Author: Thomas Fleming

6

Visit Sicily in January

  Dear Friends, Fellow Travelers, Subscribers, Casual Browsers: Mark your calendars for the second week in January 2019.  The Fleming Foundation is finalizing plans for our second voyage of exploration.  This time we are going to Sicily. Many of you are aware that since 2000, I have been taking small groups to Europe.  Although we have done programs in Scotland, France, and Serbia-Montenegro, we have concentrated mainly on the two homes of our civilization, Greece and Italy.  In 2019, we shall probably be going to the South of France, but I wanted to make what I hope will not be...

13

Sweatshops of the Mind: The Rise of Bureaucracy

Community control of schools run by dedicated teachers who looked after each child individually runs counter to the modern assumption that every human endeavor can be turned into a science.  Every real “science” requires a theoretical framework, hence the need in educationism for theories of cognitive development and child psychology.   Even the acts of learning and teaching must be analyzed, broken down into their components, tested, measured, and graphed with all sorts of coefficients and Greek letters that really mean very little more than up and down, more and less.   In the years when I was reading grant proposals...

3

The Wilsonian Empire

The empire of our good friend Clyde Wilson is spreading.  Not only does it encompass Shotwell Publishing but it now includes Reckonin, a Southern political website developed by his daughter, which just put up a revised and expanded version of  my off-the-cuff piece, “What is To Be Done?”

5

Crazy Town

In Fear, the latest spasm of gossip and fear-mongering by the infamous (among people of sense and decency) Bob Woodward, the gullible American public is given a portrait of the Trump White House as a cross between Bedlam and the palace of Caligula.  Trump supporters are outraged.  

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Take Five: The Scandalous Pope

Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences [that is, scandals, stumbling blocks] will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

4

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

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.