Free Republic

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth: The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day … Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like: The Xbox and the...

Derbyshire may have 'oldest' dog Bella's owner says she is at least 28 years old A Derbyshire couple are trying to prove their pet Labrador cross is the oldest dog in the world. Bella's owner David Richardson, 76, said he bought the mixed breed dog from the RSPCA 26 years ago when she was "at least three years old". That would make Bella's age more than 200 in canine years. But the RSPCA said it does not have any records for Bella and Guinness World Records said without the appropriate paperwork it could not be proved. Mr Richardson said he...

A reader: John, I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform. Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be...

In an essay published recently on National Review Online, John Derbyshire has declared that the documentary Expelled contains a blood libel against Western Civilization. His is an exercise of striking vulgarity, the more so since, as he insouciantly admits, he has not “seen the dang thing.� A blood libel, one might recall, refers to the charge that the Jewish people are irredeemably stained by their occasional, if modest, need for Christian blood. Some terms have acquired through their historical associations a degree of repugnance that persuades sensitive men and women not to use them. If Derbyshire has been repelled by...

... When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?...

It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?" I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and...

What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and...

“In Nature,� said Coleridge, “there is nothing melancholy.� I don’t know about that. I suppose there are lots of people who will greet American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau with joy, but both politics and temperament predisposed me against the book.[1] I had agreed to review it in a moment of weakness, but when it thumped down onto my desk—115 extracts from 101 authors in close to a thousand galley pages of almost nothing but text (“80 pages of color inserts� will be included in the finished product, the publisher assures me), melancholy is what ensued.Politics. The presence of that...

America's voters need to know why Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, praised Barack Obama at the annual Nation of Islam conference as "the hope of the entire world that America will change and be a better place" and Mrs. Obama's thesis suggests why. John Derbyshire, in "The Corner" at National Review Online: "...Mrs Obama's senior sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community"....will... have on the presidential campaign....a moderate positive, offset by a slight negative." If that's so, then Barack Obama will be the next President. Mr. Derbyshire was impressed that the thesis was released, making...

Oh, stop whining. So what if the likely GOP nominee believes in restraints on free speech, higher taxation, bigger government, open borders, and 100-year U.S. armies of occupation everywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe? Romney believes in those things too — at least, he does when he's in a room full of people that want him to. You already have a genuinely conservative candidate on offer. He's just not slick enough for you. What, he has positions you don't agree with? More than the other guys? Actually, I have heard very little complaining about Paul's positions. What I have mostly heard...

Make Your Yuletide Gay An olive branch. Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor December 20, 2001 9:15 a.m. At the beginning of Robert Aldrich's 1962 movie Sodom and Gomorrah, Anouk Aimee sets out to deliver a message to the Elamites. Halfway across the desert she encounters a stranger, who helpfully warns her: "Watch out for Sodomite patrols!" Where is that guy when I need him? In Tuesday's column, which was about ballet, I passed a comment on the movie Billy Elliot, expressing the opinion that it was "not bad, if you ignored the ingredient of homosexual propaganda ...

December 20, 2007, 6:00 a.m. Liberty! Liberty!Why I’m for Ron Paul. By John Derbyshire You can waste a lot of time in my line of work, noodling around on Internet search engines to not much effect. If the matter is sufficiently pressing (translation: remunerative), when the Internet has comprehensively failed you, you can head to your library. If that fails, you can head to the nearest university library; and if that fails, to some mega-resource like the New York Public Library. If the matter isn’t that pressing, you give up and think of something else to write about. I...

Eliot Spitzer, the Governor of my state, has achieved a thing I would have though impossible: He has made me yearn for the days of George Pataki. Spitzer's latest wheeze, to give state driver licenses to illegal aliens, was actually state policy for most of Pataki's term as Governor, until Curious George changed the rules in 2003 (causing 150,000 illegals to lose their licenses). Oddly, under the pre-2003 Pataki rules, illegals could get licenses without showing a Social Security number provided they supplied documentary proof that they were ineligible for Social Security. Under Spitzer's proposed change, an illegal no longer...

