Category: Access

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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...

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

14 Jun, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Modern Educayshun

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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...

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Fleming / Free Content

13 Jun, 2017

Bernie Lets his Mask Slip

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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...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

13 Jun, 2017

Why I’m a Global Warming Skeptic

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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...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

7 Jun, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Europe’s B******s

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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...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

6 Jun, 2017

What Conservatism?

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“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...