Category: Access

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

19 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Of Porn and Porkies

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I noted with interest last week that a popular pornographic site reported a 102% increase in searches relating to practices in which the US president-elect is alleged to have engaged while a visitor in Moscow. To my mind, the hoary vulgarity implicit in the stated aim of the man’s visit – namely, the staging of a “beauty pageant” – trumps any perversions that he may or may not have explicitly indulged, but I reckon not many of those who use the pornographic site in question will agree with me. It is as though I am conducting a dialogue at cross...

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Fleming / On the House

17 Jan, 2017

The Xanthippe: Part 3 in which Plato comes a cropper

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Socrates:  “Suppose not” will have to do for the moment, but you still think it is wrong to spend money on potters or cartmakers. Pheidippides:  I do. Socrates:  Save that thought, because at least it is solid.  However,  is enough on this for now.  So, Xanthippe, Pheidippides apparently thinks it would be wrong to use his small share of Athenian taxes to subsidize an industry.  What do you say, that it would always be right? Xanthippe:  By no means, Socrates.  Surely you would agree with me that some businesses are more important than others.  For example, if Pasion’s shield business...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

17 Jan, 2017

Trump’s Hundred Days

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By John Seiler Back in 1933 FDR set the precedent of a Hundred Days to impose a new agenda on the country. His New Deal was based on the recent policies of Hitler and Mussolini, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch detailed in his book, “Three New Deals.” As we’ve seen during this transition period before his January 20 inauguration, Donald Trump seems to have rather the opposite in mind: rolling back centralized government while pushing what remains – which still will be way too much – to be more efficient, such as protecting the borders. Obviously Trump isn’t a libertarian, or even...

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Fleming / Free Content

11 Jan, 2017

The Xanthippe, Part 3

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Part III Socrates:  Well then, Xanthippe, now  that we have silenced this childish ruffian–would that we could do the same to Anna and all her teachers and disciples–we can talk like adults.  We are not random strangers, we Athenians, but fellow citizens in a commonwealth founded by the goddess Athena and the earthborn king  Erechtheus and unified by Poseidon’s son, the hero Theseus.  The bones of heroes are buried on our territory, and their spirits and the ghosts of our ancestors watch over us, but more important than these heroes and ghosts are the nomoi, the traditional laws and customs...

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

11 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: More Awls in Sackcloth

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A month or so ago, at the end of November, in a post entitled “An Awl in Sackcloth” I mentioned Vladimir Medinsky, who is Russia’s current minister of culture.  I have since been reading up on the man, and the things I’ve learned are literally boggling my mind, weakened as it is by holiday overindulgence.  I hope I may be permitted, in the scope of a longish post, to broaden the hapless minister’s appeal by boggling yours. Some of the scandals in which Medinsky has been embroiled are of scant concern to me personally, though the Russian internet – as...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

10 Jan, 2017

Obama’s Disastrous 8 Years

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By John Seiler How should we judge a president? Some say by economic growth. Or advancing global democracy. Or pushing into law new social programs. But there’s only one way: How well did he follow his oath of office? It’s specified in Article II, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It’s similar to a man taking a marriage vow, “forsaking all others.” If he cheats...

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Fleming / Free Content

6 Jan, 2017

Black Pots, Gray Kettle (Free)

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Joe Biden–or was it Neil Kinnock?–has told Donald Trump to “grow up” and accept the verdict of his administration’s intelligence commissars.   Is this the same Joe Biden who has not been content to make  fool of himself at every point in his career  and then, as vice president, by his shenanigans dragged the whole country into disrepute?  This is the poor fool who actually stooped to plagiarizing the platitudes of  socialist Neil Kinnock, and then offered his defense that it was staffers who were responsible–the staffers who put the words into his mouth he was incapable of writing himself. VP...

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Fleming / Free Content

6 Jan, 2017

Jerks, Chapter 2: Taxonomy–More on Randy Individualists (Free)

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The extreme case of false individualism is the libertarian sect, rooted in the teachings of Ayn Rand,  known as Objectivism.  Only in America, I sometimes think, could a political movement be based on a writer of pop fiction.  The thinness of Rand’s erudition is matched only by the banality of her imagination, which ran to most of the clichés of soft pornography.  I never got farther than a few chapters into Atlas Shrugged, but I did once manage to finish The Fountainhead, and even though I skimmed it rather quickly, my gag reflex was hard to suppress.  In her defense,...

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On the House

5 Jan, 2017

President Obama’s Missed Opportunity on Race

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I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, mainly because he was about as pro-abortion as one could get. But in discussing him with my conservative friends, some of whom actually did vote for him, two things stood out: First, he was not John McCain, the Republican nominee.  Insane McCain, like Hillary in 2016, was obsessed with confronting Russia, even if that meant sparking a nuclear war.  So far, although Obama is ending his term with several pointless provocations of Moscow, we still haven’t been atomized. Second, we thought he might–just might (but no more)–improve race relations, including the status...

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

4 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (4)

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With the Pasternak centenary in 1990 came several full-length biographies of the poet, and a discussion of their merits in the literary pages.  Reviewing Christopher Barnes’s Pasternak, Peter Levi, who has no Russian, startled readers of the Independent with the theory that “Doctor Zhivago was his masterpiece, but only a poet could have written it.”  “He has some Russian,” lied Peter France, who does not have enough Russian to know he was lying, reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in The Scotsman. Reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in the Observer, Anthony Burgess, who had expended what Russian he had ever had on A Clockwork Orange,...