September 20, 2007, 0:36 a.m. Islamophobophobia By John Derbyshire I boxed a couple of brief rounds with Robert Spencer over at Pajamas Media last month. Robert is the author of a raft of books on the general theme that Islam is a bad religion — not merely bad in some current misinterpretation, but bad root and branch, its badness planted right there in the Islamic scriptures. Spencer himself is a devout Christian, and the Pajamas Media exchanges started when I posted a review of his latest book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. I don’t really...

Is 2008 The New 1964? [John Derbyshire] There's a Pro-Ron-Paul meme going around, to the effect that 2008 is the new 1964; i.e. that on the premise—debatable in itself, of course—that the GOP has no chance of winning the presidency next year, conservatives should run a Goldwater-style insurgency to remind the party we're here & set up some influence for 2012. Bruce Bartlett floated the meme here. I got a thought-provoking e-mail along similar lines (one of dozens like it I've had on that Paul column) from Ben Novak, who lists himself as "founder of the Americans in Europe for...

That Old-Time ReligionThe Ron Paul temptation.By John DerbyshireGo on, admit it: you have felt the Ron Paul temptation, haven’t you? And it’s not just the thrill of imagining another president named Ron, is it? Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War...

On “The Corner” the other day, by way of commemorating the centenary of the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, I posted Heinlein's contribution to the 1950s radio series “This I Believe.” Eschewing any religious or metaphysical affirmations, Heinlein laid out his social credo: “I believe in my neighbors... in my townspeople... in my fellow citizens.” He went on to write about his local priest, whose “goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. ... If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him.” (Heinlein was an atheist, by the way.) Heinlein’s next-door neighbor, he tells us, was a...

What a Waste. Steve Sailer said it all. [L]et's stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this. Well, why...

Well, all right, the beast is not definitively dead yet. Given the unswerving determination of our president — a quality I have admired, under different circumstances — we may see another effort at “comprehensive immigration reform” before the 110th Congress packs its bags in January ’09. Even if the president can’t be deterred, though, the congressfolk can. They’ve been getting an earful from their constituents. I don’t know what they’ve been hearing, but it can’t be too different from what all the radio and TV talk-show hosts say they have been hearing: “Enforce the law!” This past couple of weeks...

April 26, 2007, 7:15 a.m. Dancin’, YeahPrayin’ for this moment to last. By John Derbyshire For proponents of the theory that everything in the world exists for some good reason, disco music must present a conundrum. What higher purpose could possibly be served by this vapid, thrumping, affectless sound, dragging in its wake a subculture of narcissism, pill-popping, promiscuity both straight and gay, cheesy light shows, and the worst male clothing styles since slashed doublets and neck ruffs went out? Disco was so mockable it had barely got started before it was mocking itself — remember “Disco Duck�? The...

November 06, 2006, 7:15 a.m. To Vote Or Not To VoteA tough call for conservatives. By John Derbyshire Of course, it is not a matter of simply “staying home.� I shall be voting not only for my U.S. senator and representative, but also for a state senator and assemblyman, a county clerk and comptroller, and a town councilcritter. You probably have a similar array of positions to vote for. By all means do the best you can for your state and district. Whether or not it is the case that all politics is local, it is certainly the case...

<p>Nordlinger: Senator Kerry speaks, &c.</p> <p>Q. Are you a Christian?</p> <p>A. No. I take the minimal definition of a Christian to be a person who is sure that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, or part-divine, and that the Resurrection was a real event. I don’t believe either of those things.</p>

Fear of the Horizon Barbary brutality. By John Derbyshire Presented with the word “slavery,” what comes to your mind? If you are an American, it is surely the race slavery that was a feature of life here for 250 years, that continued through the early decades of the Republic in some states, and that caused divisions that led to the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in our history. That is as it should be. We naturally think of our own country first. Slavery, however, has been a feature of life in many societies all over the world, from the most...

