Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming

30 Aug, 2018

Sweatshops of the Mind, Part II: The Schooling We Have Lost

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During the 1990’s, in Rockford, Illinois, an appointed federal magistrate usurped the authority to  decide what schools should be opened or closed or built, how much tax money should be spent on which programs in which schools, and how many white children could be admitted to the gifted programs.  I was among those who condemned the magistrate’s power-grab as both unconstitutional and immoral, and, although the local powers-that-be–including the newspaper and big business interests–condemned the magistrate’s critics as racists, a federal judge ruled in our favor.  

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Feature / Fleming

28 Aug, 2018

Sweatshops of the Mind: The American School Bureaucracy, Part I

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The most significant conclusions of the National Education Goals Panel was the familiar complaint: Further study is needed.  More data needs to be collected in every area… and most of the panel members agreed that the main emphasis in the ongoing crusade to improve our schools should be on assembling data and devising new instruments for testing and measuring progress.  This has been the burden of that same old song that was sung before John Dewey had ever corrupted the first mind of a student.

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Feature / Fleming

23 Aug, 2018

What Is To Be Done?

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The flaws in such [conservative] strategies are pretty obvious.  Most obvious is that they are rooted only in nostalgia or folklore, not in the realities of power or the realities of human nature.  This leads to the second flaw:  They simply don’t work.  They never have, they never will.

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Fleming / Free Content

22 Aug, 2018

The New God of AltRight

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Why would a kid attracted to AltRight fall for Jim Morrison, Freud, and Nietzsche?  Why wouldn’t he?  Morrison is simply a latter-day Peter Pan on acid, the perfect model for displaced white kids who don’t know who or what they are

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Feature / Fleming

16 Aug, 2018

Death of a “Diva”

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Morgana King died in March.  Born in the province of Catania (Sicily), she moved to New York with her family at an early age and, with a clear if wispy voice, she enjoyed a fine career as a singer of popular music with a strong jazz orientation.  Her recording of the Kern/Wodehouse standard “Bill” is a classic performance.  Those who do not have an ear for popular music may recall her as Mamma Corleone. Since “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum,” should be the rule for normal human beings (which excludes politicians, journalists, and academics), I’ll say nothing about the late...

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Free Content

13 Aug, 2018

The Wall at the World’s End

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Donald Trump has still not been able to build his wall to keep America safe from Central American kitchen workers who got to the bathroom and don’t wash their hands before returning to work.  But if neighboring aliens are still pouring in to the USSA, news has come of a formidable deterrent to the other kind of alien–things from outer space. The New Horizons spacecraft, cruising somewhere in the neighborhood of Pluto, has detected what could be a hydrogen wall.  Score a big one for Donald! We all know how fond the Democrats are of aliens, but not everyone is...

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Free Content

11 Aug, 2018

Herodotus Book I, concluded

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Herodotus devoted much of the first book to the Persians, their conquest of Lydia, and their subjugation of the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the offshore islands.  He spends a great deal of time on the Ionian Revolt, provoked by Persian expansion, because it is both the predecessor and a major cause of the first Persian War with the mainland Greek cities.  The early Greeks, who were not unified either in dialect or ethnicity, were divided into distinct ethnic and dialect groups:  The Ionians, who were predominant in Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, the great island...