“At the end of the day,” declared the minister–or bleated the commentator or droned the expert…. But why continue? Phrases like at the end of the day are useful signposts, saying: IGNORE THE FOLLOWING COMMUNICATION.
A few days ago the President of the United States derided several governors as “neanderthals” because they decided to relax the restrictions on social life that had been imposed in a panic-response to COVID. What has he got against that extinct race of human beings? Neanderthal men, so far as I have been able to gather over the years, were a crude lot but capable of speech and, from the guesses I have read, endowed with an IQ range in the 70’s and 80’s. Since they interbred with members of Homo sapiens, it may be unfair to refer to them...
What is the Kingdom of God, and how can human beings demand that it arrive?
US Catholic bishops urges people NOT to take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it ‘uses tissue connected to aborted fetal cells’
Enactment of plank #2 leads ineluctably to #3: Declare the 14th Amendment invalid. Forrest McDonald and Raul Berger (among other historians and scholars) have shown that the 14th Amendment was both passed illegally—a bare majority was deemed sufficient, the votes of Southern states were coerced, and new states were admitted in order to gain ratification—and misconstrued to cover a wide variety of privileges not anticipated (and specifically repudiated) by the authors, such as the rights to vote and hold office. Since the Amendment was never enacted legally, all court decisions and Federal laws based in conformity or in expansion of...
I used to laugh at snowbirds who let a little bad weather drive them out of their homes to the dismal housing tracts that have destroyed Florida, but I can no longer take it.
“Conservatives are waxing wroth over a New York City high school principal who sent anti-white racist materials to parents in which a scale of “whiteness was outlined ranging from Uncle Tom Whiteys labelled “White Abolitionists” to the downright evil “White Supremacists” by way of varying shades of collaboration or resistance to America’s entrenched racist regime.
In selecting books to read, many people are content to employ The Random Walk method of my childhood, when I was set loose, without guidance, in a library to prowl on my own. This method has the advantage of finding hidden treasures, but it’s a bit like digging for gold, without any knowledge of what gold is and where it can be found, in a vacant lot. You’re more likely to find old soup cans, dog excrement, and sodden rotting copies of the shopper insert in the daily newspaper.
I am not sensing a great deal of interest in this great novel, but I shall raise one question to see if it receives a response. If readers have got at least a fourth of the way through the work, they will have read the account of Pan Jan’s diplomatic journey, his capture, and his trials.
There are countless books and articles on the press: its history, its role in defining democracy, its problems, its scandals. What is hard to find is a serious discussion of the fundamental dishonesty, the trivial huckstering that characterizes even the best newspapers. I once had dinner with a distinguished European scholar, who, with a little encouragement, asked me why there was so little freedom of discussion in the United States. Was it due to the village mentality described by Tocqueville? Or was it merely the effect of the tight grip of the media oligarchy? If the latter was true, how...
