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When seconds count, the police are minutes away. When days count, the government is weeks away: Health Canada is expected to approve the use of the rapid test kits within a few weeks. You have to admire the bureaucratic jobsworth who can type that line with a straight face. Just because the test is rapid is no reason for Health Canada to be so. It's like a fast-food joint with a month-long tailback at the drive-thru window. ~Sample headlines from my old friends at The Spectator: Is France Being Pushed to Breaking Point? Spain Faces a Political Reckoning After Its...

Well, I've resisted the obvious for the last two or three weeks, mainly because, as with "Kung Flu Fighting", I had some previous history with it. In the case of "Kung Fu Fighting", I've been using it as a somewhat improbable free-speech anthem for a decade or so; in the case of this song, I managed to turn it into the sub-title to a bestseller on demographic doom: It's The End Of The World As We Know It It's The End Of The World As We Know It It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I...

After years of guest-hosting for Rush and Tucker, this weekend I'm guest-hosting for Kathy Shaidle. Our Saturday movie columnist is taking a night off and yours truly has been pressed into service. To be honest, I'm not sure I'm up for it. Yesterday Governor Chris Sununu (whom I saw down in Bedford for "Fox & Friends" only a few weeks ago) ordered the whole of New Hampshire to shelter in place - and after thirty-six hours or so I'm already stir-crazy. Social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine, house arrest, it's quarter to three, there's no one in the place but ...me. So...

The banner at right flutters over a franchise of the Chinese restaurant chain Mama Yang. If you don't speak ChiCom Wuhu, it reads: Huge congratulations to the American epidemic and long live the epidemic in little Japan As Tucker Carlson likes to say, China is the most racist country on earth. But it's even more racist to point that out, according to the decadent halfwits of the American media. Their position - on an increasing range of subjects - is to throttle free speech ever tighter, to demand that every story be discussed within an ever narrower range of leftie...

Mark is feeling a little under the weather today, so in lieu of a brand new Song of the Week we thought we'd re-publish his thoughts on a boffo global hit of the Sixties. This essay first appeared a little over two years ago to mark the passing of Mel Tillis. We reprise it now to mark the passing of Kenny Rogers. This story starts with Mel and ends with Kenny, the man who gave Mel's song its most perfect expression: The Vietnam War cast, as they say, long shadows. It left, as they also say, deep scars in the...

As a new week begins, some Chinese virus notes: ~What can disease-riddled New York learn from Italy? Well, à propos the photo at right, how about hotter curfew enforcers? Jill Filipovic tweets: I think I speak for all New Yorkers when I say, Spain, hi, can you deploy some of that in our direction? We will comply with your orders. No disrespect, but I'm not sure figure-hugging plunging-cleavage uniforms would work with the one-man small-town police departments of my neck of the woods. ~There are now over 350,000 Politburo Pandemic cases in some 170 out of 200 countries. A week...

Fifty years ago, the dawn of the Seventies, the sound of spring on the British Hit Parade: There was rock (Canned Heat, "Let's Work Together"), soft rock (Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"), folk-rock (Judy Collins, "Both Sides Now"), pop (Steam, "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"), session-group pop (Edison Lighthouse, "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes"), Motown (Jackson Five, "I Want You Back"), country (Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell, "All I Have to Do Is Dream"), all to one degree or another the soundtrack of the era. But the Number One bestselling record exactly half a century...

When you're weary Feeling small When tears are in your eyes I will dry them all... When you're weary of songs that feel small, it's nice to have a song that feels big - seems to be about something more than just boy-meets-girl, goes on twice as long as your run-of-the-mill pop record, has a sense of its own importance but not to the point of self-parody ("Bohemian Rhapsody"). For a long time "Bridge Over Troubled Water" fulfilled that role. In 1973, when Capital Radio became the first ever (legal) commercial music-format radio station in the United Kingdom, Richard Attenborough...

Tonight is Oscar Night in Hollywood, which I find all but unwatchable these days. It is our custom to have an Academy Award-winning Best Song on this night, but, for the first time, I'm beginning to wonder if we've exhausted the possibilities. Fifty years ago, the Oscar went to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", but we did that just the other day. Seventy-five years ago, it was "Swingin' on a Star", but we've done that, too. Seventy and eighty years ago, the winners were, respectively, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and "Over the Rainbow", but we've done both of them....