August 08, 2006, 3:11 p.m. If— (you want to be a true jihadi) By John Derbyshire For some reason my imagination was caught by the news last week that Osama bin Laden has sent his son Saad off to fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Having Mozart-ized this little snippet in last week’s Radio Derb, I thought I might as well Kipling-ize it, too. Perhaps Rudyard Kipling’s best-known poem, and surely the best-known hortatory poem in the English language, is “If—�  which appeared in a 1910 volume of historical stories for children.  The two children who are principal characters in...

I seem to have got myself elected to the post of NR’s designated point man against Creationists.* Indignant anti-Creationist readers have urged me to make a response to George Gilder’s long essay “Evolution and Me� in the current (7/17/06) National Review Well, I'll give it a shot. I had better say up front that I am only familiar with George’s work — he has written several books, none of which I have read, I am ashamed to say, since I know he has read one of mine — in a sketchy and secondhand way, so what follows is only a...

I see that Namibia has offered citizenship to Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, who was born in that nation on Saturday. Little Shiloh Nouvel is of course the fruit of the union of movie stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Namibia’s Environment and Tourism Deputy Minister Leon Jooste announced the infant’s citizenship that same day, with the words: “Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt will according to Namibian law be allowed to obtain Namibian citizenship if the parents should choose to do so.” I hope that the many, many National Review Online readers over there in Windhoek, Keetmanshoop, Grootfontein, and Swakopmund will not take umbrage...

CIRA=Corruption, Ignorance, Recklessness, Arrogance [John Derbyshire] The sheer staggering awfulness of CIRA (the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, passed by the U.S. Senate yesterday) is just beginning to dawn on me. Heritage's Robert Rector, who knows what he's talking about, called it "the worst bill I have seen in 25 years." The only thing to question there is the 25. This might easily be the worst bill ever. I've been following immigration issues, in a not-very-attentive way, for 30-something years. I've held five different residence statuses myself (B-2, illegal, H-1B, Green Card, citizen). There are people like Mark Krikorian who have...

Sunday, May 21, 2006 NRO - Sensenbrenner Nonsense [John Derbyshire] For once I am (gulp) in agreement with JPod about an immigration issue: the slavery analogy is dumb. (Though I'd like to register my irritation with JPod's too-free use of the word "insane.") Sensenbrenner's preposterous argument also pushes the immigration debate in the wrong direction — the direction of sympathy with illegal immigrants. U.S. immigration policy should not be oriented towards what is good for immigrants, but towards what is good for the U.S.A. Do immigrants, illegal or not, have better lives here than in their home countries? You bet....

ne of the disorienting things for an Old World conservative settling in America is that over here, even conservatives are optimistic. This really won't do. A conservative ought to be a pessimist, at least about human nature, human society, and the prospects for improving them. The facile cheeriness of the lefty world-perfecters are not for us, with their New Soviet Man, their Socialist Spiritual Civilization, their City of the Sun, their coming reign of peace, justice, and absolute equality. We are more of the temper of H. P. Lovecraft, who began one of his short stories with the arresting observation...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 04, 2006, 11:32 a.m. Putting the World to Rights My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica lists 152 countries in the world. Question: How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact (allowing for minor constitutional adjustments like expansion of the franchise), without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation? I’ll stand open to correction here, but I make it six: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S.A. Not even Britain qualifies, because...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version March 21, 2006, 8:27 a.m. To Hell with the “To Hell With The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks” Hawks Just kidding there — actually, making the point that “The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks” is a really clunky way of identifying a faction. It used to be said of the mathematician Camille Jordan, whose papers were famously unreadable, that if he wished to introduce four variables on the same footing, such as the average mathematician would call a, b, c, and d, Jordan would label them as a, M3’, ε2,...

WHY AN INTIFADA IN FRANCE? [John Derbyshire] An acquaintance of mine -- French, currently resident in North Africa -- sent a long post about the French riots to an email group I belong to. It is a fascinating post, but much too long to paste here. I did think, though, that the following passage would interest NRO readers, so with his permission, I pass it on. It is from a passage headed: "Why an Intifada in France?" It is among a long list of reasons given as answers to the question. "The Iraq war: as I had noticed very strongly...

