Category: Feature

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

30 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Eating an Englishman

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An extraordinary episode set Moscow’s beau monde on its ear last week–extraordinary in the sense that, if a cannibal, instead of boiling an Englishman in the nude, were to eat him together with his bowler hat, silk umbrella, and brogues by John Lobb of St. James’s Street, this might be considered outrageous cannibal behavior.  “What an extraordinary way to act at table,” other, more fastidious cannibals would be heard muttering. A veteran journalist by the name of Viktor Shenderovich was interviewed on “Moscow Echo”–supposedly the last oasis of dissent yet extant in the Russian media mainstream–and made some remarks about...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 Dec, 2015

Making War on the War on the War Against Christmas

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Everyone these days seems to have some complaint against the Christmas holiday.  You’ve heard them all by now, Muslims and Jews whining about “inclusiveness,” downtown storeowners complaining about the chainstores in the malls, and chainstores complaining about Amazon.   Small wonder people are so depressed this time of year.  Not only is the sun disappearing—and who knows if the global warmingists will ever let it return?—but everyone and his Buddhist brother has some ax to grind. The late Herbert W. Armstrong of the Worldwide Whacky Church of G-d Knows What used to do an annual radio broadcast denouncing Christmas.  Crazy...

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

23 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Planet of the Apes

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  Gentle reader may remember that I was in London last week in aid of a friend charged with racism for calling a Negro cabdriver an ape.  Fine arguments marshaled by the defense came to naught once the female judge had had a good look at the defendant’s shoes. These were polished to a high shine, and clean shoes are, as the defendant ought to have known at his age, a telltale sign of racist attitudes in white males.  He was found guilty and fined. Lest my reader think I am being facetious, I draw his attention to this post’s...

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Feature / Fleming

17 Dec, 2015

Annals of Trebizond IV, Facts and Fictions

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The long reign of Alexios III  (1349-90) marks the beginning of the end of the Empire of Trebizond.   Alexios, as the result of a palace coup,  came to the throne as a boy of 11, and his youth and inexperience were an invitation to challenges of every sort:  warlords in the provinces, his own counselors and bureaucrats, and even from within the church.  The Trapezuntine elite was dominated by factions loyal either to Constantinople or to the more locally centered provincial aristocracy.  The feud between the Genoese and Venetians broke out again, when the latter were once again granted...

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

17 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

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  A funny story, this, but it also kind of makes you want to cry, a perfect combination for a Wednesday’s child broadside– especially in Advent, with its heritage of Dickensian, bittersweet tales of moral instruction. I am in London this week to help out a friend who got himself in trouble. A few months ago, returning from a dinner party in a state of more than slight inebriation, he hailed a black cab – you know the kind, the retro thingie with a doorframe high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat, the legendary vehicle that makes...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

15 Dec, 2015

Climate Change: A Frank Conversation, Part One

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The recent global summit on climate change—inevitably described as “historic”—was discussed and analyzed all over the media-sphere, by bloggers read only by their mothers and friends (if they have any) and  by the the most swollen talking heads on television.  Everyone was interviewed, profiled, and analyzed.  One important participant—an observer really—who escaped their attention was an obscure Italian political analyst, whose work has been studied without understanding for many years.  I had a chance to sit down with this great skeptic, and interview him on condition of anonymity.  Let’s just call him Nick O.  Before the conversation was over, we were...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

11 Dec, 2015

Aliens and Seditious Acts

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Donald Trump, as heavy-footed and inarticulate as he is, has shows himself time after time to be a man of superb political instincts.  Cut off, for most of his life, from contact with ordinary Americans, he manages, nonetheless, to display old-fashioned common sense in statements guaranteed both to delight what is fast becoming the Silent Minority and to outrage the cowards, liars, and flunkeys who dominate politics and the press. Donald’s latest stunt—and we can only hope that it is not just a stunt—is to call for a moratorium on Islamic immigration into the United States.  Of course, most sensible...

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Feature / FF

10 Dec, 2015

Cicero, De Officiis, A ON THE HOUSE

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As a Roman moralist, Cicero is seen at his best in the three books of his De Officiis, a work that Dr. Johnson said ought to be read once a year.  Officia are not public offices but duties, the responsibilities it is incumbent upon us to carry out.  Cicero  draw his primary inspiration from Plato and his followers in the Middle Academy, a phase of Platonism that emphasized epistemological skepticism.  However, he was  also very eclectic and fair-minded, seeking useful truths wherever he could find them–especially from Aristotle but also from the Stoics whose extremism he objected to.  For all his...

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

9 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Man vs. SORM

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You know me, folks. You know that when I hear the phrase “human rights” I release the safety catch of my Browning, or at least spit on the floor to register contempt.  Like “social diversity,” which is its opposite in real life–and like a thousand other weasel phrases too noxious to enumerate here–that neologism is not only not a synonym of individual liberty, but often its functional antonym.  So you will not think less of me if I mention something called the European Court of Human Rights in other than a derisory way. Some nine years ago a man in...