There has been an amount of discussion of a marriage strike in recent years as various male and female commentators alike attempt to explain the continuing decline in marriage rates throughout the advanced nations of the West. As more and more men have become aware that women file for most divorces and that family courts are now little more than thieves’ dens designed to funnel financial resources from men to women by any means or legal-sounding excuse necessary, they have understandably become considerably more marriage-averse.
Tag: WND
WND column
For an activity that nominally purports to concern itself with leadership, politics is essentially a game of tail-chasing. In a two-party system, or more accurately, a bifactional single-party system of the sort we suffer here in the United States, winning national elections is usually considered to rely upon slicing off a critical two percent from the least-committed, least-principled, most moderate portion of the other faction’s supporters. Since the winner of the previous election succeeded in claiming critical center, it is customary for the losing party’s next candidate to in some way mimic the previous winner in an attempt to reclaim the crucial minority.
So, it should come as no surprise that after having been ambushed by Barack Obama’s unexpected defeat of an uncharacteristically inept campaign by Hillary Clinton, some Republicans have decided that they need a “magic negro” of their own.
WND column
Mitch Daniels has not yet declared that he will run for the Republican nomination for president. In truth, he is an unlikely nominee, despite the half-hearted cheerleading he has enjoyed from the likes of Fox News and National Review, who appear to have latched onto him in lieu of their first love, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. It has been reported that the Bush family is supporting the current Indiana governor and former budget director for the Bush 43 White House, presumably because they understand that neither the nation nor the party has any appetite for a third President Bush – this time Florida Gov. Jeb Bush – after the debacles over which his father and his brother presided.
WND column
Few Americans realize that the European Union is among the most deceptive institutions on the planet. It is even less democratic than the Third Reich ever was, with ambitions that rival the erstwhile thousand-year plans of the late, unlamented Reichskanzler.
Born amidst deceit and lies that dwarf those told by the most famous 20th century titans of mendacity, the Eurofascists not only kept their totalitarian political aims under wraps, but outright denied that they had any intention of infringing national sovereignties. For more than 40 years, they swore up and down that their only objectives were economic, until the moment that their vast bureaucratic infrastructure appeared to be sufficiently emplaced to permit a naked grab for overt political rule.
But fittingly, since economics was the sword they used to conquer an unwitting Europe, economics is also the sword by which their dark visions of a Fourth Reich will die
NB: I note that I am no longer one of the very commentators anticipating the demise of the European Union:
The vision of a united Europe still has a powerful hold on the elites of Europe, who see the transfer of power from nation-states to an unelected bureaucracy as insurance against future wars and, if truth be told, a relief from democratic pressures. In addition, the prospect of a euro that would replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, or at least weaken its role in world trade, has a powerful hold on the French, who make no secret of their antipathy to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. The “European project” won’t go quietly into the night. But it just might go noisily into the ashcan of history if the Germans decide they cannot convert the Greeks into hard-working, tax-paying euro-citizens worthy of continuing handouts.
NB2: Holy cats, I didn’t notice this on the first read-through:
“Ireland’s debt now appears to be bigger, in relation to its economy, than the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War,” according to economist Anatole Kaletsky.
WND column
It is truly remarkable to witness the speed with which the mainstream and conservative media have revised their collective opinion about Obama’s birth certificate. The reader may recall that for most of the last three years, the media have been insisting that Obama released his genuine birth certificate when, in fact, all he had released was the short form “Certification of Live Birth.”
WND column
The fact of the existence of evil troubles many individuals, religious and irreligious alike. Numerous strategies have evolved for dealing with it, from denying it like the Buddhists, enduring it like the Stoics, combating it like the Christians or redefining it like the Marxists. But regardless of the method one chooses, there is observably something to which all of these people from the panoply of religious and philosophical creeds are responding.
WND column
The Christian concept of hell has proven to be a strangely difficult one to accept for a species that has developed the concepts of capitalism, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. And it is an odd world in which metal bands contemplate the theology of damnation in a more sophisticated and intelligent manner than religious ministers – one cannot reasonably call them Christian – of national standing.
NB: this is the TIME magazine article to which I refer in the column.
WND column
Imagine that you are in the back seat of a car being driven 70 miles per hour towards a cliff edge. Driving the car off the cliff will be fatal, but instead of stopping the car, turning it around, or even stepping on the brakes, the two people in the front of the car are arguing about who is responsible for how close to the cliff it is. Then imagine that after one of the passengers in the back seat begins shouting at the driver to stop the car, the two in the front argue some more, then finally agree to slow down to 68 miles per hour.
Do you feel any safer? Do you feel any more confident about the ability of the driver and his navigator to keep the car from crashing?
WND column
Over the 30 years that I have been observing American politics, one thing is perfectly clear. When Republicans stand firm on their purported principles, they win elections. And when Republicans abandon their principles in the name of moderation, or centrism, or pragmatism, or appealing to independents, they lose elections. This is because Americans respond more positively to political leadership than they do to followership. Chasing the polls is a short-sighted game for fools and renders elected office pointless since there is no rationale for holding office if one intends to accomplish nothing while holding it.
WND column
Failing to Expect the Unexpected
As John Maynard Keynes chronicles as a firsthand observer in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” the surrendering Germans had absolutely no idea what was in store for their defeated nation in 1918 when they wrote a letter to President Wilson accepting his Fourteen Points and the armistice proposed by the allies prior to a final peace treaty. But instead of reaching a reasonable agreement with the American president on the basis of the accepted proposal, the Germans found themselves being dictated impossible terms by the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, who was determined to prevent Germany from ever again being capable of challenging the economic and military might of France.
We all know how that turned out. Almost exactly 21 years later, Paris fell to the vengeful Germans.