Category: Access

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

3 Jan, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: The Coffee Mill

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Like many great men, Signor Baldo, whose skills with the ancient San Marco espresso machine recall the illustrious surgeons or perhaps even the famous generals of history, is used to adulation.  The morning bar crowd here is what in marketing is called a quality-conscious clientele, and these people are cognizant and appreciative of the fact that the machine is entirely manual, with nobody but its operator to be either blamed or applauded for the result.  None of that press-the-button stuff for Signor Baldo’s customers. Once in a while a tourist wanders in, and though I can see that the coffee...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

31 Dec, 2017

Media Misread Trump Foreign Policy Moves

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A good example of how the media are misreading President Trump’s foreign policy comes from the Los Angeles Times. Headlined in the Dec. 26 print edition of the paper, “Trump claims he’s boosting U.S. influence, but many foreign leaders see America in retreat” was pecked out by no less than three top-flight Timesies: Tracy Wilkinson, Alexandra Zavis and Shashank Bengali. This really isn’t “news,” but an opinion piece masquerading as reporting. It gets wrong just about every policy, beginning, “China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has...

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Fleming / Free Content

31 Dec, 2017

The New Index: Adam Smith, Part 2

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Adam Smith Adam Smith, perhaps the most influential political thinker produced by Britain in modern times, was born in 1722, a posthumous child of a customs collector from Aberdeenshire.  Smith’s interests in his early years were largely literary and classical, and his family had destined him for the Anglican clergy, though at some point he gave up both the career and religion of a Christian minister. He studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University and came strongly under the spell of Hutcheson’s anti-rationalist common sense philosophy that emphasized benevolence. He proceeded from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, where...

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Fleming / Free Content

30 Dec, 2017

The New Index: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

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This series, in its unrevised form, was posted in Summer  2005.  I thought it was lost forever, but Allen Wilson has been kind enough to send me dozens of old pieces that have disappeared from the old website. Part One:  Capitalism 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, was marked also by the publication of Adam Smith’s path-breaking book on economics, The Wealth of Nations. This is no accident, according to a familiar myth put out by American classical liberals who call themselves conservatives, because America is a land of individualists who came to a New World seeking freedom...

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

27 Dec, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Zone 2

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I fear the gentle reader may have concluded from my last post, where I confessed to having watched fifty hours of old Russian television in a single week, that my idleness has finally got the better of me. Yet Zone, as I sought to explain, is no ordinary television, but a pivotal historic event, and one, moreover, that presages the latest political developments in Moscow. On the day my post appeared, December 20, a remarkable anniversary was being celebrated by the millions of Russians in the covert or overt employ of the police state.  It was the centenary of the...

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

20 Dec, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Zone Too Far

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I just finished watching the last episode of a fifty-episode Russian television series entitled Zone.  This epic series was made ten years ago, and represents a kind of symbolic watershed in Russia’s political progress from the authoritarian horizontal of the 1990’s to the totalitarian vertical of today.  To make such a production in the country’s present climate would be just about unthinkable, as witness the scandal around Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan, acclaimed in Cannes yet politically a much weaker statement than Zone. It occurs to me that, having sunk 50 hours of my time into this situation tragedy, I may...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

19 Dec, 2017

Repeal the 17th Amendment

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The debacle of Alabama’s Senate election shows why the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, electing U.S. senators by a vote of the people, ought to be repealed. Like other “reforms” of the Progressive Era – the Federal Reserve, Prohibition and the dreaded income tax – it made worse what it was supposed to improve. And World War I, the passion of progressive President Woodrow Wilson and ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, instead of “making the world safe for democracy,” paved the way for Lenin and Hitler. The original Constitution established a delicate balance between the more democratic House of Representatives, apportioned by...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

13 Dec, 2017

Net Neutrality Isn’t

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Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can come up with catchy phrases. The Silicon Valley Sultans long have been brilliant marketers, beginning with the late Steve Jobs, who radiated what was called a “reality distortion field.” That’s how they came up with Net “Neutrality,” even though what they want is not “neutrality” on the Internet, but freeloading control by them. There really aren’t any Good Guys here as both sides involve the biggest corporations in the country, all involved one way or another in attacking our freedoms and basic decency. But here’s what’s going on. In the past three...

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Fleming / Free Content

11 Dec, 2017

The Pope’s Temptation

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Is anyone old enough to remember when it was not quite respectable to be in the news?   Of course, the doings of the great and the wise would have to be recorded—the birth of an heir, the discovery of a planet—but, otherwise, it  was better not to be noticed by the newspapers, which have always been properly regarded as scandal sheets.  And, of all classes of men who had to avoid notoriety, the clergy were at the top, and of all the Christian clergy, the Pope was chief among those who were wise enough to stay out of the...

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

6 Dec, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Fire in the Reichstag

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A black pimp in a red velour hat by the name of Ben Okri – black is a statement of fact, pimp is an expression of opinion, conjunction of the two is my constitutional right, and the red velour hat, I admit, is only there for literary verisimilitude – has written a poem for a new art museum called the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opens next week.  “A great story unites us all,” writes Okri, actually a British writer born in Nigeria who has won many literary prizes for his absurd twaddle, “beyond colour and creed and gender. / The...