Category: Feature

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Brownlow / Feature

2 Apr, 2019

College: The Great American Fee-Factory, Part One

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Foreword. Back in the 1980s, having had the fascinating experience of sitting on a financial-aid committee, I learned—to my surprise—that colleges no longer awarded endowed scholarships to exceptionally clever applicants; that instead they were offering something called “financial aid packages” to everyone, thus making it obvious to an inquiring mind that intellectual ability had little to do with college admissions. I also discovered that colleges operated in packs or cartels to fix their prices and restrict competition. The piece that follows was the result of my appalled fascination, and since I seem to have anticipated both the dereliction of academic standards...

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Feature

27 Mar, 2019

 Haydn’s “Lord Nelson Mass”

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Unless you are a seasoned choral singer, lover of choral music or frequent concert goer, you may not know about what H.C. Robbins Landon (a major biographer of the composer) says is “arguably Haydn’s single greatest composition.”

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

20 Mar, 2019

Two Oinks for Democracy, Conclusion: Dealing with Muslims

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Any honest evaluation of US foreign policy over the past 50 years would lead to one conclusion: Any effort to build a stable regime friendly to US interests will have to construct its programs on a population that has some understanding of the West and some institutions—religious or cultural—compatible with our own.  On this basis, we can appreciate at least one of the reasons why we have chosen Israel, for all the troubles this special relationship has cost us, to be the focus of our influence in the Middle East: Israel is a European colony in the Arab and Muslim...

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Feature / Fleming

12 Mar, 2019

Generations of Impotence, Conclusion: The Cruelty of Nerds

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Like so many modern American males, the Marquis de Sade was incapable of taking pleasure in the ordinary things of life.  Morally and intellectually feeble, he wallowed in fantasies of sexual violence.  The history of civilization might be written as a series of social inventions for the proper application of violence: boxing matches, duels, warfare.  When civilizations die, men cannot fall back on the killer instincts of barbarians who control their violence.  They are like the jackdaws studied by Konrad Lorenz:  Not genetically programmed to fight and kill, they do not have the ritual off-switch to stop violence, once it...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

24 Feb, 2019

The Problem With Movies

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Not too long ago I would have seen two or three of the five movies up for best picture at the Academy Awards, and heard something about the others. This year, as in most recent years, I haven’t seen any of the nominees, now inflated to eight, although I do recognize a couple from ads or the minor controversies they started in our PC-obsessed so-called culture. I also used to go to one or two movies a month. But I stopped doing that maybe 15 years ago. It isn’t that I watch them on TV now; I don’t even have...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Feb, 2019

Ideology: Unreason, Antifaith, Part Two

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When people vote their pocketbooks, as they often do, they are giving some color to Marx’s more down-to-earth definition of ideology as a set of ideas concocted to advance the interests of a social class.  The creed of classical liberalism—low taxes, free trade, individual liberty–is the ideology of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, while socialism is the ideology of those who expect to be dependent upon government largesse: schoolteachers, promiscuous young women, and the politicians and public servants, who have so nobly given up brilliant careers in the private sector because they wished to serve the people.  No one claims the ideal...

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Feature / Fleming

16 Feb, 2019

Ideology: Unreason and Anti-Faith, Part One

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What the GOP needs, “Conservatives” tell us, is a sharper ideological focus that will give greater prominence to the vast reservoir of “Conservative”  “ideas.”  If only the “Conservatives” were simply joking, if only they were entirely cynical about the war of words between the two parties, one might have some hope for a restoration of political sanity in this poor country.

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

15 Feb, 2019

Abortion Issue Would Win Minorities for Republicans

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Several conservative commentators have noted how the Mainstream Media have given more attention to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in blackface in college yearbook three decades ago than to his proposal to allow infanticide. It also was creepy how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo led cheering legislators as they passed a radical abortion law, which reminded me of Pandemonium in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

12 Feb, 2019

AOC’s Green New Deal–It’s Nuttier Than You Think

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AOC is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, my favorite Democrat. She’s the Democrats’ id. In Freudian terms, “The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality.” As they said in the Freudian Sixties: Let it all hang out. That’s why so many Democrats are endorsing her Green New Deal, best seen in her FAQ here. Adam Schiff took time off from looking for the non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election to endorse it, “I have long believed that our country needs an Apollo Project-like commitment to tackle climate change and lead our transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.” Republicans have...