Category: Access

I hate to sound like the sort of monomaniacal bore at a cocktail party who will only talk to you about the regrettable slump in hedgehog hospital funding, but really, this is important.  The other week, in a post entitled “Anti-Homestead Acts,” I touched on the news that the ogres in the Kremlin are using tax law to alienate an already starving populace from the tiny kitchen garden plots of land on which the subsistence of millions of Russians, particularly the elderly, had been depending since the 1990’s.  Now, as if such a thing were possible, there comes yet more...

A hundred years from now historians will doubtless scratch their heads over the news that the West’s only audible rebuttal to Moscow’s mendacity in Osaka has come from a notorious invert.  Sir Elton John has found Vladimir Putin’s argument against Western “liberalism” unconvincing, because to him the word means, above all, open practice of homosexuality. Most other people, however – those, as it were, without an axe to grind – cheered the father of Slavic nations from Oslo to Timbuktu, which was understandable in that it was them, rather than Sir Elton and his niche audience of degenerates, that his...

We are just over midsummer’s day and now well into what British journalists, before they dumbed down, used to call the silly season.  So I am nostalgically drawn to make a lighthearted offering of a post, one wherein I essentially propose to the gentle reader a fun yet civilized way to dispose of a lazy afternoon.  Odd being proposed that by a curmudgeon, but there you are. In 1930 a Neapolitan by the name of Rodolfo Falvo wrote the music to the words of another Neapolitan, Enzo Fusco, and the indubitably Neapolitan song that came of the collaboration is called...

The rationale behind “collectivization,” which the great liar is known to have admitted in a private conversation with the British ambassador to Moscow as having caused ten million deaths, was simple.  Stalin wanted every man in his country to be dependent on the state, and a man with even a kerchief-sized plot of land is independent of the state insofar as he can keep himself and his family alive by growing potatoes and cabbages on it