Eight songs, a book, and a luxury.
I was a bit surprised to learn recently that the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs (hereinafter DID) is still on the air. DID is older than I am. It’s been broadcast every week since 1942. The intro music—seagulls, surf breaking on a shore—was part of the background acoustics of my 1950s childhood in England....
Read MoreWell, that’s been a depressing few days, hasn’t it? Have you been watching the pictures on TV? Howling mobs of blacks throwing bottles; overturned cars; stores looted and burned; police in riot gear watching passively; black faces contorted with rage; furrowed-brow white liberals excusing, explaining. It’s all too drearily familiar, isn’t it? Newark and Detroit;...
Read MoreI have been reading Paul Johnson’s new short biography of Dwight Eisenhower. This fulfills a long-standing intention of the feebler kind—a velleity, Bill Buckley would have said. Thus: In his 1983 book Modern Times, Paul Johnson made a point of talking up U.S. presidents then regarded by orthodox historians as second-rate or worse: Harding, Coolidge,...
Read MoreReflections on medicine.
Reading the November issue of Literary Review (a British monthly, somewhat like the New York Review of Books but less claustrophobically liberal), the following thing caught my attention. It’s in Donald Rayfield’s review of Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin: That brought to mind a remark I’ve seen attributed to Winston...
Read MoreI maintain some vestigial links to the old country. Among them is the inclusion of the London Daily Telegraph in my morning trawl through the online news. It’s sheer sentimentality on my part. The Telegraph was one of the first major outlets to publish me, back in the 1980s. At that time it was a...
Read MoreAlthough they probably aren't worth it.
Some boffins at Harvard University claim to have transmitted information from one person’s mind to another by telepathy. Reading through the paper, I thought the content transmitted wasn’t very impressive—just the Spanish and Italian words for “hello”—but hey, baby steps. Is telepathy a thing we should hope for? I have mixed feelings, based on long...
Read MoreAlways look on the bright side.
I recently did a duplex book review for a respectable conservative quarterly (relevant issue not yet in print). The two books I reviewed, this one and this one, were of the boosterist type, the boosteree in both cases being the U.S.A. Our country has a glorious future, these authors say. The editor who sent me...
Read MoreA vote for Fortress America.
So how are you doing at keeping up with events in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa)? Can the new Iraqi government get some kind of military act together? Will the Kurds hold on to Kobani, that Syrian city under siege by ISIS? Will the big guys in the neighborhood—Iran, Israel, Turkey, the Saudis—get...
Read MoreZero Shades of Gray. The U.S. Supreme Court punted on homosexual “marriage” the other day. I can’t summon up much interest, having long since sunk into fatalism on the issue. The cultural revolutionaries are going to shove this absurd notion down our throats [sic] and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. As a...
Read MoreHong Kong, in long historical perspective.
History is full of strange folds, wrinkles, and repetitions. Consider for example the following true story. There was once a great empire of the despotic-bureaucratic sort. It had enjoyed centuries of glory; but at last came corruption, political paralysis, foreign incursions, and fragmentation. As the empire entered its long decline, a much smaller nation of...
Read MoreFuture population trends.
A new study on world population trends came out last week from the University of Washington in Seattle. If you’re one of those people who worry about an overpopulated world, the news is bad: total human population, currently a tad over seven billion, will likely be eleven billion by the end of the century and...
Read MoreIf there is hope for England, it lies with the separatists.
An opinion journalist is expected to take a stand on newsy issues, even ones he doesn’t much care about. This is especially so when the issue relates to the British Isles and the journalist podcasts with a British accent; to be precise in my particular case, a mid-20th-century educated-lower-lower-middle-class East Midlands accent. So, all right,...
Read MoreI have taken another trip on my syllogismobile to an alternate universe. Among the artifacts I brought back with me was A.J. Braithwaite’s History of Britain (2011 edition), a standard text for British schoolchildren in that universe. The following extracts are from the final chapter, titled “Britain since 1945.” Britain and Ireland became Soviet satellites...
Read MoreVisiting the Last Frontier.