It is a longstanding cliché that human knowledge of the universe advances by a series of dethronements. There was a time when men thought that the whole world was alive with spirits whose main purpose and pleasure was to watch us. Great bonfires were lit to stir the sun from his midwinter torpor; kings were ritually slain and new kings proclaimed, so that the crops thus encouraged might rise from the ground. It took several thousand years for mankind to understand that the sun is not even aware of our existence, and that crops grow well or badly according to...

I nearly fell out of my Barcalounger Sunday morning, watching The McLaughlin Group. The old Jesuit had Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Tony Blankley, and Clarence Page (who is black) sitting around. They were talking about Hurricane Katrina, of course. Suddenly, McLaughlin turned to Page and said: “Why the correlation between black and poor?” Good grief, I thought, you can’t ask that. People get taken off the air for less. Poor Clarence Page didn’t know whether to spit or wind his watch. He mumbled something that wasn’t even close to being an answer. McLaughlin, realizing his gaffe, quickly and deftly steered...

Catching up on back news this past few days — I was out of the country for the first two weeks of August — I caught President Bush's endorsement of teaching Intelligent Design in public school science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," President Bush told a reporter August 2, "so people can understand what the debate is all about." This is Bush at his muddle-headed worst, conferring all the authority of the presidency on the teaching of pseudoscience in science classes. Why stop with Intelligent Design (the theory that life on earth has developed by a series...

THE NEEDLE, PLEASE I think I was in college when I first subscribed to "National Review" magazine. I kept renewing faithfully for more than three decades. Some years ago a youngish editor was brought in, and after a while I no longer saw any of the familiar names. Of course, some long-time writers had moved into a well-deserved retirement, and some had died. It was natural for the roster to change, but other things also changed, including the magazine's intellectual level and commitment to principle. This year I ignored the pleas to renew and let my subscription lapse. Occasionally I...

Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant — 14 deaths in 113 flights — is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up — which, depending on...

The people of Britain have spoken, and the Labor party is back in power with a comfortable, if much diminished, majority of seats in parliament. The leader of the Conservative party has said he will step down, forcing the Tories to their fourth leadership election in eight years.* The victorious Labor party got 36 percent of the vote, the Conservatives 33 percent, the Liberal Democrats (a Naderite Green-Left party) 22.5 percent, and "other" (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish parties) 9.5 percent. The real victory here is Margaret Thatcher's. By annihilating the old statist ideological Left in the 1980s, she forced the...

April 07, 2005, 10:43 a.m. The Rearguard Pope One man vs. a posthuman tsunami. I am not a Roman Catholic. In fact, I was raised in the old English tradition to think of the Roman Church as a sinister continental conspiracy — hatchet-faced Jesuits in purple robes, lurking in dark corridors, muttering subversion in Latin — to deprive honest Englishmen of their liberties. A few years’ acquaintance with the world showed me the absurdity of all that. Philip II of Spain has been dead for a very long time, and the great enemies of liberty in our own age have...

I have been getting an exceptional quantity of mail — paper mail, not e-mail — about a piece I wrote for National Review last December. The piece, titled "Our Crisis of Foundations," was a loose rumination on current metaphysical confusions in the Western world. Not many of my correspondents were interested in metaphysics. What mainly caught their eyes, and what they wanted to take issue with, were the following two sentences: It is now taken for granted, for example, that homosexuality is a biological attribute of the human organism. "I was born this way!" the modern homosexual tells us, and...

John Derbyshire just appeared on C-SPAN with Brian. It was absolutely amazing how liberal Democrats hungering for some scrap of intellectual content to bolster their "hate Bush" rhetoric, just ate up everything he said. It shows how intellectually bankrupt they are. I can see some sensible sounding Democrats splitting off from 1/3 of the radicals in their party leaving the radicals as a 3rd party and joining with some liberal Republicans to form a new party with maybe 30-40 % of the electorate to challenge and provide some real opposition to conservative Republicans.

