Audio Lecture: Losing Property and Liberty by Dr. Thomas Fleming
Dr. Fleming talks about property and ownership. Do you really own it or can it be taken away?
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Burn This Book! Part I
Why do we send our children to school, much less to a college or a university? I have put this question to any number of parents, teachers, and headmasters and only rarely received a better answer than: “So they can get a good job.” Never having had what most people call a good job, I take their word for it that taking out tonsils or keeping felons out of jail constitutes a good job, so long as it brings in more than 100k in the second or third year of practice.
Wednesday’s Child: More Fake News
The gentle reader did not comment on last week’s post, so I follow the famous orchestra conductor’s advice to slow down if the audience finds your tempo sluggish. With regard to old icons – the “figure” of my metaphor, as a literary critic would say, current news being its “ground” – my meaning was clear enough, I think.
PRESIDENT TRUMP ADDRESSES THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, 5
My Fellow Americans, I promised you I would take up the six most serious problems confronting the survival of our country. In this fifth broadcast I am going to discuss what is undoubtedly the most sensitive subject of all.
The Nightmare Convention
I’ve watched at least some of every major party national convention since 1964, when I was nine. There’s something different about the Democratic National Convention this year. The speakers boldly laid out how they are going to impose tyranny on America. Don’t miss the key part of the festivities on Day Three, from about 18:00 to 28:00 on the video. It’s an unrelenting attack on gun rights, unalleviated by even a mention of the Second Amendment, or how owning hunting rifles would not be banned, the lines Bill Clinton and others long used. They want our guns – all of...
Think Twice Before You Bend
I just accidentally ran across a FB post in which trans-gendering is justified by the claim that the word “man” once referred to humans of either sex and “she” was not invented until the 13th century. These people are wonderfully creative, almost as creative as the average priest or minister who lies his way through the Scriptures and the Creeds. I don’t suppose I have to point out to any of my readers that different languages express natural distinctions in a variety of ways. That distinctions of tense, for example, are in some Indo-European languages, no more significant than...
An Unreconstructed Summer Symposium
It was the Summer of 2008 when I first made my way up to Rockford, Illinois. It was a slow, languorous summer drive, with plenty of preparatory reading to do, some often crammed in during the final segment of the voyage. In many ways, this year was no different. In other ways, the long tentacles of Covid-19 (and its handlers) couldn’t help but be felt by the attendees. But perhaps the miracle is that we were able to meet at all, while most of the world huddled inside or behind masks, frightened by the government, media, and the new bands...
Wednesday’s Child: Fake News
Disinformation, which we Russians lovingly nickname deza, differs from ordinary misinformation in that it is planted or spread knowingly, with malice aforethought and the intent to deceive. This looks good on paper, until a piece of fake news is actually before us and we start mulling it over, and then what is patently a case of carelessness or even of fraudulent intent may begin to take on the configurations of a gospel truth. That fake, after all, has not come out of nowhere. That fake is almost always a palimpsest of earlier fakes, and as one’s mind keeps burrowing deeper...
Silicon Kamala Valley
People are writing about Kamala Harris, our next president – maybe? Joe Biden clearly is out of it. I’m still predicting a Trump win. But if not, then either Joe will be replaced before the election, or will resign due to health reasons after it. But nobody I’ve seen is writing about her special relationship with the new Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley and its digital offshoots in San Francisco. California long was balanced between Northern California and Southern California. Northern Cal’s dominant families originally came from New England. Knob Hill in San Francisco was like the Boston...
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from U—
I’m writing this on a terrace that overlooks cerulean infinity on three sides, yet a day here is costing me less than a cocktail, with an inevitable accompaniment of olives and roasted nuts, at the Cala di Volpe or any number of similarly fancy establishments dotting the map of Italy from the Costa Smeralda upwards
