Author: Dennis

The Independent online has an interview with Roger Scruton (with a corny journalistic ending) that I find most interesting for Roger’s own assessment of the rift between the left and the right: “One of the great distinctions between the left and the right in the intellectual world,” says Scruton, who has held chairs in aesthetics…

James Doohan, who will forever be known as Scotty, has died: The publicist for James Doohan says the actor who played Scotty on “Star Trek” has died at his home in Redmond, Wash. He was 85. The cause of his death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease. In Doohan’s biography on the official Star Trek Web…

Someone has hit 25 posts here at Classical Values with comments seemingly advertising Google: i come from best search engine http://www.google.com I deleted one comment that was attached to a recent post of mine, and as I wondered why someone would flood a site with comments like these it hit me: could it be to…

Glenn Reynolds has more on the reluctance of the press to use the word terrorist, specifically the BBC which has infamously whitewashed its reporting on the recent terrorist bombings. Confused by my title? Read Glenn’s excerpt from the telegraph.

Why not ask instead, ‘why don’t the rest of them hate us?’ Anne Applebaum seeks out Pro-Americanism in Foreign Policy: Even the most damning evidence, such as the BBC poll quoted above, also reveals that some percentage of the population of even the most anti?American countries in Europe and Latin America remains pro?American. Some 38…

The following photo from weather.com does not, as some readers might hope, have anything to do with me: Still, I can’t say it didn’t feel a bit personal.

via ALDaily, Julian Baggini makes an urgent plea at BBC Radio 4 that David Hume be crowned the greatest philosopher of all time: The lessons he taught are desperately relevant today, when certainty is only found in religious fundamentalism, yet uncertainty risks a descent into postmodern relativism and intellectual anarchy. In this climate, how do…

After a night of drinking with an old friend I awaken to read something truly sobering: terrorism in the city of London. There really isn’t much a guy like me can say right now. I am puzzled by the refusal of several in the media to call anything terrorism any more. Even now many resort…

der Spiegel’s English site has a piece on aid for Africa which flies in the face of the ‘common sense’ approach, i.e., throw money, problem gone. The piece opens in Rumbek in the south of Sudan where the ‘aid workers are thirsty and the beer is flowing,’ a place which threatens to become a bitter…

Before I begin, happy Independence Day! We sure gave those Brits hell, didn’t we boys? Wouldn’t you know that just when Eric goes on vacation and we’re loosed from the task master’s shackles I have to drive to Michigan for a wedding, and spend the weeked in Indiana getting fattened up on good old-fashioned heartland…

If you’re like me you’re a huge fan of George A. Romero’s living dead series. Then again, you’re probably not. At a party the other night a friend remarked that watching Night of the Living Dead with my running commentary enhanced the experience, which isn’t normally the case when some know-it-all fanboy won’t stop yapping.…

My good friend E. over at the Dave has some tough words for Dick Durbin following the Senator’s claims of Nazism in the American military’s treatment of prisoners at Gitmo (centering largely around the use and subsequent non-use of air conditioners and the playing of rap music): somebody get me dick durbin on the phone.…

I’ve been pretty busy lately editing an old Greek textbook, plodding through some rather unrewarding research, and getting caught up on some reading I’ve put off too long. Of course, that’s all meant that I’ve neglected Classical Values. I’d first like to apologize to Eric, but second and most importantly to those few rabid commenters…

I was just playing around with Google Sets, which may actually have its uses, though what follows isn’t promising. Inspired by Chairman How’s confusion between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, I made the two evildoers ‘a set.’ The results were bewildering: The only conclusion is that the folks over at Google know intimate details…

I caught the last few minutes of Howard Dean with Tim Russert as I finished my breakfast. Did Howard Dean really just deflect a question about socialism by insinuating that Bush’s judicial nominees would work to repeal minority rights? This kind of rhetoric is unconscionable. I think he did. Here’s the transcript: MR. RUSSERT: In…

When I read this headline: Lake Disappears, Baffling Villagers I imagined loony conspiracy theorists on left-wing blogs blaming the US military. I can’t say I was shocked when I read the punchline: “I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us,” said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.…

That blonde Brillo pad (whom many swear by, but just rubs me the wrong way), Ann Coulter, has a little jingle reminiscent of one often bandied about in lefty circles, though this is far more clever: ‘NEWSWEEK DISSEMBLED, MUSLIMS DISMEMBERED! The rest of what she’s got to say is as incendiary as ever, but a…

The editors at the New Criterion have a good question for protest-minded environmentalists: But what we wish to know is, why are they so selective in their exhibition of outrage? A logging camp in Maine or the Pacific Northwest gets the full Green treatment: demonstrations, press conferences, sabotage. But what about a major university press…

In honor of the 2nd Blogiversary of Classical Values, Karl Rove sent me a copy of Irving Kristol’s NeoConservativism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Continued funding for the site is now contingent upon certain proofs of allegiance to the neocon cause, and as our actual posts fail to offer such proof, Karl has asked me…

I’ve just returned from a secret indoctrination session and am just a few short steps from Neo-Condom. Is that the right term? Hmm … I have been Neo-Condemned. No, that’s not it either. Perhaps I’ve joined the Neo-Conspiracy. Or so some of our readers would like to think. I did attend a talk on the…