Category: Access

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

27 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: One-Upmannship

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This is my eighty-seventh Wednesday’s Child, and I’ve always prided myself on posting these tearjerkers of mine on time – except this week, when I didn’t.  Appealing to our sainted editor’s sense of scribblers’ camaraderie, I pleaded that I’d had my mind on other things and my body in too many places to be able to produce something intelligible, in short, that I’d been uncommonly busy.  The sainted editor fired back, reminding me of the Amos and Andy episode in which the loafer is lectured on the stress of modern life, with the peroration running something like this: “First you...

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26 Apr, 2017

The Hundred Days Myth

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The chattering classes are all aTwitter about Trump supposedly failing to do much in his first “Hundred Days” haunting the Oval Office, which ends on April 29. Actually, I think he has done fairly well, as I’ll write about more in detail once he actually has passed the supposedly crucial milestone. FDR started the Hundred Days craze in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. He used it as a marketing gimmick to push his New Deal socialist schemes which, far from ending the Depression, extended it. His New Deal actually was an expansion of President Hoover’s schemes –...

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21 Apr, 2017

Trump Needs to Cut Taxes Now, Forget ‘Revenue Neutrality’

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Tax cutting should be simple. We’ve done it before, the best ones being the 1964 JFK/LBJ reduction of income taxes across the board, with the top rate dropping to 70% from 91%; and Reagan’s 1981 cuts, with the top rate dropping further, to 50%. President Trump campaigned repeatedly on tax cuts – and won on that promise. Unfortunately, now his administration is stuck, with the cuts delayed until after August. Part of the reason is Trump’s recent embrace of “revenue neutrality,” as explained in an op-ed by four of the president’s campaign advisers on taxes: Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

19 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Damned if We Do, Damned if We Don’t

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I cannot but agree with my learned friend Dr. Fleming, who writes in response to last week’s post – where I suggested that the official explanations of a recent terror bombing, which the Russian blogosphere unanimously rejects, may be intentionally implausible – “Give me the serenity to ignore what I do not know.”  My instinctive concurrence with my friend’s apophthegm, however, comes with an autobiographical caveat. The Russian émigré grandmother of an acquaintance of mine, a Hohenlohe by birth, refused to come out of her house in Rio de Janeiro to look at Sputnik, which everybody said could be seen...

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17 Apr, 2017

Ask the Autodidact, #1 (FREE)

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Ask the Autodidact This column is a work in progress.  I have invited several teachers and home-schooling parents to work together in improving the reading list, posting articles on important aspects of the classical  inheritance, and to take part in discussions initiated by questions Brother Martin, who works in a classical academy, writes in to ask: Would you mind sharing your thoughts on an educational issue, namely, the length of the school day, amount of homework, and such things.  When you have time, would you mind sharing your thoughts on an educational issue, namely, the length of the school day,...

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11 Apr, 2017

Syria Strike Aids Trump’s Enemies, Alienates Friends

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  “I reward my friends and [expletive] my enemies,” was how the noted political philosopher Bill Clinton once explained his governance. It’s pure Machiavellianism, but it worked for him. And while such amorality is an abomination, the kernel of truth is that a politician needs friends, and needs to keep them, because he certainly will gain plenty of enemies whatever he does. I’ll provide some examples in a minute. President Trump seems not to understand that his Syria attack endangers his entire presidency because it repulsed his truest friends, who backed him no matter what during the long and bloody...

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

11 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Blast of Cynicism

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Say what you will, democracy has a responsible side.  Hardly anybody in America believed the findings of the Warren Commission, but you can never argue it was for want of trying on the part of its members, or for that matter on the part of those who had organized the assassination.  In totalitarian countries, by contrast, a lie is thought to be wasted on the populace unless it’s a white lie, and a conspiracy that is convincingly covered up is simply not worth the blood of the victims. So it is with the news of the recent blast in the...

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10 Apr, 2017

The Balkans Powder Keg, Again (FREE CONTENT)

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It’s a complete mess! The Balkans are becoming once again the powder keg of the European continent.   In the turbulent nineties, the peninsula experienced the creation of several artificial states, such as Kosovo, Bosnia and FYROM, that became cradles of Islamic terrorism as well as headquarters for criminal organizations.  Now, once again, Balkan governments are undermining the stability of Europe. Everywhere we look, there is trouble. Belgrade is plagued by antigovernment rallies and protests. The population of tiny Montenegro sharply is divided over NATO membership.  In Athens the leftist gang in power has opened the Greek and therefore European border...

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7 Apr, 2017

War Could End the Trump Administration

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It didn’t take long for President Trump to let the dogs of war bite him. Item: He just attacked Syria with a “targeted military stroke” on an airfield supposedly used by President Assad for chemical attacks. But what if reports the chemical weapons are “fake news”? The reports came from the U.S. intelligence community, which hates Trump and, as we now know, relentlessly spied on him, his family and his campaign, while conjuring up the fake news of his collusion with Russia. Why would Syria use chemical weapons, bringing condemnation on itself, it it’s now winning the war against the...

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

5 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: The Möbius Syndrome

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The Möbius strip, twisting back on itself in an endless loop, is how most people visualize the past, present, and – consequently – future of civilization. This seamless plane of recurrence is punctuated by popular historical concepts, such as “tyranny,” “slavery,” “war,” “revolution,” “famine,” “torture,” or else by such allegedly universal memes as “family,” “happiness”, or “wealth.”  Even those hysterically optimistic punters who believe that the history of civilization is progressive – which would imply that its topography is less like the closed loop than like an upwardly mobile parabola – cannot escape the pervasive myth of endless recurrence enshrined...