Monthly Archive: March 2017

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

Persons unfamiliar with Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, ought to bear in mind that, socially, cocaine may well be a less problematic alternative. Certainly the book is more addictive, but the real trouble is that it makes one eschew all human contact for the duration.  I remember sinking into it some ten years ago.  For three weeks I did not open the shutters or answer the telephone, waking up every morning with the same terrifying thought that one day it would end. Spanning roughly half of the twentieth century, Powell’s novel revolves...

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The Shaming of Shame, Part A by Jack Trotter

Warning:  This in a brilliant and original essay on a difficult and unpleasant subject that goes to the evil and perverse heart of contemporary feminism.  Of necessity it includes precise  references to the female anatomy, questions of hygiene, as well as obscene quotations from feminist writers.    It is not recommended for children or adolescents or for any reader who visits this website in order to escape from, not wallow in, the muck of the world around us.   When I first became an editor, I should never have dreamed of publishing such a piece, but as times change, and...

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Women of the World Unite:  You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Freedom and Dignity.

“Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone” Reading those lines from “the Garden,” an incautious reader might imagine that the poet—Andrew Marvell—did not limit his Puritan tendencies to theology and politics but hated womankind with the fury of a John Knox.  In fact, Marvell was a woman-loving man who wrote several of the best erotic (I don’t mean dirty!) poems in English.  God bless him: He was only a hypocrite. Marvell’s lines came to mind when I read news of the feminist plans to mark today’s international celebration of women by refusing to go to work.  At first...

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Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (7)

Was that biography ever going to work?  I honestly don’t know.  Even if I had been writing the book not in a foreign tongue but in my own, and not for foreign readers but for those familiar with my subject since childhood, even then, insofar as it ran contrary to the Pasternak myth, an explanation of feeling might run into outraged silence.  The explanation I actually attempted, in these strange circumstances, was still more improbable. To focus on a single episode of Russian culture, its most blinding moment, and to develop it against the fuzzy background of certain historical events...

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Trump Should Fire All Generals, Admirals and the Equivalent Civilian Intelligence Agency Officers

Here’s what President Trump should do to deal with the Deep State that, with the connivance of ex-President Obama, is attacking the new presidency: Trump should ask for letters of resignation the top military officers and intelligence officials, then accept all the resignations. And the ex-officers and officials should be banned for life from getting jobs anywhere in the military-industrial complex, or in anything even close to the military. Let them take their plush pensions and leave us alone. Would some worthy officers get thrown in with the bad ones? Yes, but no government job should be a sinecure. Fired...

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Reconstituting the Supreme Court

As I noted in my recent article here, “The Supreme Court: The Most Dangerous Branch,” the third branch of government has aggrandized central power beyond that even imagined by the most fevered early Hamiltonians. The country will be revisiting the court’s history and makeup as Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the open space, begins confirmation hearings on March 20. Now is a great time to ask the question: Would there be a better way to structure the court, assuming the rest of the Constitution remained intact? I submit the following reform. The idea is to restore to the several...

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Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (6)

In short, in the professional view of a gossip columnist on an evening paper, it was bizarre that the tug of war over Second Nature – a difficult book by an obscure author brought out by a small publisher – should attract public notice.  And the truth is, it was those who so improbably saw the obscure author crying out de profundis as a threat to themselves and their own departmental peace of mind who made the ensuing imbroglio what it was.  Thus, in the Observer, ancient Anthony Burgess had been given half a page to deal with four centenary...