Category: Access

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

12 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Poking Right Through

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Last November (“An Awl in Sackcloth”), and again in January (“More Awls in Sackcloth”), I regaled the reader with tales of intellectual misadventure suggested by the preposterous figure of Russia’s omnipotent culture tsar, Vladimir Medinsky.  I cannot resist adding an orchestral coda, a dramatic postscript, a final malediction. The denouement of the tragic farce takes us to a town called Belgorod, a place we may be excused for knowing little about because it is a provincial hellhole just this side of the Russian border with Ukraine. The town, however, boasts an “institution of higher learning,”  Belgorod State University, which in...

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On the House

11 Jul, 2017

Don Meets Vlad (Free to Everyone Signed UP)

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  It’s too bad President Trump didn’t say of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, “Putin admitted to me he interfered in our election by working with the Democratic National Committee to torpedo Bernie Sanders’ campaign and nominate the party’s worst possible candidate, Hillary.” But that might have been a joke too far even for Trump. As it was, Trump asked Putin about the supposed interference, and Putin denied it. This is part of Trump’s Deflection Strategy, which has included blaming President Obama for not taking action last year against the Russian interference. As Fleming Foundation readers know, last December I...

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

4 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Hitler on the Roof

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It may be that the name of Astrid Lindgren is utterly unfamiliar to the gentle reader.  In this possibility, perhaps more than in anything else, he differs from the inhabitant of Russia, whether in its Soviet or in its present totalitarian incarnation.  For every Russian of whatever age now living has read and can quote from Karlsson-on-the-Roof– a cross between Le Petit Prince and Mary Poppins–with the consequence that Lindgren is more famous in Russia than Marx, Lenin, or for that matter St. John the Evangelist. Born in 1907 in Sweden, Lindgren was a writer of children’s books.  Globally, I...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

28 Jun, 2017

Russia Hoax Finally Dying

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Events are confirming what I wrote on this site six months ago, that there’s no way the Russians could have rigged our election because it’s just too complex. It would involve not just putting up anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stuff on social media, but knowing what to put up, and when to do it. Elections are more about intuition than anything else. Trump intuited he would win if he campaigned for working-class voters in October in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Hillary’s bad tuition sent her to Silicon Valley to collect bucks from the digital oligarchs. The latest developments: This past week, former...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

28 Jun, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Malaga

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Well, from Marbella, actually, but it occurred to me that having a posh name in the title would look like I was putting on airs and that the name of Spain’s great tourist hub – Malaga Costa del Sol Airport, whence 17 million oafs, badly hungover and savagely sunburnt, return every year to the satanic mills of Great Britain – might better suit the persona I cultivate and reveal here. Yet cavernous is the abyss of snobbery.  While I was dousing myself with pink champagne on the lawn of a friend’s villa, a madam I used to know in London...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

22 Jun, 2017

When Will Trump Strike Back?

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Granted, the presidency is one tough job. Even eight years isn’t long enough to master it. The job includes the ability to launch 7,000 nuclear weapons and wield the world’s largest conventional military. Then there’s the economy, which if it crashes mean you’re not going to be re-elected. It also includes the ability to use presidential powers to achieve policy and personal ends. As Bill Clinton once put it in typical fashion while in the White House, “I reward my friends and (expletive) my enemies.” Trump is a proud man. And one of the more entertaining parts of last year’s...

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Fleming / Free Content

21 Jun, 2017

Rome, the Long Way Round, Part II

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Part II The several days we spent at Ulivello vibrate in the memory like an hallucination.  Our friend Navrozov has written a beautiful piece about his visit to Ulivello.  The reality was a bit grittier and decayed than he described it—less the odor of jasmine than of hay and manure—but no less magical.  The food was almost a revelation:  pasta, of course, but followed by farm-raised pork, roasted with apples and served with potatoes deep-fried in olive oil. Ulivello had been a sort of farm, worked by share-croppers, and when the Italian government ended share-cropping, the former croppers stayed on...

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

21 Jun, 2017

  Wednesday’s Child: The Rubber Burka

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The burkini, in case the gentle reader doubts that I know how to use Wikipedia, is a “modesty swimsuit for women,” covering the whole body like a diving suit, with only the wearer’s face, hands, and feet exposed to the omniscient eye of Allah – one of whose Quranic epithets, incidentally, is “Al-Musawwir,” meaning shaper or designer.  The burkini was trademarked in 2007 by a Muslim lady called Aheda Zanetti, but I note that a garment of exactly the same description made a public appearance over fifty years ago – in the television series The Avengers, worn by Diana Rigg...

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Fleming / Free Content

20 Jun, 2017

Question of the Day

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The Media have taken to describing Illinois as a “Banana Republic”?  So today’s question is: How is Illinois not a Banana Republic?  I await  your answers. My first answer is: Because Banana Republics have beaches and warm winters… And, Banana Republics have distinctive cuisines and excellent coffee not sold by greedy Communists who think the sky is falling…

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Fleming / Free Content

19 Jun, 2017

Religio Philologi: The Lame and the Blind

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Long long ago in another galaxy, I wrote a series of pieces looking at the plain meaning of various passages in the New Testament, not as anyone pretending to be a theologian or Biblical scholar, but as a simple philologist seeking the kind of understanding of a Greek text he might get by studying Demosthenes or Sophocles.  I am going to try and dig them up and refurbish them, if I can find them.  I am afraid I wrote some of them for another website that has by now undoubtedly 86ed them, as they say in commercial  kitchens. I tend...