My firstborn Nikolai is in Palermo this week to meet his new brother and, perspicaciously, has brought with him a liter of excellent French brandy to mark the occasion. “Your Christmas pudding, Father,” he said, handing over the ornate gold-topped bottle.
One of the things the Left likes to do is put up fake conservatives to tell real conservatives what to think and. This also serves the purpose of telling the Left what supposedly really is going on among conservatives.
A diverting article in the New York Post, of all places, made me look back on nearly half a century of Western handwringing and eyerolling at the mention of the homeland I had lost long before I was born.
The picture of President Biden presiding over his Summit for Democracy showed him sitting in front of a giant screen featuring 66 small pictures of the invitee heads of state.
There’s a lot of dust in the house, visitors from abroad have on occasion admonished us, don’t we ever vacuum? Now, with the newborn child on hand, I fear the criticisms will sound yet more insistent and the excuses ever more feeble. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and by the way when are you planning to get the baby vaccinated?
America is like an old business family in which the patriarch has gone senile, and the heirs are just plain stupid, competent only at blowing the inheritance. The enterprise is collapsing inexorably.
A university friend of mine, Peter Baldwin, whose book on the pandemic I mentioned here some months back, has just come out with another. The title is Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History. Were I a libertarian, it would always sit on my bedside table, next to a tome of Ayn Rand and a sepia print of the Unibomber in a silver frame.
Gilbert was himself, a man of no particular party. He was as suspicious of progressive levelers as he was contemptuous of the conservative defenders of entrenched interests.
I realize the above pun leaves much to be desired, but I was in an exceptionally jolly mood last week. I had come across a ridiculous article in The Atlantic which straightaway I knew would give my next post its subject and meaning, and the headline above it was “Vladimir Putin’s Waning Tolerance for Art.” Gosh, I thought, mentally addressing the author of the article, you say waning tolerance for art like it’s a bad thing.
Only a brave jury stood between Kyle Rittenhouse and Garland Injustice. I’ve written before on Fleming Foundation about AG Merrick Garland’s persecution of the Jan. 6 protesters, Steve Bannon and others.
