Category: Feature

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

27 Jul, 2016

Living in the Empire of Lies

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Julian Assange did his best to spoil the Hillary-fest being held in the renamed City of Sisterly love.  No sooner had Wikileaks released the DNC emails confirming the active collaboration of party leaders with the Clinton campaign than the state media attempted to divert attention from the fact of what the hacked hacks had actually done to ruin the Sanders campaign.  This is all part of a Putin plot to elect Donald Trump.  Why, it’s an outrage when one country tries to rig political outcomes in another. I could not agree more, which is why American administrations have never involved...

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

27 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: The Less You Know

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This is my forty-eighth post in this space–a panoply variegated enough for a whole Well-Tempered Clavier of distempered musings – and some of my readers may have noted that not once did I review or commend a book.  This is because the industry that produces books, which were once significant events, each with a claim to absolute uniqueness or at the very least to qualified originality, now functions like the writer of Melania Trump’s address to the Republican convention.  Plagiarism long ago ceased to be an intellectual crime, yet it remained a niche product, like tales of the supernatural or...

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Feature / Fleming

25 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood I.5 Revenge, Part D

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Christian Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge.  Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation.  Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.  Moral understanding of crime and punishment has certainly moved on since the writing of the Pentateuch, but if Christ was serious that he came not to overturn but to fulfill the law, then we cannot begin anywhere else, if we wish...

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Feature / On the House / Phillips Red

25 Jul, 2016

A Chump for Trump: A Court Party No More

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In early 2015, well before Donald Trump was a blip on the radar screen, a friend asked me to contribute an article to a Constitution Party newsletter.   I happily obliged. The article was entitled “Needed: a Real Country Party,” but, because of the nature of the venue, it was never made available for wide public viewing. I am currently working on an update of that article because I believe it helps explain why Donald Trump and Trumpism have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams (or nightmares) of the political and pundit class. Because of the momentous nature of the Trump...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

22 Jul, 2016

One More Reason I’m Glad I’m Not a Conservative

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When several people asked me what I thought of the Republican Convention in Cleveland, I had to answer truthfully that I had paid very little attention to the quadrennial shenanigans. Much of my time, this past week, was devoted to driving my broken-legged wife to medical appointments, the most serious of which was the three hour operation that took place yesterday.  The doctors are proclaiming a tactical victory, but recovery time is now being measured in terms of months rather than weeks, which puts our October program in Greece on hold. When I did have time to turn on the...

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

21 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Yes, Prime Minister

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Britain has a new prime minister by the name of Theresa May.  In and of itself this may not be reason enough for jubilation, but last week the new leader appointed a cabinet that was considerably stronger than what many, myself included, had been expecting.  No fewer than four leaders of the Leave EU movement in parliament received ministerial portfolios, most remarkably Boris Johnson, who became Foreign Secretary; David Davis was given a new post of Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union; and a similarly novel position created in the wake of the referendum, that of Secretary of...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

19 Jul, 2016

Learning to Write and Read Verse

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Several readers and friends have asked me how to read poetry, and the questions usually take the form of asking my advice on this or that book on prosody or form or the history of poetry.  I invariably reply to such requests—as I also reply to requests for “one good book” on Greek drama or the fall of Rome or ancient rhetoric, by suggesting generally that is best to form one’s taste on the “classics” that used to be approved by the wisdom of our ancestors, the cut-off being World War I. In matters of writing—poetry and rhetoric, for example—I...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Revenge, Part C

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Civilized people will never be impressed by any argument that seems to celebrate the morality of apes.  We are, after all, human beings who are, as Christians say, made in the image of God or, as Darwinists insist, the product of tens of millions of years of evolutionary progress.  It is a main thrust of philosophical liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. I can almost hear the rumblings from the professors, social workers, and other right-thinking people:  ”If you once start conceding some legitimacy...

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Feature / Phillips Red

18 Jul, 2016

Anti-Trumpers, Please Watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

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{I beg pardon from both Red Phillips and our readers for being so late in publishing this.  It arrived on a day I was preparing dinner for a few early arrivals to our Summer Symposium, which just ended Saturday night.  I was preparing the dinner–a two day project–because the chef in charge, namely my wife, had just broken and badly dislocated her ankle in several places and will have to undergo an operation this week. TJF] As a good traditional conservative, I like Westerns. If you watch a lot of Westerns you will eventually discern that many of them have a...

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

13 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Betting on Winners

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  In a writer’s life it sometimes happens that no sooner does he put a thought in words than chance sends him fresh evidence to substantiate it, a kind of souvenir acknowledgement in tacit confirmation of what he had been thinking.  So it happened last week.  No sooner had I posted my musings on football than chance spirited me away to a place called Enna, a mountain townlet in the middle of Sicily, where, of all places, an international piano competition, with my wife among the jurors, was to take place.  Free lodging, free grub, and free air at temperatures...