slow Jam" And lest the atmosphere of the first two seem more light-hearted than warranted–Rupert Hine: "The Outsider" (no video) Thanks to Robert W, who…
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We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here. –Barack Obama
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…philosophy, naturally. At Oxford, no less. "Speaking to the Sunday Times, Sandberg said that life with just a head would be limited…" Maybe this is what the Sex Pistols really meant by "no future."
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Some direct quotes from that James Hitchcock piece in Touchstone that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: …liberalism is now not merely a political philosophy compatible with many kinds of religion but has itself become a religion. …it is expedient for liberals that their movement not be seen as a religion, since it thereby…
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Let me state right off that the artist is my son, and that I probably would never have heard this music otherwise. There is so much recorded music available today that no one can even keep up with the titles, much less listen to more than a very tiny fraction of it. If you don't…
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And I have it from her ladyship's own maid, who happened to overhear a conversation between her ladyship and one of the gentlemen staying here–Mr. Maxwell, who is employed in an editorial capacity by one of the reviews–that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir.…
Light On Dark Water 