Wednesday’s Child: Operation Watchtower
What do I know about Jehovah’s Witnesses? Nothing, naturally, as do most of my readers, I suspect.
Category: Access
Poems of the Week, May 6: Canning on Candid Friends
“Much may be said on both sides.”–Hark! I hear
A well known voice that murmurs in my ear,–
The voice of Candour.–Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party’s headlong rage.
Wednesday’s Child: Brownlow’s Razor, Part Two
In short, something like a late Romantic. Had Pasternak been born in England, he would now be remembered as the culmination of Romanticism, a poet taking to modern extreme that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which, famously, Wordsworth mentions in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. And politics, it would seem, had as little to do with any of this as automobile manufacturing or Olympic sports. Yet this was the same poet who, aged 41 in 1931, published an autobiography entitled Okhrannaya gramota, its title usually, and not incorrectly, translated into English as Safe Conduct. In speaking of a man who,...
“Which Clash, What Civilization?” Part One of Two
One of the minor annoyances of growing old is the uncomfortable feeling that that less time we have left, the faster it seems to be going by. In a dying civilization the annoyance is aggravated by the constant awareness of how rapidly downhill everything is headed.
Poems of the Week: April 30– Andrew Marvell
Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
Now Dems Take a Bead on the First Amendment
Having spent a month machine-gunning the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms,” now the Democratic Party is taking a bead on the First Amendment right to “freedom of the press.” The Party is suing President Trump, Russia and Wikileaks over the bogus Russian interference in the 2016 election. As I have written on Fleming Foundation from the start of this nonsense in late 2016, the Russians couldn’t possibly have influenced the election’s outcome because it’s too difficult to figure out how to do it, even for Americans, let alone Muscovites. President Trump can defend himself and the Russians...
Wednesday’s Child: Brownlow’s Razor, Part One
Frank Brownlow’s post of a few days ago has made me want to continue the discussion it began, but the truth is, it ain’t simple. I’m at a disadvantage, because Dr. Brownlow’s is an eagle’s eye view of the paradox of culture under totalitarianism, whereas what I want to respond with is a worm’s eye view of the underlying evidentiary base
Eating with Sinners, Part One of Two
To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
Poems of the Week, April 22…:Two Cheerer-Uppers by Sarah Teasdale
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Taxes: A Flight of Fancy by George Bagby
Taxes are an infamously good way to discourage whatever they tax. For this reason and others, the income tax and the property tax are especially bad ideas, for they discourage both work and ownership, along with mandating that all forms of work and property produce a minimal amount of cash.
