Category: Access

2

All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

7 Apr, 2017

War Could End the Trump Administration

By

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...

45

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

5 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: The Möbius Syndrome

By

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...

6

Free Content

4 Apr, 2017

The Imperial and Momentary We by Clyde Wilson (FREE)

By

This piece was originally published in Chronicles Magazine, October 2012.  It has been republished on the website of the Abbeville Institute.  Prof. Wilson has also given permission to put it on Fleming.Foundation in the hope that it will stimulate a lively discussion. “O Fame, O Fame! Many a man ere this Of no account hast thou set up on high.” —Boethius “It is a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind­blown gibberish. . . . In content it is a vacuum.” —H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s speeches Americans are a practical people. They don’t want to hear your...

2

Fleming / Free Content

4 Apr, 2017

In Memoriam Frank Schier (FREE)

By

This is a slightly revised version of my brief tribute delivered on Sunday, April 2, 2017 at a memorial gathering in Rockford the Mendelsohn Club.  Frank Schier was for many years the editor and publisher of the local weekly The Rock River Times.   My name is Tom Fleming, and I was for many years Frank Schier’s friend, sparring partner, and occasionally punching bag.  We once hosted a television show that must hold the record for the smallest audience, and for a brief period, I wrote restaurant reviews for his newspaper.  Perhaps that fact will be recorded on my own...

2

Fleming / Free Content

3 Apr, 2017

Samuel Johnson, Our Greatest Moralist, Part D: The Problem of Pain (FREE)

By

Rasselas is probably Dr. Johnson’s most accessible piece of moral philosophy.  Since we shall be posting a podcast on the work, the treatment here can be quite limited.  Rasselas is a sort of a picaresque novel that tells the story of a young Abyssinian prince who, with his sister and mentor, leave the Happy Valley, an earthly paradise where the prince, his sisters, and their companions and attendants, enjoy every possible comfort and pleasure.  Rasselas, however, is not happy but is  possessed of what seems to be a romantic delusion that he should desire something.  He imagines that there is...

5

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

29 Mar, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: The Old and the Reckless

By

Last week I mentioned Lampedusa.  Scion of a princely family who wrote his only book aged 58 and did not live to see it published or declared a masterwork of world literature, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa would have inherited his ancestral palazzo in Palermo – about a hundred yards from my house – had it not been for an Allied bomb that leveled it.  Later he moved to another splendid palazzo nearby, because, as the Serbs say, “caviar is eaten not by those who can afford it, but by those who are used to it,” a wise adage that I...

3

Free Content

29 Mar, 2017

Can Trump Repeal and Replace Obamacare? (FREE)

By

Obamacare is giving us the worst of both systems: The expense of capitalism and the deadly incompetence of socialism. President Trump’s attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare – made during the election at every rally before voters – has descended into Cheyne-Stokes. Here’s a reality check. We’ll now see how good President Trump’s deal-making prowess really is. He’s attempting something Republicans never have been able to do: repeal, or at least sharply scale back, an entitlement, in this case Obamacare. The general history of Republicans long was to be the “adult in the room,” paying...

2

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

22 Mar, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Magic Mountain

By

Our precious Mount Etna, which happens to be the tallest volcano in Europe, has been exploding, with streams of molten lava descending into the Valle del Bove from elevations of some three kilometers at the crater’s rim.  A BBC team of reporters nearly didn’t make it down, which showed them that nature could be as violent as the teenage drug lords and tattooed single mothers they had been used to interviewing in their line of duty. ‘“a Muntagna,” the locals call it in dialect – the Mountain with a capital M – as attested by a man named Gaetano Perricone,...

0

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

15 Mar, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

By

Persons unfamiliar with Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, ought to bear in mind that, socially, cocaine may well be a less problematic alternative. Certainly the book is more addictive, but the real trouble is that it makes one eschew all human contact for the duration.  I remember sinking into it some ten years ago.  For three weeks I did not open the shutters or answer the telephone, waking up every morning with the same terrifying thought that one day it would end. Spanning roughly half of the twentieth century, Powell’s novel revolves...

0

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

8 Mar, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (7)

By

Was that biography ever going to work?  I honestly don’t know.  Even if I had been writing the book not in a foreign tongue but in my own, and not for foreign readers but for those familiar with my subject since childhood, even then, insofar as it ran contrary to the Pasternak myth, an explanation of feeling might run into outraged silence.  The explanation I actually attempted, in these strange circumstances, was still more improbable. To focus on a single episode of Russian culture, its most blinding moment, and to develop it against the fuzzy background of certain historical events...