August 15 marks 50 years since Nixon took us off gold. Since then, gold has gone from $35 an ounce to $1,782. A better way to put it is: The dollar’s value was eroded from $35 an ounce of gold to $1,782 – a reduction of 1/50th of the original value.
Jacques Feyder just must be the font of French cinema in the Renoir tradition. Everything looks very on-location, everyone looks very real-life, every action is quite natural, every development is made as credible as possible through adept, unshowy camerawork, careful lighting, and naturalistic acting.
Andrey Vyshinsky was Stalin’s prosecutor during the Great Purge of 1936-39. He came up with the phrase, “Give me the man and I’ll find the crime.” That’s not remote. In 2009, Harvey Silvergate, a Boston civil rights lawyer, penned a book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”
Dr. Trifkovic discusses with a Stephen Heiner the new orientation of the world post-Covid, and why he does not believe this qualifies as a “pandemic” despite being hospitalized for the disease himself.
Bulldog Drummond VS. Indiana Jones!? Rex takes issue with Dr Fleming’s critique.
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
An earlier less humorous version I meant to keep in draft mode got posted (by me). If you read it, please read the new version. I have post neither column nor comment since August 1. This slacking is not due to heat–it has been in the very low 80’s here in Rockford–nor pique with anyone or anything. I’d spent much of a day eating out, smoking a cigar, and talking for hours and was not surprised to find I had a minor sore throat.
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”? Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a taunt? I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves. I am speaking of the early...
In reading fiction, especially fiction of the lighter sorts, readers are tempted to see the characters in abstract terms as straw men or lay figures invented to play a part or represent an idea, a virtue, or a vice.
