Category: Feature

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Feature / Fleming

12 Jul, 2017

Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep?

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One of the best developments of the first six months of America Under Trump is the growing discontent with the media.  Why anyone has ever paid any attention to the New York Times or Washington Post or Fox or CNN is something I have never been able to figure out.  The editors are poorly educated liars, and the reporters, columnists and commentators cannot even manage to tell their lies in standard English There is only one reason to pay any attention to the news, and that is to find out what bizarre forms of snake oil the ruling class is forcing...

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Feature

11 Jul, 2017

Roger McGrath: Out of the Past:  California: as it used to be

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Tom: You have confessed more than once that you have seen Out of the Past five times.  When it came out on VHS tape, I immediately bought a copy.  It was not only my favorite of the film noir genre, it was one of my favorite movies, period.  I like to be careful about using the word brilliant, but that’s exactly what the movie is.  I don’t know much about Jacques Tourneur but his direction was brilliant.  He brought the very best out of each actor.  Bob Mitchum was the best he ever was at being Bob Mitchum.  In a...

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

4 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Hitler on the Roof

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It may be that the name of Astrid Lindgren is utterly unfamiliar to the gentle reader.  In this possibility, perhaps more than in anything else, he differs from the inhabitant of Russia, whether in its Soviet or in its present totalitarian incarnation.  For every Russian of whatever age now living has read and can quote from Karlsson-on-the-Roof– a cross between Le Petit Prince and Mary Poppins–with the consequence that Lindgren is more famous in Russia than Marx, Lenin, or for that matter St. John the Evangelist. Born in 1907 in Sweden, Lindgren was a writer of children’s books.  Globally, I...

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Feature / Fleming

29 Jun, 2017

Chesterton

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Dear Friends and Readers: I have been asked to speak at the 36th annual The American Chesterton Conference being held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 27-29. https://www.chesterton.org/36th-annual-chesterton-conference/ The title of this year’s conference is “The Tyranny of the Learned,” and I’ll be speaking on Chesterton as an amateur ancient historian who often got the details wrong but had a deeper insight than many scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of ancient history. Other speakers include Dale Ahlquist, founder and president of the American Chesterton Society, my former colleague Christopher Check, who is now president of Catholic Answers, Joseph...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

28 Jun, 2017

Russia Hoax Finally Dying

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Events are confirming what I wrote on this site six months ago, that there’s no way the Russians could have rigged our election because it’s just too complex. It would involve not just putting up anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stuff on social media, but knowing what to put up, and when to do it. Elections are more about intuition than anything else. Trump intuited he would win if he campaigned for working-class voters in October in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Hillary’s bad tuition sent her to Silicon Valley to collect bucks from the digital oligarchs. The latest developments: This past week, former...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

22 Jun, 2017

When Will Trump Strike Back?

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Granted, the presidency is one tough job. Even eight years isn’t long enough to master it. The job includes the ability to launch 7,000 nuclear weapons and wield the world’s largest conventional military. Then there’s the economy, which if it crashes mean you’re not going to be re-elected. It also includes the ability to use presidential powers to achieve policy and personal ends. As Bill Clinton once put it in typical fashion while in the White House, “I reward my friends and (expletive) my enemies.” Trump is a proud man. And one of the more entertaining parts of last year’s...

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

21 Jun, 2017

  Wednesday’s Child: The Rubber Burka

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The burkini, in case the gentle reader doubts that I know how to use Wikipedia, is a “modesty swimsuit for women,” covering the whole body like a diving suit, with only the wearer’s face, hands, and feet exposed to the omniscient eye of Allah – one of whose Quranic epithets, incidentally, is “Al-Musawwir,” meaning shaper or designer.  The burkini was trademarked in 2007 by a Muslim lady called Aheda Zanetti, but I note that a garment of exactly the same description made a public appearance over fifty years ago – in the television series The Avengers, worn by Diana Rigg...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

17 Jun, 2017

Going to Rome, the long way around.

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The first time we went to Rome, we took the slow train from Pisa, where we, with the two older children, had spent a week, first at a beach hotel in Tirrenia and then at the always crumbling, always in the process of being restored Royal Victoria Hotel on the Lungarno Paccinotti.  We had been intending to visit Italy for several years, but bringing up four children on a modest income put it beyond our reach.  A ticket, back then, cost us $1200, so three tickets (Alitalia charged half price for children!) was $3600, roughly $6,750 in 2017 dollars.  Throw...

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

14 Jun, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Modern Educayshun

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Thirteen million Britons have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, a delusional pacifist and nostalgic socialist.  The news that Kensington, for the first time in London’s history, is now a Labour borough is counterintuitive, rather like learning that the president of the United States is black, a member of Skull and Bones, cannot distinguish between Iran and Iraq, thinks Latin is the language of Latin America, uses Twitter, and cannot spell the word “counsel.”  If leaders of today’s totalitarian states, such as Russia or North Korea, are best described with recourse to the SketchCop Facette facial recognition software used by international police...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

13 Jun, 2017

Why I’m a Global Warming Skeptic

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Now the alarmists call it “climate change,” which can mean anything from California enjoying even better weather than it already does to a meteor slamming into Los Angeles and extinguishing all life on earth (small “e,” please). But they really mean “global warming,” the phrase used to scare us until the late 2000s, when it became clear it wasn’t happening. I’ve been a skeptic – or denier, as the alarmists say – all along. I remember the 1970s global cooling scare. A 1975 Newsweek article warned of “The Cooling World”: “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have...