Category: Access

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

3 Mar, 2016

Ransom Notes March 5–On the House

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Ransom Notes  March 2 2016 Q: Several people have asked me about the Uzbek nanny in Russia who decapitated the child she was minding.  Some news stories have reported that she was distraught because her husband back in Uzbekistan had decided to take a second wife.  Other reports indicated that she was psychotic.  What really was her motivation? TJF: The answer should obvious to anyone familiar with the old Flip Wilson routine whose signature was “the devil made me do it.”  In this case the Uzbek nanny claims allah—which amounts to more or less the same thing—told her to murder...

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

2 Mar, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Super Wednesday

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  I have not really been following the fruit salad of the American presidential election, as the only apparently human being among the Republican candidates might have bumbled, and yesterday’s Super Tuesday is no exception. So I write this through a fog of wilful ignorance, its mists made all the more impenetrable by the Atlantic’s breadth.  At times, however, such scanty impressions, gleaned almost against one’s will, have some salubrious value, as not buying a used car simply because one had taken a dislike to the peonies on the salesman’s shirt can have a salutary effect on one’s wallet. Carson,...

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Essays / Feature / Fleming / On the House

29 Feb, 2016

East is East, Part II ON THE HOUSE

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If human experience were rmin glacier, slowly accreting facts, pebbles, and statistical debris in its course, some case might be made for writing impartial history, but most of what he call history is a conflict of wills, between leaders and nations.  Who could write an impartial account of the Crusades?  Not a faithful Catholic or Muslim, and certainly not an atheist who is “neutral” on the religious claims of the two parties: he, in fact, has the biggest ax to grind.  I prefer Hilaire Belloc or the Whig historians who never concealed their prejudices or their agenda. Once upon a time,...

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Feature / FF / Fleming / On the House

24 Feb, 2016

On the House: East is East, and West is Wuss, Part I

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This piece was published in a very slightly different form in 1999.  It is being offered free to our free subscribers, and I hope that they will enjoy it.  I also hope that they will see their way to joining us more fully by subscribing to the website. If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time; post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude...

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

24 Feb, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Vienna

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“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.”  Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...

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

17 Feb, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

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  From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends?  Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light.  Irina Stolyarova – such is...

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

11 Feb, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: The Way to Malibu

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“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.”  So a headline in the Financial Times.  It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism.  Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings.  What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”?  Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”?  Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

4 Feb, 2016

On the House: The End of the American Century

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About On the House.  From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing.  A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix.  This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away.  I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine.  Then, come on, do not...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

3 Feb, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Another Statistic

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  “Don’t be a statistic!” was, as I recall it, a didactic phrase widely used by our elders to check a youthful tendency to irresponsible behavior of various kinds, such as driving while under the influence of cheap alcohol or crossing the road without having first looked both ways.  What this meant to communicate was something like “33.000 people will die in motor vehicle traffic crashes this year in the United States alone, and if you aren’t going to be careful you may be one of them.” As a sometime compulsive gambler, now long cured though as ever unrepentant, I...

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

27 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: National Characterlessness

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  It is by now evident, indeed rather a platitude, that globalism, with all its associated political and social tendencies, is destroying national character, but recently I found myself wondering whether there remains anything to destroy.  If, in the twenty-first century, an individual’s character , as I have had occasion to remark on numerous occasions, harbors more exceptions than rules – and occasions, as it were, more dilemmas than lemmas–what of the national character?  Can it be that the French are no longer duplicitous lechers and the British upper lip has long lost its stiffness? It is fanciful, yet not...