Category: Feature

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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...

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Feature / Fleming

8 Jun, 2017

BREAKING  NEWS: FLEMING FOUNDATION RETURNS TO ITALY

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  10: AM CDT In the palatial headquarters of The Fleming Foundation, Founder and President Thomas Fleming, surrounded by popping flashbulbs and rolling movie cameras, made an official announcement that brought joy to the literally dozens of friends and readers who follow the work of the Foundation. (They actually number in the hundreds, but dozens sounds more poetic.) I am happy to report that we have struck an agreement with the beautiful Grand Hotel del Gianicolo to arrange TFF’s first convivial meeting in Italy: A one week meeting in Rome to explore “the grandeur that was Rome,” specifically, the height...

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Clyde Wilson / Feature

6 Jun, 2017

 Democratic Discourse

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I am not one of those who spends time reading or writing “tweets.”  Life is too short and I am already the victim of too many forms of communication.  However, a friend sent me a “tweet” that arrested my attention as illustrative of the sad state of our “democracy.” The tweeter, upset by President Trump’s apparent  (and ill-advised)  use  of the word “covfefe,” tells the world: “Trump now claims his ‘covfefe’ tweet contained no typos.  This is sociopathy.  He must be impeached ASAP.” Note that this statement is not opinion or argument. It is an imperious demand for a transfer...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

2 Jun, 2017

I Wake Up Screaming–The Nightmare that is Kathy Griffin

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Kathy Griffin, one of nature’s more repellant mistakes, is now complaining that she has been bullied by the Trumps.  Preposterous, no?  Even Trump-haters with a normal brain—my friend and colleague, Navrozov for example—would have to concede that  it is in unquestionably poor taste to get a laugh by portraying anyone, much less the head of state, as the victim of decapitation. What kind of people are these, you may ask:  We know what kind of people they are—degraded specimens of postmodern ex-humanity who could not care less what effect their little pranks might have on the families of their victims...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

31 May, 2017

The Authoritarian Personality–GENX

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Part III We are some time after the beginning of the new millennium.  Americans are fighting “for their freedom” in two wars and liberating their own homosexual citizens who labored under civil disabilities.   Fritz Rechstaffen III, who (like President Bush) once did a stint in the National Guard, is an enthusiastic supporter of the President’s war on terror.  His son Fritz IV, known as JJ after his two middle names Justin and Joshuah, is not so sure. He is a bit tired of his father’s patriotic rants over the dinner table.   He doesn’t want to waste time going...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 May, 2017

The Authoritarian Personality–The Next Generations

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Sometime in the 1960’s a young German-American named Fritz Rechtschaffen is having a beer with his father, a prosperous owner of several appliance stores and a staunch Republican.  Pretending to take an interest in the boring old businessman, Fritz junior asks: “So, dad.  So like what did you do during the war?” Fritz senior, bringing the glass to his lips, pauses with the glass in midair and looks uncharacteristically pensive.  After a  half minute of embarrassing silence, the father takes a swallow of beer. “You know, son.  We spent the war years back in Germany.  It would have been hard...