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Greetings from Ukraine, where I am growing increasingly enfeebled and have got to get out of this hellish eastern oblast. Not because of the aerial bombardment, but because of the surly Russian waiter denying me the apple juice he offers to all other breakfast customers and the pretty but charmless Kharkov girls pressing in on all sides and offering to show me the town in exchange for getting them approved for immigration to Canada. War is hell. But it is also, generally, very clarifying. I stood at my window and watched a drone pass leisurely across the skies from right...

Greetings from Ukraine, where, notwithstanding constant Russian bombardment through till morning, it's still safer than a Saturday night out in DC. Immediately following the excitement at the White House Correspondents Shoot-Out, the Director of the Secret Service, Sean Curran, stepped to the microphone and said: Tonight, we saw exactly what our brave men and women do each and every day. Yeah, you can say that again - and probably will, in late spring, early summer or so. Butler, Pennsylvania... West Palm Beach, Florida... Washington, DC... A famous line of Ian Fleming's seems more germane: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence....

...Wars are easy to start but rather harder to stop - and, as Washington should have learned in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, when they do eventually stop, it's not in any place that would have seemed remotely plausible back when you started. In Kabul, you hand the Taliban back more territory than they'd held twenty years earlier; in Baghdad, you invest a fortune in blood and treasure to create a highly functional client state of Iran; in Damascus, you buy a new suit for the al-Qaeda honcho's blood-soaked deputy you let talk his way out of Abu Ghraib, and then...

Greetings from Ukraine. I was supposed to spend last night in Budapest, but by early afternoon there was a palpable sense on the streets that something big was coming. So I figured I'd rather take my chances with Putin's incoming drones than hordes of Hungarian hotties high on their impending liberation from the Orbán terror. Because of some or other incident on my preferred TransCarpathian frontier post, I was obliged to detour via south-eastern Slovakia. Pleasant, if you're interested, and I encountered a nun in a full-length habit, which I don't think I've seen on a Montreal street in half-a-century....

...So just to be clear: I don't "fear" that it "might" end badly. Because, since VJ Day, what American war doesn't? The only difference this time is the potential scale of disaster. As I noted at the beginning of Wednesday's Clubland Q&A: Population of Syria in 2011: 22 million; Population of Libya in 2011: 6.3 million; Population of Iraq in 2003: 26.8 million; Population of Afghanistan in 2001: 20-25 million; Population of Vietnam in 1965: 37 million; Population of North Korea in 1950: 11 million. Oh, and, for those weary of that grim roll-call, let's throw in: Population of the...

~HEADLINES TO PONDER: Greece to Exhume 150 COVID-19 Graves After Bodies Fail to Decompose I think the plan is to raise an Army of the Undead to take Iran. ~WHAT'S DO-ABLE: Matt Walsh: "This is the status quo you're expected to accept: we can terminate the supreme leader of Iran despite all his security but we can't deport Somali fraudsters in Minneapolis... we can't do anything about the clear and obvious threats in this country right now." pic.twitter.com/A8oF1UWz0w — The American Conservative (@amconmag) March 4, 2026 There is always a risk in venturing abroad to slay dragons. As one observer...

Further to yesterday's column, a third American is dead at the hands of the "Austin man" from Senegal.Day Four began with President Trump's midnight post on Truth Social:The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better - As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons. Wars can be fought "forever," and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!)... The United States is stocked, and ready to WIN, BIG!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President...

~I was out of it for most of last week, due to a car accident and another heart attack within seconds of each other, both pretty serious. So I was hoping to emerge to a reasonably relaxed environment with plenty of time to get myself up to speed on what I've missed. Alas, the news cycle had other plans. One worries in such circumstances that one is projecting outward one's own intimations of mortality. As I have maintained for God knows how many sodding decades, in a certain sense the Iranian revolution is where our present era began, and not...

Increasingly, countries that were once U.S. allies are aligning themselves with America’s enemies. The signs were obvious two decades ago, and the insightful Mark Steyn—the conservative Canadian author—addressed them then. In numerous books, written in his sharp, convincing style, he warned that America would soon become isolated in its fight against Islamist jihad. Today, that loneliness appears to be fully realized. His 2006 book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, convincingly argued that much of the Western world would not survive the 21st century. Europe, with its declining birthrate, would be the first to go—thanks...

~I'm just emerging from a rather grisly week and was hoping to catch up leisurely with relatively inconsequential things such as the State of the Union, only to wake and find that we have a brand new war: OPERATION EPIC FURY 🇺🇸 — Department of War 🇺🇸 (@DeptofWar) February 28, 2026 I'm not sure, after the last quarter-century, that the over-butch monikers impress anyone anymore. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the next one were designated "Operation Somewhat Irked" or "Operation Mildly Peeved". Be that as it may, Lindsey Graham is already at the if-erection-lasts-for-over-six-hours-consult-your-doctor phase: God bless @POTUS for planning...

