Category: Access

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

28 Jan, 2019

Jerry Brown’s Eve of Destruction

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Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say? And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today? If the button is pushed, there’s no running away, There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave, Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy, And you tell me over and over and over again my friend, Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.  – Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction It’s too bad Jerry Brown didn’t come out with a guitar and belt out that old anti-war protest song from 1965. After...

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Free Content

25 Jan, 2019

Poem of the Week: A Sonnet of Keats

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Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

23 Jan, 2019

Wednesday’s Child: The Quick and the Dead

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If reading the Gospels has taught me anything, it’s that there is no recipe – no algorithm, a scientifically minded person might say – for the salvation of the soul.  Although Christ said many times that He had come to uphold the law, no one can ponder the events described by the evangelists without seeing that He, not the law, is the Savior.  This is why the Gospels are populated with every form of lowlife, from prostitutes to thieves, and why the virtuous and the strong are so often depicted there in moments of abject weakness.  What we most remember...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

18 Jan, 2019

Wednesday’s Child: More Garbage

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Perhaps the gentle reader remembers the oath I swore a few months back, when, like the ghost of Banquo that passes among the revelers to haunt Macbeth, containers for differentiated trash collection appeared to me on the terrace of a seaside restaurant.  Basically I said that sooner will Birnam Wood come up to Dunsinane than the abomination arrives in Palermo, but that if it does, I shall move to Morocco or Tunis forthwith.  Autumn turned to winter, and suddenly it seemed like no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the huge steel garbage disposal containers all over...

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Free Content

11 Jan, 2019

McGrath and Fleming, Part II

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Tom, I, too, am stunned by the decline of literacy among the literate classes, which is far more disappointing to me than the general decline.  Kids growing up today don’t have the people in the profession–whether the media, academe, or writers–we had to learn from.  After a discussion about writing essays and grammar in one of my classes back in the 90s a couple of older students came up to me.  They were both women who had come back to school to earn teaching credentials and master’s degrees after rearing families.  They had grown up when English was properly taught...

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Andrei Navrozov / Free Content / Wednesday's Child

10 Jan, 2019

Wednesday’s Child: Capram et circenses

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For Christmas dinner we had ordered a roast baby goat, and consequently the teenage daughter of one of our invited guests regretted on the grounds that she is “a Vegan.”  When the animal, just shy of sixteen pounds in weight, arrived from the local fornaio, resplendent in a cloud of rosemary and a jubilation of potatoes, I must confess I felt a trifle abashed at the spectacle and glad that the girl would not be coming.  The serving platter took up the entire dinner table, with cutlery, plates and wine glasses huddling around its edges like poor relations, and the...

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Free Content

8 Jan, 2019

A Dialogue on the Decay of English, by Roger McGrath and Thomas Fleming

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I received this message from Prof. McGrath in response to my columns on learning foreign languages. Tom: For what it’s worth, I took French in high school and Latin in college.  I think Latin teaches one a surprising amount about the English language or perhaps reminds one of all those things that we were supposed to learn in the 7th and 8th grade–when English teachers emphasized parts of speech, diagramming sentences, tense, mood, et al. During my years playing professor I noticed a slow but steady decline in the writing skills of the average student.  By my final days of teaching...

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Free Content

8 Jan, 2019

Should Students Read T.S. Eliot?

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Dear Autodidact: Question for you. T. S Eliot is one of my favorite poets. ( I have read and re-read many of his poems) Most friends of mine aren’t as enthusiastic about him. I’ve often heard people say that he “killed poetry” with his “Modernist” style. This is also the view of a number of conservative professors I know (none is  a literary scholar, though) Do you think there’s any truth to this claim? I tend to read poetry for its meaning, not its style (so Eliot’s style doesn’t bother me much) A Catholic College Student Dear Catholic College Student,...

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Fleming / Free Content

7 Jan, 2019

Direct Election: A Grave Threat to Republics

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John Seiler has posted a sensible column on why the electoral college is not going to disappear in a puff of smoke.  He points out that one of the great compromises that made the Constitution possible is an electoral system that protects the interests of smaller states without eliminating all the advantage enjoyed by larger states.  There is, however, another aspect of the electoral college that is worth looking at:  the principle of indirect election.

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

7 Jan, 2019

Dems vs. the Electoral College

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The best thing the new Democratic House can do is waste its time on things that aren’t going to happen. Such as pushing a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Yes, they’re still miffed Hillary won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College. Even though, if the popular vote were decisive, Trump would have run a far different campaign concentrating on the large population centers and forgetting low-population states. Which is one reason why the EC never will be abolished. It takes a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, then a three-fourths vote of the state...