Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen! That’s one of the most plaintive and poignant things I’ve ever read. Ironically enough, it’s also one of the most penetrating. In English it goes: “I’ve seen my death!” That’s what Anna Bertha Röntgen, wife of the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, reportedly said in 1895 after she saw an X-ray […]
Dying young. It turns performers into legends and politicians into footnotes. For proof of that, just compare James Dean (1931-55) with John Smith (1938-94). Seventy-one years after he died in a car-crash, the actor James Dean is still famous, still at the heart of a devoted cult. Thirty-two years after he died of a heart-attack, […]
Truthless Tongue: The Lie-Loving Language of Leftism I’m bilingual in English and English. That is, I’m bilingual in standard English and leftist English — I’ll call the latter Lynglish to blend the concepts of “leftist English” and “lying.” Standard English and Lynglish look the same but often mean very different or even entirely opposite things. […]
Politicians lie. That’s a toxic truth of life across the world and through history. But the British politicians Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi will never lie on one very important matter. They’ll say that their proud patriotism and devotion to popular service will not alter one iota after their defections from the Conservatives to the […]
Dystopian novel? No! Instruction manual? Yes! Those two questions are about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The two answers are from the kind of people Orwell was satirizing in the novel. Britain presently has a government full of people like that. It’s the Labour government of the gray grasper Keir Starmer, the Black buffoon David […]
Varsk’vlavi. That’s a strange word from a strange language. At least, it’s a strange word if your mother-tongue is English and not Georgian, the mother-tongue of Joseph Stalin. As a boy, Stalin himself would have found the word right at the beginning of the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew: 2:9 და აჰა, ვარსკვლავი, […]
Australia and Britain are on opposite sides of the globe. But mind annihilates distance and the mind of a leading Irish ethicist has recently pondered events in these two widely separated countries. Yes, the Trotskyist libertarian Brendan O’Neill has raised two very interesting questions about two pairs of energetic Muslims, one pair in Australia, the […]