Some great men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have great catchphrases said to them. James Doohan is an honorary member of that last category. He was the guy who spent four decades on the receiving end of the request to "Beam me up, Scotty" – if not on TV, where no character on Star Trek ever actually uttered the words, at least in real life, where fans would cheerfully bark the injunction across crowded airport concourses in distant lands, and rush-hour freeway drivers would lurch across four lanes of traffic to yell it out the window at...

Five years ago, Valentine's Day was marked in Denmark by murder - not a lot of murder by the standards of similar events before and after, but this one struck close to home: It would be the last time my old comrade Lars Vilks appeared in public. My closing remarks below on the shriveling perimeters of free speech and the popular support it requires have proven sadly true in the half-decade since. Here is some of what I had to say about the events of February 14th 2015: Today, Valentine's Day, a café in Copenhagen hosted a discussion on "Art,...

If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Friday afternoon, here's the action replay. Simply click above and settle back for an hour-plus of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet. This latest edition began with a Friday-night droning and ended on a musical note with Matt Monro and "Rule, Britannia!" - not the former singing the latter, alas. In between came a variety of topics from impeachment and Iowa and the State of the Union to Boris and Greta and climate change via Wodehouse and Waugh and woeful stand-up. You don't have to be...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Mark Steyn. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Mark Steyn, America's Undocumented Anchorman, is Rush Limbaugh's primary guest host. He is best known for his humorous quips behind an unrelenting defense of the Constitution.Welcome back, Rush! All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the...

Author and columnist Mark Steyn told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Thursday that the ironic fact lost in the firestorm surrounding Sen. Mitt Romney's vote to convict President Trump of abuse of power this week is that Romney is the reason Trump is in the White House. Steyn told host Tucker Carlson that Romney never "punched back" when attacked by the media or Democrats during his failed 2012 bid for the presidency. When voters took note of that habit, they wanted a candidate who would do the exact opposite and not bow to the opposition when attacked. Those voters, Steyn said, gravitated...

This week began with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and ends with the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. These two events are not unconnected, for per yours truly on page 105 of America Alone the EU is "a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem". They shouldn't really be quite so entwined, but as I said to Laura Rosen Cohen on the seventieth anniversary: I think they drew the wrong conclusion from 'Never Again'. The Jews were sort of peripheral to the meaning of that. I think what 'Never Again' means to a Continental...

Happy Australia Day to our readers Down Under. The future shows up so fast in Oz that it's already Post-Australia Day in Australia, but the national holiday takes longer to work its way around to my neck of the woods, and the great merit of our tardy overseas jubilations is that they don't seem to be afflicted by the paroxysms of self-loathing, virtue-signaling and guilt-tripping with which the Aussie media now observe the occasion (which may be why my old chum Julie Bishop is celebrating the day from the safe distance of Earl's Court). Anyway, this is the first Australia...

As I wrote in The Spectator way back on February 13th 1999: At the time of writing, I do not know the verdict of the impeachment trial. But undoubtedly, by the time you read this, William Jefferson Clinton will have been convicted and removed by, oh, at least 83 out of 100 Senators. Okay, maybe not. So instead, in this brief interlude between the end of the President's first impeachment trial and the start of his second - over the so-called 'Jane Doe #5', the contract killing of Kathleen Willey's cat, or whatever else comes along - let me make...

Readers ask for my view of the impeachment trial. I had a very good view of the last impeachment trial - from a largely empty Senate press gallery, the US media collectively agreeing from about Day Three or Four that the whole thing was a crashing bore, notwithstanding the oral sex and cigars and "distinguishing characteristics". Not like a phone call to Kiev, is it? Nevertheless, this time I'm the one disinclined to follow along. The left, being not terribly imaginative, always accuse you of what they're doing themselves. So, in this case, President Trump is charged with interfering with...

On the radio this past week, I mentioned Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady, Camelot, Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, etc. And about twenty minutes after I came off-air I remembered a conversation I had with him decades back. The Pope was on tour somewhere (my estimate from the time period would be eastern Canada): he'd landed at the airport to be greeted by a shy moppet bearing a garland of flowers, and he'd kissed her head. And Alan showed me the headline above the picture in the newspaper: Thank Heaven for Little...

If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Friday afternoon, here's the action replay. Simply click above and settle back for an hour-plus of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet. This latest edition began with impeachment and ended with a consideration of whether "social media" is reconfiguring humanity. In between came a variety of topics from Roger Scruton on dancing to the latest English town's evil cover-up of industrial-scale paedo gang-rape to the Australian horn player whose wife married the 46th in line to the throne. You don't have to be a Mark Steyn...