And now for something completely different! Since Polish novelists and ancient historians have proved to be too daunting or time-consuming for most readers, I am taking a different tack and devoting a few days to Bite of the Bulldog (initially titled simply Bulldog Drummond), a short thriller in which the reader meets one of the great pop fiction heroes of the last century, Bulldog Drummond.
I only have one question to put to conservatives who are waxing wroth about the media coverage of the Trump Administration: Why are you reading Time and the New York Times? Why are you watching ABC, CNN, and FOX?
Hollywood and Congress are free to make up any reality they like, but anyone who has lived on the ground in the real American knows perfectly well that the welfare-consuming classes are living off the sweat of American workers, whose only reward is to be insulted and attacked.
On Thursday May 19, I’ll be giving a lecture at the Irish Rose. In putting the finishing touches on the talk, I decided to see if there had been any major candidates in the presidential race who had not succumbed to the insanity of wanting to arm the Kurds. “Not one, no no, not one!” Here is a little extract of the talk. In the nearly 1400 years since Mohammed began persecuting and massacring Jews and Christians, this pattern of Muslim behavior has not changed. Flash forward to end of 19th century, as Ottoman Turks were being driven out of the...
Why are so many Republicans shying away from Trump and promising to boycott the convention? Whatever the answer is, we know it has nothing to do with principles, because they don’t have any. What they do have are paymasters. In picking a side, e.g., the global war machine to which Maddog John McCain bends the knee, or the Megachurch pseudo-Christian pastors bloated on greed and ignorance that Ted Cruz adores, or the transnational business interests that force the Republican Party to stiff the American people by bringing in cheap labor and shipping jobs off to Chinese slave-masters. Even the hint...
Although nobody asked for my opinion on these bits of news, I have a few things to say. First. Finally, the head of a major Christian denomination with a grain of sense! The bleeding-heart-liberal Archbishop of Canterbury has informed the world that it is not racist to oppose mass migration. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35781613. While calling upon England to do more than it is doing to help so-called Syrian so-called refugees, he said that it was “outrageous” to describe fears about the migrant crisis as racism. Archbishop Welby is as leftwing as most English and North American bishops and ministers of the Anglican communion, but unlike too many...
Ransom Notes March 2 2016 Q: Several people have asked me about the Uzbek nanny in Russia who decapitated the child she was minding. Some news stories have reported that she was distraught because her husband back in Uzbekistan had decided to take a second wife. Other reports indicated that she was psychotic. What really was her motivation? TJF: The answer should obvious to anyone familiar with the old Flip Wilson routine whose signature was “the devil made me do it.” In this case the Uzbek nanny claims allah—which amounts to more or less the same thing—told her to murder...
Pastor Brent MacGuire writes in with two questions: When the enclitic “-ne” is added to a word to make an interrogative, does the stressed syllable, per the law of the penult, get pushed back or does it remain as it did before? “ah MAHT nay” or “AH maht nay”? Same question for the enclitic “que.” If you try to check this on the internet, as I did (being away from my library), you will find a good deal of false information. In fact, the general rule is that when enclitic particles are added to a word, the word accent has...
Dallas Shipp writes in to ask: “You once wrote that whenever a talking head on television referred to a storm or a shooting as a ‘tragedy,’ their misuse of the word amounted to nihilism. Could you elaborate and explain your point? TJF: I don’t recall using the word “nihilism,” but I have frequently argued against the trivializing of the word tragedy by applying it to accident victims and people who have suffered in a disaster. The trivialization works in two directions. First, it reduces to the word tragedy to meaning something like “terrible misfortune” or “incomprehensible suffering.” It is...
Kellen Buckles wrote to TFF Facebook page: A friend gave me a copy of Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” and I was wondering if my time will be well spent negotiating those 1,150 pages. Her prologue was full of intriguing ideas but I don’t want to be led astray. TJF: The simple answer is that it is a wonderful book, certainly the most insightful and entertaining volume on the Balkans that is available in English. Nothing else comes close. West does not know the language and makes historical mistakes, but her approach is humble and allows the various...
Augustan England
