People invent new words to describe new phenomena. Take “quack” as an example. In my schoolboy ignorance I used to think that “quack” was an amusing slang noun derived from the word describing the noise a duck makes. Not at all. It is an earlier seventeenth-century abbreviation of an entirely serious sixteenth-century Dutch word meaning “a pedlar of false cures,” that came into English as “quacksalver.”
St. Robert Southwell (1561–95) was born to a well-to-do Norfolk family. At fourteen he was sent out of England to receive a Catholic education at the new English school founded by William Allen at Douai in Flanders. He soon made his way to Rome, where he became a Jesuit and a teacher at the English College. In 1586 his superiors sent him to back to England, where a new statute made it treason to be a priest. Waiting to take ship, he wrote that he was “on the threshold of death.” He survived for six years before he was captured, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, tried, convicted for being a priest “against the statute,” and executed the next day, 21 February 1595. The Church canonized him in 1970.
People whose memories go back more than a few weeks will remember that when Donald Trump inserted himself into the competition for the Republican nomination in 2015, and began immediately to dominate the debates, there was consternation among all those people who had become accustomed to things never changing. When his supporters began to greet the name Clinton with chants of “Lock her up!” and he began to talk about draining the Washington swamps, consternation turned to panic. As we now know, his political opponents, both Democrats and Republicans, joined forces with rogue elements in the huge spy establishment, hoping...
When over a year ago now I wrote on: “A Nest of Swamp Rats,” I treated the leading actors in the pursuit of the Democrats’ Russian hoax as exemplars of institutional or bureaucratic mediocrity, of opportunism, arrogance, and stupidity. Apart from a mention of John Brennan’s youthful Communism, I credited none of them with anything as risky as thinking.
At Mount Holyoke, the affirmative action committee sent to all departments an article by one of their professors of philosophy, arguing that preference on grounds of race and sex was proper, whereas no sound case in logic could be made for preference on grounds of ability.
Foreword. Back in the 1980s, having had the fascinating experience of sitting on a financial-aid committee, I learned—to my surprise—that colleges no longer awarded endowed scholarships to exceptionally clever applicants; that instead they were offering something called “financial aid packages” to everyone, thus making it obvious to an inquiring mind that intellectual ability had little to do with college admissions. I also discovered that colleges operated in packs or cartels to fix their prices and restrict competition. The piece that follows was the result of my appalled fascination, and since I seem to have anticipated both the dereliction of academic standards...
Two unrelated events have connected themselves in my mind this week. My first story concerns a piece I read a couple of months ago about a priest in the diocese of Fall River, MA. He had begun his career as a seminarian at St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, MA, in the early 1990s. In his first-year there, the academic dean, one Fr. John Farrell, not only described one of his homosexual adventures to the whole first-year class, but “inappropriately touched” our student twice or, as we would say in the language of the law, assaulted him. He was not the only...
In the past twelve months the national news has introduced us all to some remarkably loathsome people wielding considerable power from very high places. How does this come about? A complete list of these creatures would be long and unwieldy, but a short list, on the lines of the FBI’s Most Wanted, and treated as character studies, allows us to reach some conclusions, the most important one being that we are dealing here with is entrenched mediocrity—intellectual, moral, and spiritual. John Brennan, former head of the CIA under Obama, is an Irishman, born in New Jersey, 1955, whose...
Another coincidental event accompanying the invention of Kraft Cheese and the Hollywood film industry was Woodrow Wilson’s signing of the Federal Reserve act, which inaugurated the evacuation of value from the dollar. Compared to the gold-backed, pre-Federal Reserve dollar, today’s dollar is worth about 3 cents, another example of capitalism’s mass-production of imitation goods.
If it comes to that, what is a woman? Mention of “Gender liquidity” brings to mind a recent article in The New York Post about Mount Holyoke College. It is the oldest women’s college in the country, perhaps in the world, having been founded by Mary Lyon in 1837, and it admits only women. Or does it?
