A friend of a friend asked his friend, a medical student, how many bones there are in the human body. In reply he heard that there is no definite answer. “You mean to tell me,” he pressed on in astonishment, “that since the days of the Victorian vivisectionists nobody’s bothered to come up with the answer?”
In 1945, a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army wrote a letter ridiculing “the mustachioed one,” Stalin. He was arrested by the secret police and given a long sentence in the Gulag. That was Solzhenitsyn. Last week Douglass Mackey was arrested for making jokes during the 2016 election. He went under the nom de comedy Ricky Vaughn, after the character played by Charlie Sheen in Major League,”the 1989 baseball spoof. Tyrannies don’t like comedy. Vaughn’s alleged crime was putting up on Twitter suggestions that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote for her by tweeting to a specific number. Only an...
There are countless books and articles on the press: its history, its role in defining democracy, its problems, its scandals. What is hard to find is a serious discussion of the fundamental dishonesty, the trivial huckstering that characterizes even the best newspapers. I once had dinner with a distinguished European scholar, who, with a little encouragement, asked me why there was so little freedom of discussion in the United States. Was it due to the village mentality described by Tocqueville? Or was it merely the effect of the tight grip of the media oligarchy? If the latter was true, how...
“Black History Month, which used to be known as February…”
Sam Francis’ witticism has been repeated ad infinitum, by friend and foe alike, usually with little appreciation of the broader implications, which extend far beyond the politics of race. The politics of race, let us never forget, is merely one comparatively small part of the Revolution against Western civilization and human nature.
Most Americans are convinced that they live in a democracy. Who can blame them? They have been told nothing else throughout their lives. Until not too long ago, there had been a remnant of conservatives who insisted that the Founding Fathers had established a republic, but the constant jeers from the Leftist Mainstream have apparently forced them to drop this affectation.
We live by our opinions. While other people’s opinions are called illusions, if they pose no threat to our interests, and prejudices if they do, we call our own opinions “truth” or fundamental principles, if we are fools; if we are more cautious we prefer to speak of theories and hypotheses
Many years ago, to test the gullibility of colleagues and readers, I started the rumor that I was being considered as a possible Presidential candidate. No one I know could be that gullible? Think again, one prominent libertarian-leaning conservative called to find out if it was true. Obviously, he was sounding me out for a cabinet appointment. A few years later, I printed a piece, which I explicitly attributed to a dream, in which I was being dragged to the Hague to be put on trial for complicity in Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal policies in Kosovo. Again, who would believe it?...
If Donald Trump is doomed to endure a second ordeal of impeachment proceedings, what are we to expect?
Part two in the podcast series in which Dr. Fleming, with Rex Scott and Jim Easton, grapple with the literal meaning of every word in the prayer we are given as the model by Jesus Christ.
Jessica Powers was born less than three hours from our house, in Mauston, Wisconsin, in 1905. In 1941 she entered a Carmelite convent in Pewaukee, where she received the name Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit.
