The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
More Birthdays: Podcast
An 18 minute podcast on Bat Masterson, Joe Di Maggio, Emperor Komnenos, John Bunyan, William Blake, Berry Gordy, Jimi Hendrix, Merle Travis, Voltaire, C.S. Lewis, Gregory of Tours, Jonathan Swift, Theodor Momsen,
VOA Propagandizing Americans on Ukraine
The Voice of America is part of the U.S. government’s Ministry of Truth. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibited it from directly broadcasting to the American people. It did some good during the Cold War, with programs aimed at those behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere. With the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the rise of the Web c. 1994, it should have been abolished. But as Milton Friedman said, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government agency. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 gave the VOA the OK to broadcast directly to Americans, supposedly...
A Happy Real American Thanksgiving
how, once upon a time, some footloose Englishmen came to the New World seeking easy gold, free land, and the right to spit tobacco when and where they wanted. As good Anglicans, these adventurers, roughnecks, and proto-cavaliers were too busy minding their business to worry to much about minding yours. The few who who survived the initial attempts to settle various spots in Virginia, beginning with Jamestown, were reminded of their own weakness and from time to time their leaders decided it was time to give thanks to the Almighty for letting them survive in this savage land. So, with one accord, the men brought what game they could shoot, along with their jugs of corn-squeezings and stashes of tobacco, whipped out their fiddles, and had themselves a great time
Wednesday’s Child: Sympathy for the Devil
The private plane used for delivering women to Epstein was known as the Lolita Express, with reference to Nabokov’s third-rate novel. The same bien pensants who admire the book are among the first to sling mud at Epstein’s shadow, but it is the still wider landscape of morality that makes a nonsense of their hypocritical censoriousness.
Climate Change, Face Book, and Other Nonsense
On the basis of what authority are you entitled to declare all criticism of manmade climate change to be rightwing ideology? I know several people who never got beyond 9th grade general science but are forever sounding off on FB on the idiocy of “conservatives”–by which I think they mean supporters of global capitalism–who deny what all right-thinking men are supposed to know. Of course all right-thinking men once upon a time believed in Phlogiston, spontaneous generation, phrenology, and the possibility of a successful Marxist economy. It is true that we all have opinions, most of them unsubstantiated by any stronger proof than an editorial in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or perhaps it was something we misunderstood once back in Music Appreciation 101. That is what ideologies do to the brain, and it scarcely matters if it is the ideology of Al Gore or Alfred Rosenburg. If Mr Henman, so absolutely certain he is on the right side of history (or should I say the left side), thinks he is an expert on climatology, how did he come by his expertise?
Judge Napolitano’s Abuse of Roman History
For some reason Judge Andrew Napolitano is obsessed with pushing flimsy reasons to impeach President Trump. He gave Reason mag a list of five reasons to do so. But that’s “Loserthink,” as Scott Adams explains in his new book of that name. If you can’t come up with one good reason for something, such as impeachment, then it’s just a “laundry list,” with every item weak. The judge even started out saying “three or four” reasons, then ended up with five. He’s a self-parody out of the old Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch, in which the inquisitors kept increasing the...
Thomas Fleming to Speak in Kentucky
Soon Fleming Foundation readers living in the vicinity of Louisville, Kentucky will have a chance to encounter Dr. Fleming in person, for on December 6th he will be at the parish hall of Saint Michael’s Orthodox Church to deliver the address “Shakespeare, Christian Moralist: Love, Family, Justice, and Hamlet.” The evening will kick off with a wine & cheese reception at 7 p.m., followed by Dr. Fleming’s lecture and a Q & A session. This free public event is sponsored by Immaculata Classical Academy, along with Holy Family Radio WCLR AM 1040. An independent Catholic school recognized by the Louisville...
Politics of Human Nature, Part III
A 24 minute podcast on how modern ideologies–Marxist, Freudian, feminist, Classical Liberal–have fragmented and undermined our understanding of human nature. The Soviet experiment ended in complete failure, and the American and European experiment in democratic hedonism is going faster into ruin than communism.
Wednesday’s Child: Natural Hypochondria
The weather’s changed, we are now into the rainy season, and the crowds in pharmacies are out of control. The British equivalent of the Italian drugstore is the local post office branch, because there, too, people socialize while waiting in the interminable queue, with the dispatch of a parcel a mere cover story not unlike the quest for advice regarding a cold sore. The gum-chewing, nose-pierced, orange-haired girl in the window, however, is nothing like the patrician figure of the pharmacist – always male, and portly enough to exude authority – a single word from whose august mouth can make...