The Derbs—Mr., Mrs., and Missy—spent two weeks in Alaska. Here are some random observations. Positively the last family vacation. Most people who visit Alaska nowadays arrive on cruise ships, which seem to get bigger every time I see one. Juneau’s harbor is a cruise ship parking lot. There were five of the behemoths there when...
Read MoreThe ups and downs of Depressive Realism.
Do I get downhearted? Yes I do. You think it’s easy, living on the red pill? In that world-bestriding bestseller We Are Doomed I introduced readers to the theory of Depressive Realism, launched by psychologists Taylor and Brown in 1988: If it’s well-adjustedness you want for yourself, and a minimum of subjective distress, take the...
Read MoreWho? Whom?
From the police blotter: Sounds nasty. In this or any other particular case there may be circumstances we don’t know—but there is no doubt that rape happens. The law codes of civilized countries consider it a heinous crime, and rightly so. If events transpired as reported, Mr. Rodriguez should do serious time. Now consider the...
Read MoreOrwell and Waugh: the same man?
I have just finished reading David Lebedoff’s 2008 book The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. No, this isn’t a book review—it’s a bit late for that—only some loose reflections on what Lebedoff wrote, as it relates to our present circumstances. Orwell and Waugh are the two big names in...
Read MoreYou can’t faze a New Yorker. After all these years in the Big Apple, I really should know better than to try conclusions with the natives. Place: Track 8 platform at the Long Island Railroad hub in Jamaica, New York City. Time: May 20, 11:50 P.M. Derb’s condition: Seriously over-served. As I emerge from the...
Read MoreBreaking Bad.
A few columns ago I mentioned in passing that the Mrs. and I had been watching Breaking Bad. This brought some inquiries about whether we got to the end of it, and what I thought. Here are the answers. Yes, we got to the end, after four months or so of Saturday-night marathons via Netflix....
Read MoreThe title I wanted for my 2009 call to pessimism was We Are Doomed, Doomed. The publisher thought that was too dark, though, so I settled at last for just one “Doomed.” A good thing, perhaps, as the original title is now available to authors reaching for a deeper level of despair. David Archibald might...
Read MoreVisiting the 9/11 memorial & museum.
I’ll admit I went to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum with a bad attitude. Why are we memorializing a humiliation? Two of our proudest buildings were leveled and some 3,000 of our people were killed—unarmed, going about their workaday business—by a gang of foreign religious fanatics. Why should we memorialize this? I know, there’s a...
Read More… to politics in a postindustrial society.
Wednesday this week marks the 25th anniversary of the Chinese army’s retaking Tiananmen Square from anti-regime protestors, an event known to Chinese by the date as “6/4.” The first thing to be said about this is that if, like me, you welcome summer by reading a good thick middlebrow novel, here’s just the thing. Not...
Read MoreDebate debased.
After all these years of bloviating, I still can’t tell in advance what will get people riled up. I’ll spend hours in research for a good deep thumb-sucking piece on Pacific theater geostrategy, and it falls dead-born from the press. Another time I’ll procrastinate until an hour before deadline and then, half drunk and yearning...
Read MoreWading for clams.
So I was in the downstairs study, idly surfing the Web while the Mrs. watched TV in the next room. The door was open—gotta keep ’em in sight—so TV noises drifted in. Among the indrift I caught the tail end of a commercial. I don’t know what was being advertised; some labor-saving device, I guess....
Read MoreHope, our grandmothers told us, makes a good breakfast, but a poor supper. My guess is that where hope for convergence of the races in America is concerned, it’s around 6 p.m. on that schema. Not suppertime yet, but it’ll soon be getting dark. This gloomy thought was inspired by a couple of news stories....
Read MoreGerry Adams helps police with their inquiries.
One summer’s day 32 years ago, during a spell of employment at the U.K. offices of Marathon Oil Corp. in London’s Marylebone Road, I was taking lunch at a nondescript greasy spoon near those offices when from the near distance there came an almighty THUD. Startled, I looked across at the proprietor of the place,...
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