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…
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...
Thirteen million Britons have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, a delusional pacifist and nostalgic socialist. The news that Kensington, for the first time in London’s history, is now a Labour borough is counterintuitive, rather like learning that the president of the United States is black, a member of Skull and Bones, cannot distinguish between Iran and Iraq, thinks Latin is the language of Latin America, uses Twitter, and cannot spell the word “counsel.” If leaders of today’s totalitarian states, such as Russia or North Korea, are best described with recourse to the SketchCop Facette facial recognition software used by international police...
Bernie Sanders’ anti-Christian hissie fit the other day is overheating the Christian chattiverse. Sanders unloaded on Russell Vought the load of Christ-hating venom he had accumulated in a liftetime devoted to attacking all things normal, decent, and well-groomed, describing his faith as “insulting,” “hateful,” and indefensible.” Christians are drawing the obvious conclusion that for Sanders and his ilk—and, remember, their name is Legion—any form of orthodox Christian faith is a cause for exclusion from federal office. First it will be cabinet posts, then federal judgeships, then college scholarships. Unfortunately, too few Christians seem to understand that Sanders is only making explicit...
Now the alarmists call it “climate change,” which can mean anything from California enjoying even better weather than it already does to a meteor slamming into Los Angeles and extinguishing all life on earth (small “e,” please). But they really mean “global warming,” the phrase used to scare us until the late 2000s, when it became clear it wasn’t happening. I’ve been a skeptic – or denier, as the alarmists say – all along. I remember the 1970s global cooling scare. A 1975 Newsweek article warned of “The Cooling World”: “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have...
It is true that the word “bastard” was not equally offensive in every period of history, as we know that William the Conqueror is called “William the Bastard” in some contemporary official screeds, but after Shakespeare, in King Lear, fashioned the underlying notion into the definitive metaphor of vice, the word was pretty much spoken for. The term’s origin, in the age of homosexual marriage and gender dysphoria, may seem rather innocuous, since etymologically it does not mean anything more shameful than “here today, gone tomorrow,” an approach to conduct regarded as perfectly legitimate at least since the great moral...
“I remember the days of long ago.” Psalm 143:5 If you haven’t chuckled at it yet, check out George Will’s attempt to resuscitate Bill Buckley. I’ve always been a conservative and started out long ago a great admirer of both men, later disillusioned. Buckley’s old National Review I discovered in the library of Franklin Junior High School around 1967, when I was 12. Will wrote for it then, but later moved to write a column for the Washington Post. His column was especially valuable in Stars & Stripes when I was a Russian Linguist with the U.S. Army in West...
IV It’s 2017, and the Rechstaffens have moved from the crazy Bay Area to the crazier Portland, where Fritz IV (J.J.) is doing well as head of an immigrants’ rights organization and Democratic Party activist. He had worked hard for Bernie, but, when his candidate lost, he cheerfully rolled up his sleeves to work for the first woman that would be elected President of the Free World, the human race, and the entire universe. He makes no bones about his loathing of all things Trump, and that is the one subject on which he and his former son, Fritz...
Comedian Al Franken is back in the headlines with accusations the Russians colluded with Donald Trump to make sure the Democrats nominated the worst candidate in their party’s history so she would lose. Or something like that. Reported Bloomberg, “U.S. Sen. Al Franken said ‘everything points to’ collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians. The Minnesota Democrat did not cite any evidence….” Franken said, “My feeling is that there was some cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russians. They just haven’t been acting like people who have nothing to hide.” Once again, check out my Fleming Foundation post...
I first visited the Shostakovich Center–Association Internationale Dimitri Chostakovitch, if you go by the name on the doorbell–last October, and wrote about it in this space. A friend, now dead, used to live across the road in the Rue des Saints-Pères. The street, which marks the border between the 6th and 7th Paris arrondissements, dates back to the sixteenth century, with all the glories of intervening ages sucked up by it as by a sponge of sedimentary calcite. The Center is in a small courtyard, its stones overgrown with ivy and moss, and of an afternoon one can sit on...
