Category: Access

2

Will Joe Biden Even Make It?

By

This was an amazing statement by Kamala Harris: “A Harris administration, together with Joe Biden as the president of the United States – a Biden-Harris administration – will have access – provide access—to $100 billion in low-interest loans and investments for minority business owners.”

9

Wednesday’s Child: Of Clubs and Cudgels

In Les Visiteurs, one of my favorite movies of all time – I once showed it to Dr. Fleming, who said, after an astonished pause, that “this is the most reactionary film I’ve ever seen” – there is a moment when the hero, a medieval knight who has stumbled into the twentieth century, is being shown the Larousse encyclopedia entry on his illustrious family. “Who is this?” he asks about a descendant of his who lived in the eighteenth century. “Oh, he was a famous revolutionary.” And what does that mean, the knight persists. “He wanted to kill the king.”...

8

Poem: Pletho on Prayer

Pletho had concealed his growing attachment to what he thought was the old religion of the Greeks, though it was in fact NeoPlatonic Neopaganism, but some part of his explicitly pagan work The Laws came to the attention of his more Orthodox friends. However the last fragment of the Roman Empire had more on its hands in the 1450’s than a brilliant pagan

5

Wednesday’s Child: Hell and a Purgatory

September must be allegory month, and fittingly one of the films now the talk of the Venice Film Festival is an offering from the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky entitled “Dear Comrades.”  Its subject is the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov-on-Don, in 1962, and in fairness it ought to be said that a 2012 TV miniseries, entitled “Once Upon a Time in Rostov,” had done that subject ample justice, notwithstanding that it was made in the first year of what will enter history books as Putin’s Terror.  But Konchalovsky regards himself as an artist, and hence...

7

Trump Unleashed

I’m sure you’re heard the totally fake news about Trump supposedly insulting American troops, calling them “losers” and “suckers” Scott Adams totally refutes them on many points on his Friday podcast, starting at 27:00, calling it the “Losers and Suckers Hoax.” But he also notes this hoax will be devastatingly effective against Trump, as were the previous Fine People Hoax and the Russia Collusion Hoax. But I think this latest massive lie will unleash Trump to improvise a total war on Biden and the Democrats. Campaigns can be rough, such as LBJ’s 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad, implying Republican Barry Goldwater,...

1

The Nightmare Convention

I’ve watched at least some of every major party national convention since 1964, when I was nine. There’s something different about the Democratic National Convention this year. The speakers boldly laid out how they are going to impose tyranny on America. Don’t miss the key part of the festivities on Day Three, from about 18:00 to 28:00 on the video. It’s an unrelenting attack on gun rights, unalleviated by even a mention of the Second Amendment, or how owning hunting rifles would not be banned, the lines Bill Clinton and others long used. They want our guns – all of...

4

An Unreconstructed Summer Symposium

It was the Summer of 2008 when I first made my way up to Rockford, Illinois.  It was a slow, languorous summer drive, with plenty of preparatory reading to do, some often crammed in during the final segment of the voyage.  In many ways, this year was no different.  In other ways, the long tentacles of Covid-19 (and its handlers) couldn’t help but be felt by the attendees.  But perhaps the miracle is that we were able to meet at all, while most of the world huddled inside or behind masks, frightened by the government, media, and the new bands...