Category: Feature

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Feature / Fleming

12 Sep, 2016

Properties of Blood I.7: Dueling For Honor, Part A

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Defining the Duel The word duel is often used loosely to mean a fight between two men or even any competitive conflict between men or beasts.  The historian Victor Kiernan has written an entire book on European dueling without ever, apparently, figuring out what a duel actually was.  Let us begin by setting aside such metaphorical usages as “dueling egos,” “dueling banjos,” and “dueling roosters,” and restrict ourselves to violent encounters between two human antagonists, who may or may not ne accompanied by allies who may simply insure fair play or even take part in the action. If we are...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

12 Sep, 2016

9/11 Still Haunts 2016 Presidential Race

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Without delving into “conspiracy theories,” the 15th anniversaries of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, continue to haunt America and the world, especially the 2016 election. 1. Hillary Clinton, currently running for president herself, was “co-president” for the eight-year run-up to the attacks. She’s running on her long experience in government. But the first (and one hopes only) Clinton administration left the country open to the attacks. For one, its open-borders immigration policy let in the 19 terrorists. For another, its obsession with bombing numerous foreign countries – Iraq, Serbia, Sudan – for no real reason except to keep...

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

7 Sep, 2016

Tripe Advisor

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The generosity of a friend, like a magic carpet, took me to Rome over the weekend, and I am glad to report that the best restaurant in the world is still there and still serves the best tripe.  Outside Italy, mastery over tripe is a useless yardstick of a chef’s eminence, since hardly anybody makes it, while a cook in England would probably get arrested if he dared to put the dish on the menu, containing as it does organic agents even more devastating to the human condition than gluten or traces of nuts.  On our blessed peninsula, however, tripe...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Sep, 2016

Bullying and Baloney

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Bullying is the latest great social craze in the American media. They always have some social pathology with which they terrorize the suckers who watch the news or read websites.  Back in the 1980’s and 90’s they beat the drum for teenage pregnancy and father-daughter incest.  They had to drop the former, after a few dissidents were cruel enough to point out that the term “father” turned out to include the mother’s second husband, live-in boyfriend, and any stranger in the night she happened to entertain. The increase in teenage pregnancies was real enough, but, since the cause was the sexual...

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Feature / Fleming

6 Sep, 2016

Properties of Blood I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part D

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On a more basic level, shame can be an intense feeling of embarrassment and inferiority.  Romance languages express this feeling by using derivatives from the Latin verecundia:  vergogna (Italian), verguenza (Spanish), vergogne (French).  This sense of shame is an expansive category as Julio Caro Baroja points out in his historical account of Spanish honor. “Verecundia shows itself not only as chastity and modesty, as the blush which lewd speech or actions bring to the face, but also as respect for parents and elders, which prevents one from doing certain things in their presence, and as humility, reserve, and respect for...

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Feature

5 Sep, 2016

Reckoning With Reality

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Reality has a way of biting you in the posterior. Americans are finding that out the hard way. They’re going to find it out even more if voters put Hillary Clinton back in the White House. She basically has reassembled President George W. Bush’s Neocon Brain Trust. The Atlantic magazine keeps a tally of Republicans who are backing her, including these Neocons: Richard Armitage, Michael Hayden, John Negroponte, Paul Wolfowitz, Max Boot and Robert Kagan. Add that to the “neo-Liberal” interventionist Democrats she has gathered, and you have a powder keg of interventionist insanity. Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland,...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

5 Sep, 2016

The Chickens Come Home To Roost

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These are not really  trick questions: Question 1) What is dumber than a dumb jock? A sports fan—or sports writer—who lionizes postmodern athaletes [sic!] who are paid to slough off every quality that turns hominid apes into human beings.  Note: I am not talking about genuine athletes, who still exist–though there are not many “Olympians” among them–but sports stars, who are as insubstantial in human terms as any other media celebrity.  Televised football games are aimed at the husbands of soap opera fans, and our sports heroes are cut from the same cardboard and tinsel as Ryan Seacrest and Angelina Jolie. This past...

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

1 Sep, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: The Bloodthirsty Artist

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Everybody knows, however vaguely, that just before World War I, during his years in Vienna, Adolf Hitler made his living as a painter.  In Mein Kampf he recalled his hopes of attaining at least national renown, holding the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts responsible for eventually dashing them by denying him admission.  It is likewise remembered that the Viennese cafes where the epoch’s leading artists habitually gathered were frequented by the future dictator with a view to what today would be called networking.  In 1937, pictures by some of those artists were famously held up to ridicule in the Exhibition...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Feature / Fleming

30 Aug, 2016

Jerks 0: Introduction, Part B (Conclusion)

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Jerkitude is a contagious disease:  After putting up with bullying and rudeness for a few days, we come to expect it, and we are ready to lash out in a preemptive strike against anyone who even slightly offends us.  It’s like the story of the guy whose car breaks down at night on a lonely road and finds he does not have a jack.  He starts walking down the road, imagining the warm reception he will get from a friendly farmer, but the farther he goes, the darker his thoughts become.  What if the farmer doesn’t have a jack?  What...

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Feature / Fleming

29 Aug, 2016

Properties of Blood, I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part C

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Opponents of dueling have made many valid arguments against staking life and honor on swordsmanship or marksmanship, and not all of them went so far as Twain in deriding the very notion of personal honor.   Before evaluating the arguments on both sides, we should have some understanding of what this honor is that would cause a man to risk death.  In the 21st century, honor has little meaning in vernacular English.  It can hardly be used without quotation marks or an ironic intonation of the voice.  This was not always so.  Once upon a time, one could take for...