Category: Feature

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

23 Aug, 2017

The Counter-Revolution–Back to Square One (Conclusion)

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Then what are we to do with the Great Books of the revolutionary tradition?  They are to a great extent a poisoned chalice which is fatal to those who drink from it.  There is a sense in which the system of American education is taking care of at least some of the problem.  Apart from Great Books colleges and Western Civ courses, no one actually reads Montaigne or Voltaire.  They are simply dead white males that only a conservative fuddy-duddy would read. But suppose we confine the question only to people we care about, our children and students.  Do we...

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

23 Aug, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Fair Name

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In Italy, a sagra is a local fair, festival, or fête, usually – oh, but let us be truthful, invariably – dedicated to food, and sometimes accompanied by a historical pageant, a sporting event, a marionette show, or some other spectacle that may aid digestion. There is a Frog Festival at Casteldilago near Arrone, an Onion Festival at Cannara, a Stuffed Eggplant Festival in Savona, a Lattarino Festival on Lake Bolsena, in homage to a local fish by that name and now in its forty-second year, a Frico Festival in Friuli, involving an italianized cheese-and-potato rösti, and an almost infinite...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

19 Aug, 2017

The War of Gods and Demons: Chesterton, Part II

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Chesterton was certainly not alone in treating the Romans fairly, but he is among the few who saw the conflict in the proper civilizational terms, as a conflict between decent paganism that prepared the world for the Incarnation and the filthy sort of paganism that instead of adoring the Christ child would have joined Herod in seeking to kill him.  Chesterton begins his essay “The War of  Gods and Demons,” a chapter in The Everlasting Man, with a deep reflection on the failure of so much academic history on Rome: Merely political histories of Rome may be right enough in...

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Feature / Fleming

19 Aug, 2017

I HATE TRUMP, 2:  08-19-17, 9:00 AM CDT

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I have always hated Trump, even when he was a star on reality TV.  Even before.  To me, The Art of the Deal is really The Art of the Steal.   That is what all businessmen are, fundamentally, especially big businessmen:  thieves.  One of my professors (Harvard Law, 1987!) told the class that someone—I guess it was JFK—once said that property is theft.  He was so right!  I absolutely hate the rich.  A little guy like me, worth only a couple hundred million, can’t get justice in this country.  Look at poor Bernie Sanders’ wife, the way she is being...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Aug, 2017

I HATE TRUMP: 08-18-17, 9:00 AM CDT

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This is a President?  Instead of issuing  high-minded moral diatribes against racism, when some minor incident develops in  Kankakee or Charlottesville, this big-haired moron wastes his time on forcing North Korea to back down.  Then, as was noted on NPR so correctly, even his religious advisors–men who are supposed to be of high moral character–refuse to resign in protest. What planet do these so-called Christians live on? Why doesn’t this moron admit the truth?  The South is evil, except for the African Americans and Mexicans who live there.  American Slavery was the worst moral evil in the history of the human race, worse...

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

16 Aug, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Portrait of the President as a Young Man

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As a young jobbing journalist in London I used to do a lot of book reviewing for The Times, then still the pre-eminent paper in Britain.  They paid me £1 a word, which meant that even at the rate of two or three pieces a month body and soul could be kept together, with a bob or two left over for cigarettes and booze.  Last week I was trawling through old photocopies of some of my clippings and found one that made me giggle, dated April 8, 1989 and entitled “Diary of a Nobody.”  I’m quite sure that Rupert Murdoch,...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

14 Aug, 2017

Actually, North Korea Can’t Hit the U.S., or Guam, With a Nuke

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Americans sure get in a tizzy these days. What happened to the people that methodically destroyed Hitler and Tojo in less than four years, then calmly faced down the Soviets in the Cold War? The latest “threat” is from the ridiculous Kim Jong Un of North Korea. This time, supposedly, he’s years or months away from launching a nuclear-tipped ICBM at the American mainland, or at least Guam and its U.S. military bases. The Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post headlined, “North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say.” But as Justin Raimondo noted, the Post quoted only a single sentence from...

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Feature / Fleming

14 Aug, 2017

Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon: Liberal

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  In one of our discussions, I hinted that our conversations might be expedited by agreeing to use certain words, e.g., liberal, conservative, radical,  Marxist, traditionalist, culture/cultural, republican, democratic, in a precise manner that takes account of historical reality.  The most obvious term with which to begin is the almost universally abused word “Iiberal.” Political Liberal:  Someone who advocates liberty and individual autonomy as the ultimate good and seeks to weaken or eliminate all barriers and impediments that stand in the way of an individual’s quest for fulfillment.  At different periods Liberals have opposed monarchy, established churches, aristocracy, tradition, and...

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

9 Aug, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Sardinia

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A capital delusion of the rich, to the effect that money can be transmuted into beauty, is dwarfed by a mass delusion of the poor, to the effect that beauty can be transmuted into money.  As in the case of nuclear transmutation in physics, neither of the two processes is an impossibility. Yet scientists warn that while particle bombardment can easily turn gold into a base metal like lead, the reverse, though possible in theory, is far too costly and time-consuming to be of any practical benefit to the avaricious. An alchemist, or for that matter anybody who’s got his...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

8 Aug, 2017

Bring Back the Spoils System!

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  Nowadays American history in high school consists of unrelenting attacks on our country as a racist, sexist, etc., hellhole. But back when I took the class at Wayne Memorial High School back in 1971, we learned about how horrible the old spoils system was, and why our country leaped into the progressive future with Civil Service Reform. Although he didn’t use the term, the spoils system largely was instituted by the great President Andrew Jackson. It was a way to get an unresponsive bureaucracy to perform its duties. If a functionary treated citizens badly, he knew they could vote...