Category: Access

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Peace for Ukraine?

By John Seiler Will Donald Trump work out a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that finally brings peace to the longsuffering Ukrainian people? First, a little history. No country has suffered more in the past 100 years than Ukraine. Not even Cambodia and Rwanda, the sites of huge massacres, which at least were of limited duration. Living under the czars was no bowl of warm borshcht to begin with, although Ukraine was so fertile it was the “breadbasket of Europe.” Then World War I hit, with much of the worst fighting on the Eastern...

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Wednesday’s Child: Faking the News

The other day I came across a book that was being advertized on Amazon, and it was called Christ’s Ventriloquists.  The blurb said it was “a work of investigative history” and the author described himself as an “investigative historian.”  Now, at the risk of giving the reader apoplexy, I want to quote from this blurb. The book, burbles the blurb, “documents and describes Christianity’s creation event, which occurred in Antioch 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. At this event, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he...

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Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (5)

“Well, where is the getting down to the nitty-gritty then, eh?  The bedroom stuff you promised us? ” What I want the reader to glean from the preceding, anticipating some of my yet stranger claims, is that the Pasternak family had been split from the beginning.  The female line, issuing from the mother, produced Boris and Josephine.  Alexander and Lydia took after the father. When it comes to genetic roulette, a special deity protects the integrity of the big loser.  Rosalia gambled away music, but ended up with a devoted husband.  Boris staked his all on being like everyone else,...

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Trump’s First 10 Days: Battling Obstructionist Republicans in Congress

By John Seiler President Trump – it’s great writing that! – now is facing a problem similar to that of President Reagan in 1981: His own fellow Republicans are obstructing his agenda. For Reagan, the main problem was the old “root canal Republicans,” such as Bob Dole, then the chairman of the Senate’s Finance Committee. The phrase derived from Democrats going on huge spending binges, then Republicans being the supposed “adults” who performed painful oral surgery with tax increases to pay for everything, as they did under President Eisenhower in 1953 and President Nixon in 1969. The result was Republicans...

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Wednesday’s Child: A Fallen Lion

  Lev Navrozov, my father, died last night.  The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess.  He had lived his whole life in a kind of autistic cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer to the congenital intellectual whose brain is, or ought to be, his sole active organ. There was a Russian science fiction novel of the 1920’s...

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Trump’s Inaugural Address to Save America

  I enjoyed watching Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address more than any other. I missed Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 because I was freezing to death standing off the Red Army while on maneuvers with my unit, the U.S. Army’s 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence Battalion, in West Germany near the Fulda Gap. But I was a big Gipper supporter and would have loved to watch it. Although in many ways his administration was disappointing, he did stand down the Evil Empire in the endgame of the Cold War without getting us all nuked. Trump’s Inaugural comes at an even more critical...

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Wednesday’s Child: Of Porn and Porkies

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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The Xanthippe: Part 3 in which Plato comes a cropper

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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Trump’s Hundred Days

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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The Xanthippe, Part 3

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...