Category: Feature

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

11 Apr, 2017

Syria Strike Aids Trump’s Enemies, Alienates Friends

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  “I reward my friends and [expletive] my enemies,” was how the noted political philosopher Bill Clinton once explained his governance. It’s pure Machiavellianism, but it worked for him. And while such amorality is an abomination, the kernel of truth is that a politician needs friends, and needs to keep them, because he certainly will gain plenty of enemies whatever he does. I’ll provide some examples in a minute. President Trump seems not to understand that his Syria attack endangers his entire presidency because it repulsed his truest friends, who backed him no matter what during the long and bloody...

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

11 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Blast of Cynicism

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Say what you will, democracy has a responsible side.  Hardly anybody in America believed the findings of the Warren Commission, but you can never argue it was for want of trying on the part of its members, or for that matter on the part of those who had organized the assassination.  In totalitarian countries, by contrast, a lie is thought to be wasted on the populace unless it’s a white lie, and a conspiracy that is convincingly covered up is simply not worth the blood of the victims. So it is with the news of the recent blast in the...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

8 Apr, 2017

Samuel Johnson, Our Greatest Moralist: Conclusion

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In his moral writings, Dr. Johnson showed himself a devotee to  duty almost on the level with Robert E. Lee’s, who described it as “the sublimest word in the English language, adding,  “You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.”   The concept of duty has been somewhat tarnished by Victorian moralists who too often seem to be advocating the virtue of prigs, and, worse, by  philosophers who, since the 18th century,  have got into the habit of regarding all duties as abstract, universal, and rational. A locus classicus for this approach...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

7 Apr, 2017

War Could End the Trump Administration

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It didn’t take long for President Trump to let the dogs of war bite him. Item: He just attacked Syria with a “targeted military stroke” on an airfield supposedly used by President Assad for chemical attacks. But what if reports the chemical weapons are “fake news”? The reports came from the U.S. intelligence community, which hates Trump and, as we now know, relentlessly spied on him, his family and his campaign, while conjuring up the fake news of his collusion with Russia. Why would Syria use chemical weapons, bringing condemnation on itself, it it’s now winning the war against the...

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

5 Apr, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: The Möbius Syndrome

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The Möbius strip, twisting back on itself in an endless loop, is how most people visualize the past, present, and – consequently – future of civilization. This seamless plane of recurrence is punctuated by popular historical concepts, such as “tyranny,” “slavery,” “war,” “revolution,” “famine,” “torture,” or else by such allegedly universal memes as “family,” “happiness”, or “wealth.”  Even those hysterically optimistic punters who believe that the history of civilization is progressive – which would imply that its topography is less like the closed loop than like an upwardly mobile parabola – cannot escape the pervasive myth of endless recurrence enshrined...

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Feature / Fleming

4 Apr, 2017

Mat Rarey, RIP

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I learned today, from several sources, that my former assistant Matthew Rarey has died.  Mat was still a young man.  I have no idea, at this point, what happened, but he had been very troubled in recent years. He yearned for the best, and if he often fell short, he was hardly different from the rest of us.  I’ll write more later, perhaps, since Mat kept in constant touch with me.

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

4 Apr, 2017

The O’ Reilly–Rotten from the Beginning

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In the current tempest in a teapot over Bill O’Reilly’s allegedly indecent behavior toward women, no one seems willing to state the obvious:  The fellow–by no means a man–is both a bully and a toady, the embodiment of the lying conservative journalism at FOX.  This is a corrected and improved version of a Perspective published long long ago in 2001.   Some celebrities seem born with a natural star-power that radiates from them like an angelic halo.  Alcibiades, so it is said, had this kind of “charisma,” to make himself adored even by people who disliked him.  To be a...

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

29 Mar, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: The Old and the Reckless

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Last week I mentioned Lampedusa.  Scion of a princely family who wrote his only book aged 58 and did not live to see it published or declared a masterwork of world literature, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa would have inherited his ancestral palazzo in Palermo – about a hundred yards from my house – had it not been for an Allied bomb that leveled it.  Later he moved to another splendid palazzo nearby, because, as the Serbs say, “caviar is eaten not by those who can afford it, but by those who are used to it,” a wise adage that I...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

17 Mar, 2017

Down With “the Arts”!

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Art is a noble human attempt to make beauty and sense out of human experience.  “The Arts” are an ignoble scam by which no-talent bums force the taxpayers to subsidize their indolence.  I received an email today from a friend who has done good work in one of the more popular arts.  He is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, but he was calling upon his friends to “do what we can to reverse this ill advised decision before it is too late.” My distinguished friend’s argument is that the Trump administration will be “throwing away an opportunity to move the culture and...

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Feature / Jack Trotter

14 Mar, 2017

The Shaming of Shame, Part A by Jack Trotter

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Warning:  This in a brilliant and original essay on a difficult and unpleasant subject that goes to the evil and perverse heart of contemporary feminism.  Of necessity it includes precise  references to the female anatomy, questions of hygiene, as well as obscene quotations from feminist writers.    It is not recommended for children or adolescents or for any reader who visits this website in order to escape from, not wallow in, the muck of the world around us.   When I first became an editor, I should never have dreamed of publishing such a piece, but as times change, and...