As the world grapples with fearsome Ebola Fever, we have been through something similar before. Last time it was stemmed in Colonial America by a black African slave and his owner, a firebrand, evangelical, white clergyman. Onesimus was a slave, owned by the Puritan polemicist and renowned preacher Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Beyond Black Studies Departments, [...]
Britain’s The Independent newspaper, second in Progressivism to The Guardian, reports that scientists may be able to clone a woolly mammoth within a human generation. There the problems start. Nicknamed Buttercup, the 2.3-metre beast was discovered frozen in Siberia, having succumbed to swamps and predators some 40,000 years ago. She is missing a leg but [...]
In the unlikely event that any neo-cons read this, some will pore through the atlas with sound and fury; others will try and reroute the Pacific Fleet; while a few more will summon the 82nd Airborne to drop and rain down mass destruction. But they will be disappointed. The Hendiadys is not a group of [...]
Get ready! And hurry! We mustn’t wait! It’s time for worship! Don’t be late! Be not like those wretches who Disdain our values, through and through That made us what we are today! We ‘ere grow stronger ‘ere we pray, When pray we fully—not by half; Come worship, now, the Golden Calf! On bended knee [...]
“He’s out of touch as he can be, Now filling up the Holy See With rabble-rousers, populists, With throngs of half-baked dogmatists; Who make us weep, or maybe laugh, Who cannot read a simple graph, Who can’t perceive the bottom line, Who deign to cavil, moan and whine; Far too unlettered to ensure That we [...]
In the media’s Yuletide “Silly Season,” when legislatures close and there is precious little which to make people upset, reporters, as starved for controversy as bears hungry after hibernation, yearn to eat a few campers. Yet there is wisdom to be gleaned from the recent UK savagery against Baroness Jenkin of Kennington, and her ritualised [...]
Another Christmas, another dilemma! What to give friends and distant relatives when money is tight? How to give a gift without unnecessary commercialism; or without it escalating into undesired mandatory reciprocity? Fear not, and give the gift of ideas. The following websites are packed with ideas to be welcomed by any Imaginative Conservative or a [...]
Mein Führer! Put down that pistol! Eva! Relax! It is not all finished! No! I have it figured out! Really! It came to me in a dream. Your Thousand Year Reich is not over! The Amerikaner pig-dogs surging toward Berlin—they can be stopped! The Allied bombing raids – they can be halted! Listen to me, [...]
Famously, Oscar Wilde said “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Fair enough, while others of us are gazing hungrily at the McDonalds across the street, or peering up the skirt of a passer-by. Scientists look at science at least most of the time, we hope, because [...]
The Pentagon’s $800 million spent on Afghan economic development has “accomplished nothing,” says the intrepid gumshoe hunting down waste, corruption and inefficiency. Meanwhile, he has 322 investigations still underway, across the US government’s similar $120 billion spent there so far. An official who does not mince words, Mr. John Sopko, who heads the US Special [...]
Some years back, a Florida preacher, who seemed to have a neck that was 17-inches long and a goitre the size of a musk-melon, looked like ten generations of first-cousin marriages and probably handled snakes in church. He earned much publicity by burning a Koran; but just to make the story less controversial, let us [...]
When I heard the bad news, I was struggling with a mug of particularly nasty instant coffee in Kathmandu, trying to get my head around a report that gadgets now outnumber human beings; and while our global population grows at two people per second, mobile telephones now proliferate five times faster. This was worse; a [...]
“This year’s first meeting is ending today, So what do you think all the bishops will say?” “Hunh? Why do you wait for the prelates to speak— Reporters predicted it fully last week!” “They’ll skip the formality, blessings and fuss And marry their cats to their dogs—or to us! Or they’ll marry each other, then [...]
Today, 21st October, is the Feast Day of the Blessed Charles (or Karl) of Austria, beatified in 2004 by the pope Saint John Paul the Great. Revealing, startling and moving in equal measure, this is the best book on this inspiring couple, on the heroic youth’s tragic end and the demise of the West’s last [...]