Category: Feature

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

4 May, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: But ah, my Foes, and oh, my Friends

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Vladimir Bukovsky, whom I became friends with while living in Cambridge in the late 80’s, was born in 1942.  In 1963, while a student in Moscow, he was arrested and charged with possession of forbidden literature. As it was thought more convenient to pronounce a lad of 20 insane than to bother with a trial, he was committed to a special psychiatric hospital.  He was released in February 1965 and arrested again in December of that year for organizing a street demonstration.  This time he was committed to a psychiatric hospital of the ordinary type. Released in July 1966, in...

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Feature / Olson

22 Apr, 2016

The Ealing Comedies

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Will Barker, a commercial traveler with a passion for photography, bought “the Lodge” overlooking Ealing Green in West London in 1902 for the purpose of making movies. Cinema–very often television programs rather than movies–has been made there ever since. Recently, a couple of its studios hosted the servants’ quarters of Downton Abbey. The place reached its perihelion after World War II, when the production company, Ealing Studios, made a string of 17 comedies, from Hue and Cry in 1947 to Davy in 1958.  Those films brought British cinema to world consciousness as few never before, pleasing critics as well as...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

21 Apr, 2016

The Face on the Barroom Coin

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The Good News [from Matthew 22]: And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying…Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?  But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?  Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?  They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.  When they had heard...

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

20 Apr, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Readers 1, Writers 0

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Children, generally speaking, are not wiser than their parents, and it cannot ever be said that pupils are much cleverer than teachers, but it is a manifest truth that newspaper editors are always stupider than newspaper readers.  In fact, reading a newspaper invariably conjures up in my mind the image of a large department store where the customers, who are ordinary people possessed of the usual medley of human qualities, are served by moronic salesgirls, automatons with the dual setting of surly or flirty. In England I read the Daily Mail, of which there is no longer an equivalent in...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

19 Apr, 2016

Trump Begins New Phase of Campaign

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Donald Trump’s easy victory in his home state of New York rockets him into the next phase of his campaign: The long march taken by the Okies to California. Albeit in a custom-built 747. Some pundits have criticized Trump for not having a “ground game” and not “knowing the rules” of the nominating process, especially in Colorado. But the process was rigged from the beginning against somebody like him – somebody like Ron Paul, whose 2008 campaign sparked GOP convention rules that prevented his name being put in nomination at the 2012 convention. If the rules are rigged, why play...

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Feature / Fleming

19 Apr, 2016

Live Until You Die (on the house)

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This is an improved version of an essay first published in 1999 “I grow old learning many things,” said Solon, a poet well-known for his wisdom and for his longevity: He lived to be almost 80.  Although, as my old teacher Douglas Young pointed out, Solon’s statement might be interpreted to mean “too much education makes one prematurely old,” the point is clear enough and as true today as it was 2400 years ago when the Athenian poet-statesman lived long enough to see his beloved city acquiesce in the rule of a tyrant: A wise man never ceases to learn new...

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

13 Apr, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Just Don’t Call It Praetorian

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A physiognomic peculiarity of Viktor Zolotov, who until last week and for the past 13 years had been head of Russia’s presidential bodyguard, is that he is a Doppelgänger of the man he was charged with protecting from enemies foreign and domestic.  Dogs sometimes grow to look like their owners, and evidently this applies not only to old ladies’ poodles, but to guard dogs as well.  The German word I’m using, incidentally, meaning a body double, is not so much pretentiousness on my part as consciousness of an historical rhyme. If Zolotov is a Putin clone, what used to be...

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Feature / FF / Heiner

9 Apr, 2016

The indefatigable Dr. Clyde Wilson

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I was in my late 20s when I first met Dr. Clyde Wilson at a Rockford Institute event.  If you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting Dr. Wilson and listening to that singular gravelly voice, you’ve known learning and gentility bound together with a ready smile, no matter how curmudgeonly he might be in other fora. I remember sitting on a porch with him on Johns Island, South Carolina, at my first Abbeville Institute event (I would go on to attend four more).  I had a question related to what I then referred to as the “Battle of Antietam” (my yankee-addled...

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Feature / FF

7 Apr, 2016

Merle Haggard, Requiescat in Pace by Robert Reavis

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This tribute was penned by our Okie friend Robert Reavis, who  frequently comments on this site. Country singer, song writer, and middle American poet, Merle Haggard, died at his home in California this past Wednesday at age 79.  To paraphrase one of  his acquaintances, the blind poet Ronnie Millsap,“ his life was almost like a song but not too sad to write.” In many ways Merle Haggard was an old Ghost Rider in the Sky who had roots in Oklahoma that dried up with the dust bowl that sent his mother and father to California, where Merle was born.  To be...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

6 Apr, 2016

Trump and Trade

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A couple of days ago I briefly tuned in to Mark Levin’s radio show. He was talking about Trump and trade, making the “comparative advantage” point you might remember from Econ. 101.  That if each country makes what it can most cheaply, such as America designing iPhones and China assembling them (my examples, not his), then everybody comes off better.  But if we impose tariffs, then prices go up for everybody, most hurting the poor when they go to buy stuff. So Trump’s attacks on Ford for moving a plant to Mexico, which on April 5 he called an “absolute...