The Reverend Jesse Jackson died this week, prompting tributes from far and near: Former president Barack Obama said Jackson "laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land". So his principal contribution was as Obama's warm-up act? One begins to understand why the Rev was so eager to "cut his nuts off". So poor Jesse had to make do with being (as I used to call him back in the Nineties and Oughts) President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. The pansies of The Orange County Register refused to print that phrase, which is why I...

...the Beauty of Killing Fascists: This review was certainly planned differently, on the assumption that this would be a conventionally proceeding first night. But now one has to start with the ending. In the final scene, the 'fascist' has the floor - that is, the far-right politician who hasn't said a single word until now, just waited for his execution by a large group of committed anti-fascists, who have made such actions a recurring ritual for seventy years. So Tiago Rodrigues' play ends with a very long monologue in which the prisoner delivers the usual nonsense from JD Vance, AfD,...

~Welcome to the capital city of the European Union: JUST IN: Two Alabama women and their children were attacked on a train in Brussels, Belgium for being American The attacker reportedly approached them with a knife and asked if they were American, when they confirmed, he threatened to kiII them. pic.twitter.com/cD7Ybhxtsk The train is filled with both Flemings and Walloons, but, in a rare display of comity, both seem, objectively, to be on the side of the knifeperson. Perhaps the State Department could arrange for any American tourist in Europe to be issued with his own Vance-sized Milano motorcade. On...

They're just messing with us now. From the Epstein files: STATEMENT OF MANHATTAN U.S. ATTORNEY ON THE DEATH OF DEFENDANT JEFFREY EPSTEIN Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: "Earlier this morning, the Manhattan Correctional Center confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein, who faced charges brought by this Office of engaging in the sex trafficking of minors, had been found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Today's events are disturbing..." I'll say. For one thing, the statement is dated Friday August 9th 2019, and Mr Epstein was not "found unresponsive in his cell" until Saturday August 10th. Had the...

Fake Nobel Winner found "responsible" in $9M lie to DC jury. snip BREAKING: The Superior Court in DC just NUKED disgraced climate scientist Michael Mann AGAIN. Last year, Mann was sanctioned for "knowingly feeding the jury false data" in a manner of misconduct that was "extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent." Today, the court doubled... pic.twitter.com/fQff5YsM7V — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 22, 2026 Here are some highlights from today's decision (my emphasis in bold): The Court has considered Dr. Mann's request for reconsideration. For the reasons Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn articulated orally during in-court arguments and presented in...

In her autobiography A Lonely Life, Bette Davis remembers making All About Eve with none of the rancour or drama that should provide all the dirt an essayist would look for when writing about the film. Her part was supposed to go to someone else, but when Claudette Colbert injured her back while filming Three Came Home, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had producer Darryl F. Zanuck call Davis. "I can think of no project that from the outset was as rewarding from the first day to the last," she writes. "It is easy to understand why. It was a great...

The unravelling of the world continues: ~Er, so Arab nations no longer want their children studying at Oxford and Cambridge because England's too full of crazy Muslims... Absolutely insane headline https://t.co/mZRezpmau8 — JD Vance (@JDVance) January 9, 2026 ~Our friend Naomi Wolf - when she's right she's right: Okay, I'll just say it. I've seen enough videos of the faces of liberal white women in conflict with @ICE, to know what is up. Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing...

"If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his (Steyn's) thesis, I would also propose the following: 1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must...

As a new year begins, it is sobering to find that one has outlived national stereotypes that endured for generations. A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when I was just venturing out into the world, the universally acknowledged joke was some variant of:In Heaven the chefs are French, the lovers are Italian, the engineers are German, the police are British, and it's all run by the Swiss.In Hell the chefs are British, the lovers are Swiss, the engineers French, the police German and it's all run by the Italians.How we all laughed!Of course, times change. I was trying to work...

It was somewhat surprising, and a little dispiriting to me, the number of counter-arguments that - even at the website of a far-right madman - framed what is now an existential crisis for the entire west in sentimentalist and pseudo-mystical terms, if not explicitly left-wing ones - such as "nation of immigrants". As to the broader arguments about America as a "proposition nation", here is one response to Vivek Ramaswamy:Cernovich @Cernovich · Follow Everyone claiming America is a creedal nation should move to Liberia - a country with a Constitution broader and more protective of civil rights than our own....