Author: Thomas Fleming

1

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 Dec, 2015

Making War on the War on the War Against Christmas

By

Everyone these days seems to have some complaint against the Christmas holiday.  You’ve heard them all by now, Muslims and Jews whining about “inclusiveness,” downtown storeowners complaining about the chainstores in the malls, and chainstores complaining about Amazon.   Small wonder people are so depressed this time of year.  Not only is the sun disappearing—and who knows if the global warmingists will ever let it return?—but everyone and his Buddhist brother has some ax to grind. The late Herbert W. Armstrong of the Worldwide Whacky Church of G-d Knows What used to do an annual radio broadcast denouncing Christmas.  Crazy...

1

Feature / Fleming

17 Dec, 2015

Annals of Trebizond IV, Facts and Fictions

By

The long reign of Alexios III  (1349-90) marks the beginning of the end of the Empire of Trebizond.   Alexios, as the result of a palace coup,  came to the throne as a boy of 11, and his youth and inexperience were an invitation to challenges of every sort:  warlords in the provinces, his own counselors and bureaucrats, and even from within the church.  The Trapezuntine elite was dominated by factions loyal either to Constantinople or to the more locally centered provincial aristocracy.  The feud between the Genoese and Venetians broke out again, when the latter were once again granted...

0

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

15 Dec, 2015

Climate Change: A Frank Conversation, Part One

By

The recent global summit on climate change—inevitably described as “historic”—was discussed and analyzed all over the media-sphere, by bloggers read only by their mothers and friends (if they have any) and  by the the most swollen talking heads on television.  Everyone was interviewed, profiled, and analyzed.  One important participant—an observer really—who escaped their attention was an obscure Italian political analyst, whose work has been studied without understanding for many years.  I had a chance to sit down with this great skeptic, and interview him on condition of anonymity.  Let’s just call him Nick O.  Before the conversation was over, we were...

2

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

11 Dec, 2015

Aliens and Seditious Acts

By

Donald Trump, as heavy-footed and inarticulate as he is, has shows himself time after time to be a man of superb political instincts.  Cut off, for most of his life, from contact with ordinary Americans, he manages, nonetheless, to display old-fashioned common sense in statements guaranteed both to delight what is fast becoming the Silent Minority and to outrage the cowards, liars, and flunkeys who dominate politics and the press. Donald’s latest stunt—and we can only hope that it is not just a stunt—is to call for a moratorium on Islamic immigration into the United States.  Of course, most sensible...

0

Feature / FF

10 Dec, 2015

Cicero, De Officiis, A ON THE HOUSE

By

As a Roman moralist, Cicero is seen at his best in the three books of his De Officiis, a work that Dr. Johnson said ought to be read once a year.  Officia are not public offices but duties, the responsibilities it is incumbent upon us to carry out.  Cicero  draw his primary inspiration from Plato and his followers in the Middle Academy, a phase of Platonism that emphasized epistemological skepticism.  However, he was  also very eclectic and fair-minded, seeking useful truths wherever he could find them–especially from Aristotle but also from the Stoics whose extremism he objected to.  For all his...

1

Feature / FF15Dec / Fleming

7 Dec, 2015

How to Combat Islamic Terrorists?  Quit Sponsoring Them!

By

I did not watch, hear, or read President Obama’s brilliant address offering a range of eminently practical solutions to the terrorist threat.   Why bother?  Like most of his recent predecessors, this President would not tell the truth if it were tattooed onto his brain, and if he did accidentally blurt out some particle of reality, the state media would  immediately cover up his gaffe.     The security of the United States and of its citizens is menaced by Muslims, but neither the President nor the media is willing even to state thate fact.  Without reading the speech, I...

0

Feature / Fleming

5 Dec, 2015

The Genius of Burke–and His Limitations ON THE HOUSE

By

This is a slightly modified version of a piece originally published in The Spectator under the  title “Tories Back Wrong Philosopher.”  It is being made available “On the House” for five days. TWO hundred years ago, the career of Edmund Burke was drawing to a close under a cloud of accusations. The Duke of Bedford and his friends had denounced the one-time budget-cutting reformer and enemy of the royal prerogative for accepting a pension from the Crown. In his ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, published in February 1796, Burke rebutted the charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy. It was Burke’s last stand,...

13

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

3 Dec, 2015

San Bernardino: The American Nightmare

By

As Americans went to bed on December 2, they knew little of what happened in San Bernardino, where mysterious “white” assailants murdered 14 people  at a “social services center.”   Like most people, probably, we were otherwise occupied. We were watching an old episode of Comissario Montalbano.  Even this morning on NPR, which featured an interview with two “experts” on mass shootings, I  only accidentally learned that one of the shooters had a Pakistani Muslim name. Checking out the stories in the Washington Post, LA Times, and New York Times, I was able to glean only a few facts:  a...

0

Best Revenge / Fleming

2 Dec, 2015

Greece IV: On the Gulf

By

Greece IV We had brief interchange, four hours into the trip.  We stopped for lunch at Menidi on the Ambracian Gulf.   We were not expecting much from Menidi.  The morning had been spent on the endless drive along the superhighway, every mile under repair, from Athens to Corinth and then along the northern coast of the Peloponnesus.  It is true that the road got worse and the landscape better, after  we crossed the bridge across the Gulf of Corinth at Rhio. I thought about stopping at Missolonghi,   where Byron had died in 1824, raising money for Greek independence...