We had a print-magazine deadline this week, so I'm just coming in at the tail end of some things here, especially the odd bedfellow’s alliance of Derb and Ted Kennedy on Iraq. Derb is absolutely right that there are many places in the world that have zero effect on U.S. security. And he is right to recoil from a global crusade for American-style democracy (not that that is in the offing, despite the Second Inaugural address). But there are a couple of ways he goes wrong. 1) The Middle East matters to us strategically, and basically every American president since...

We suffer most not when the White House is a peaceful dormitory, but when it is a jitney Mars Hill, with a tin-pot Paul bawling from the roof. Discounting Harding as a cipher, Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant?" — from H.L. Mencken's obituary for Calvin Coolidge There is something I want to say to my NR/NRO colleagues. Also, come to think of it, to the president of the United States and his Cabinet. Have you...

At one of the panel discussions on the recent (sigh) cruise, we panellists were invited to opine about what GWB did right this election, and what JFK did wrong. I laid out my own contribution in the form of a Letterman-style Top Ten. Several people have asked me to post it. Here is as much as I can glean from my notes. ---What Bush did right 10. Married Laura. She was a great asset to W's campaign, a natural. 9. Showed humor. Steve Sailer argues that W is a teaser on humor -- always seems on the point of making...

YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAA! At the time of writing — 1:45 A.M. Wednesday morning — George W. Bush needs just one Electoral College vote to get him over the top. I'm going to take this as a done deal, and start gloating. Now, gloating is of course bad — coarse, heartless, insensitive, and ill-mannered. Magnanimity in victory, that's the thing. Humility, grace, gentlemanly forbearance, there but for the grace of God... YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAA! Sorry, sorry. I was saying... Yes, gloating. Definitely uncouth, undoubtedly bad manners. Still, the fact that the good Lord gave us the capacity for bad manners suggest to me that He...

This month is the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve, the book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray about — to quote their own subtitle — "intelligence and class structure in American life." The book generated a huge controversy when it was published — so much so that, if you trawl around the Internet or bookstores, you can find first, second, and third derivatives (so to speak) of the book: books and articles about it, books and articles about those books and articles, and so on. Most of TBC consists of summaries of research in...

An interesting reader quibble: "Dear Derb---[Some approving remarks, then] ...I am however going to quibble with you on one point. Our revolution was not a product of the Enlightenment, which celebrated the glory of man, and led in my opinion to all these silly theories of human perfectability (ok, revived them). Our revolution was a product of the Puritan and protestant revolutions, with some of the Enlightenment mixed in (Mr. Jefferson). Our revolution explicitly recognized that men could not be trusted with power, and religion was the only true civilizing force that could ensure a stable republic. The Enlightenment revolutions...

As every reader of paleo-con websites knows, the only people who wanted to go to war against Saddam Hussein were a tiny clique of "neocons,"... If the quotes collected here are authentic, the "neocon" cabal included Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Sandy Berger, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton,.... Boy, this was some cabal!

I'm sick of hearing about this "holy city of Najaf" and its "sacred shrine." Why aren't the world's 60 million (?) Shi-ites in a state of fuming outrage that this supposed holy of holies is occupied by a gang of armed thugs led by a bogus un-credentialed pseudo-cleric with a political agenda? I know how *I* would feel if Canterbury Cathedral were so occupied. Why don't a few ten thousand of the world's pious Shi'ites march unarmed on this "holy city" demanding that Muqtada al Sadr get the heck out of there? Sure, they might get killed -- but aren't...

RE: KERRY, GWB, VIETNAM [John Derbyshire] Just one more from the tarpit. A reader in Houston urges me to correct my statement of yesterday: "We all know what happened when time came for George W. Bush to make his Vietnam decisions. His family, like 90 percent of well-connected elite families in America at that time, made a few phone calls & got him a stateside billet. This option was not open to most Americans." Not so, says my reader: "The assertion that Dubya signed up for the Texas Air National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam ... [is] simply untrue....