Category: Fleming

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

Rome, Year 16 AMT

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I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had recently been changed,...

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Autodidact / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

The Plagues of Greece, an Interview with Nikolaos Hidiroglou

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First, the one homework submission. Vince Cornell sends in:   t is inevitable what we face. What we did once treasure we must now break. But first must we state our causes plainly. That this divide did arise from just cause Be assured, for we declare with one voice That our lives, our liberty, and our joy Are those goods which we must of our own secure. Britain, it was you that did bar our way, Cruelly depriving us of our base rights. Destructive became your rule over us, And we now do form our own government Building it upon...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

13 Nov, 2015

Trump: The Lesser Evil

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Hillary Clinton’s take on a large percentage of the American people is drawing fire: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right, The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” and added, “some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The other half of Trump supporters are simply stupid and depressed, and people in Hillaryland should pity them. Let’s do some quick and very rough math.  In round numbers, the country has about 280 million people, about three fourths of whom—or 210 million—are old enough to vote.  Making...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Nov, 2015

Greece II

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Athens may be the oldest city in Europe. It is certainly the oldest that is still significant. There were settlements on the Acropolis before the Greeks arrived, and, although the Athenians may have slightly exaggerated in claiming that their citadel was never abandoned in the Greek Dark Age brought on by the so-called Dorian Invasion, they are more or less right that they maintained some kind of polity throughout that grim period. Whether they can survive the new Dark Age, brought on not by more primitive northern Greeks–or still more primitive invaders from the Middle East–but by Athenian politicians who...

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Fleming / Interviews

9 Nov, 2015

Interview with Misa Djurkovic, Part III

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The Bigger Picture 8.  Why is this happening.  Is this a case of historical accident?  Do you agree with American and European who say it is all the fault of President Assad or does US support for the rebels—only the “moderate and democratic” rebels, of course—play a part? The roots of this problem spread deep into neoconservative (neotrotskyite) schemes and are behind the agenda of “democratizing” the Muslim world. It started with Afghanistan and reaches a climax with Arab Spring. There is now massive instability all around MENA (the Middle East and North Africa): the slaughter of Christians, outbursts of...

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Fleming / Interviews

3 Nov, 2015

Misa Djurkovic Interview, Part II

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Part II:  The European Context 5. The Germans seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouth, with Merkel saying early on that this had to be treated as a humanitarian crisis but later blaming Hungary and Croatia for letting so many migrants into the EU.  What do you think she and other EU leaders have in mind? I just published a book called The Illusion of European Union. One big chapter deala with immigration politics in the EU. It is a mess, that basically comes down to a strong internal fight between ordinary people–which includes even statesmen...

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Autodidact / Fleming

31 Oct, 2015

Cicero, Part II: Enter Cicero, Stage Left.

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The most notable event of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, however, was the political trial of Gaius Verres. As governor of Sicily (73-71) Verres had outdone all his predecessors and rivals in corruption and theft, and he could afford to retain the greatest legal and political talent of the day, the former consul and arch-conservative, Q. Hortensius Hortalus.

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Fleming / Interviews

30 Oct, 2015

An Interview With Misa Djurkovic: Serbia–and Europe–Under Siege

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An Interview with Misa Djurkovic, a writer and political analyst with the Institute of European Studies, Belgrade. Part I:  Τhe Immigration Crisis and Serbia 1. How has the Inundation of Islamic refugees affected Serbia?   How many have actually crossed into Serbia?  Do many stay or are they just passing through on the way to Hungary. For the time being more than 200, 000 of immigrants, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq have entered Serbia. Not all of them should be regarded as refugees or asylum seekers. Huge number of them are economic immigrants. At this point, all of them...

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Best Revenge / Fleming

29 Oct, 2015

Back to the Past, Part I: Athens

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International travel has always been a chore, but in recent decades that chore has begun to equal one of the labors of Hercules. The blame lies in part to pointless security regulations and the TSA goons culled from the prisons, asylums, and housing projects from which they were recruited, in part to the airlines who, in packing fatter and fatter Americans into tighter and tighter places, have defied the laws of solid geometry, but in larger part to the travelers themselves. What people! Unwashed bodies bulging out of unwashed jeans, aging fat ladies whose decibels rise with the alcohol content...

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Autodidact / Fleming

22 Oct, 2015

Preface to Cicero

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Cicero is, in fact, one of the most important figures in our tradition: statesman and orator,  rhetorical theorist, public philosopher, and a writer of marvelous letters that still give us a candid picture of insider politics that is unmatched to this day.