Category: Feature

16

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Dec, 2017

A Capital Crime? Trump and Jerusalem

By

“Trump has sold us out!” ”It’s all the fault of that Jewish son-in-law of his!” “This sets back the Middle East peace process by decades!” These are just a few of the more moderate exclamations I have heard in condemnation of the President’s decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel and to relocate the embassy. Perhaps they are all right, but I doubt it.  While Trump’s manifest trust in his children is a source of possible weakness, it is also one of his strongest qualities.  Jared and Ivanka Kushner have certainly played a major role in this administration, but whether...

4

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

6 Dec, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Fire in the Reichstag

By

A black pimp in a red velour hat by the name of Ben Okri – black is a statement of fact, pimp is an expression of opinion, conjunction of the two is my constitutional right, and the red velour hat, I admit, is only there for literary verisimilitude – has written a poem for a new art museum called the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opens next week.  “A great story unites us all,” writes Okri, actually a British writer born in Nigeria who has won many literary prizes for his absurd twaddle, “beyond colour and creed and gender. / The...

4

Feature / Fleming

30 Nov, 2017

Stupid Thoughts

By

This is a country where Joe Scarborough, who is so fake he has to lie about his Thanksgiving day, is accusing Donald Trump of insanity.  If it hadn’t been Morning Joe, it might have been Matt Laurer.  What a country. The only clever thing I have ever heard from John Podhoretz (Full disclosure: I have never met the pizza man though I did have dealings with his parents) is his remark that Trump should be impeached for forcing on our attention the moronic Lavar  Ball, who single-handedly has done more to explode the idea of racial equality than anyone since...

3

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

30 Nov, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Home Sweet Home

By

My wife used to say that coming from Palermo to London is like falling from the calyx of a flower onto a bed of metal shavings, and with every passing year I marvel more and more at the accuracy of that description.  In reverse the shock of the change does not work as powerfully, probably because the brain, like eyes after a spell in darkness, needs time to adjust and take it all in – the sunlight, the smells and the smiles.  Each time I return, I can almost literally feel the mind thawing out as I hand to Mimmo,...

3

All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

28 Nov, 2017

What $47 Million Sale of Anti-tank weapons to Ukraine Really Means

By

The Pentagon really exists for one thing: to spend your tax dollars. When’s the last time they won a war above the size of Grenada in 1983 or Panama in 1989? Recent losses include wars in: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. The Pentagon is the DMV with tanks, planes and nuclear bombs. According to an Atlantic Council article by Stephen Blank in Newsweek, the Pentagon now thinks it can save Ukraine from Russia by sending in anti-tank weapons: “There’s a real possibility that the United States will finally send lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine. “The country has been fighting a defensive...

7

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

22 Nov, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

By

I no longer have a house in London, but the sense of homelessness that envelops me here like a shroud is probably nothing to do with entries in the land registry. It is more to do with November wind, swirling bestially inside my coat and making restaurant awnings flap like exploding grenades, with drizzling rain that stops and starts with a nauseating periodicity, with passing pedestrians who avoid your eye as they roll and unroll black umbrellas. London in November is like being a mourner at a funeral, and who ever felt at home in front of an open grave...

8

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

14 Nov, 2017

Judge Roy Moore: Is It Time to Go?

By

Judge Roy Moore is probably not going to be governor of Alabama.  The case against Moore is growing more serious with each passing day as more women come forward to charge him with indecent behavior and as people who knew him in Gadsden are backing their claims. That none of the claims is politically motivated is difficult to believe, and the justification that the accusers are Republicans who voted for Trump proves little.  Many Trump voters are not especially conservative and few, probably, would approve Judge Moore’s conflation of Scriptures and the American Constitution.  HL Mencken might have held his...

12

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Nov, 2017

Conservatism: Traditionalism

By

Conservatism is a very elastic term, so big that it was stretched, by rent-seeking leaders of Conservative organizations in the 1990’s, into a big tent.  There are liberal Conservatives who care only about the illusion of free markets and freedom of choice, Neoconservatives who are democratist Jacobins and soft-core Marxists, and even “traditionalist” Conservatives, who do not entirely reject the classical tradition, the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and the wisdom of the past. If the word “conservative” were to mean anything—these days, it really doesn’t—it would have to include a healthy respect for tradition. Otherwise, the accusation that Conservatives...

1

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

2 Nov, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Moral Borderlands

By

I was under the weather last week, and besides I thought the gentle reader might use a week’s rest from my compulsive ratiocination, so I did not post.  Weather is a big factor the closer one gets to Africa.  The sirocco arrives here bearing a fine sand dust from the Sahara that gets in everywhere, but worse than that, it makes one feel like a lemon squeezed dry, moscio, as the locals say, meaning flaccid, limp, flabby.  After a day or two, one finds oneself yearning for Siberia and the bracing touch of the bora. Sirocco makes people grumpy, irritable,...

9

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 Oct, 2017

Times Out of Joint

By

Europe went off daylight savings time this morning, and America follows suit next week.  I suppose this means we are still trying to catch up with Old Europe. The twice a year time change inevitably unleashes a pack of feral economists snapping at the heels and howling criticisms of the inefficiency of savings times and all the hours of work lost to the plantations of international capitalism.  Being economists—or, what is almost worse, business writers—they enjoy the high privilege of always missing the point.  If  it is true that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the...