When over a year ago now I wrote on: “A Nest of Swamp Rats,” I treated the leading actors in the pursuit of the Democrats’ Russian hoax as exemplars of institutional or bureaucratic mediocrity, of opportunism, arrogance, and stupidity. Apart from a mention of John Brennan’s youthful Communism, I credited none of them with anything as risky as thinking.
The family is not the only natural social institution that is being undermined by the modern state. Men are by nature competitive, and they created war and games, politics and the marketplace, to satisfy their need to contend for status, wealth and power. One of leftism’s greatest successes has been to adopt the social language of Christianity and to transfer it from enclosed households (which are naturally communal and socialist) to the open fields where men do battle with each other. This is a point I made briefly in The Morality of Everyday Life and which has been expanded...
I’m often told that people “didn’t know what they voted for,” or were “stupid,” or are, “as everyone knows, racist.” Fascinatingly, as far as I know, stupid people, racist people, and even people who are lied to get equal votes in a democracy.
President Trump’s opponents in the military are using the classic language of military strongmen who overthrow republican government.
My second law of presidential elections is that the best liar wins (usually). This law goes a long way toward explaining why it took so long for the result of the 2000 election to be declared: Both parties were working round the clock, not only in the lower courts but also in the ultimate TV court of appeal, to spin flax into flannel. In this never-ending period of what everyone seems to be calling a political crisis, no one is willing to talk about the underlying problems which have nothing to do with the electoral college or voting machines but with the basic legitimacy–or rather the lack thereof–of the American regime.
I have, as promised, added two sections, the first on the metrical shape of the lines with some small effort to show a parallel effect in English, and, second, on the tightness of syntax and word order that makes the first stanza one complete thought expressed in a complete sentence–something we simply cannot do, at least not very well, in English.
Mr. Autodidact has been missing in action for some time. We celebrate his triumphant return by announcing our plan for two weekly programs on Latin, corresponding roughly to the first and second years of a college Latin course. As many of our readers know, I did a Latin I course on CD’s plus study guide years ago. Back then, we kept the lessons short and Spartan, because of production and shipping costs. This meant that I had to leave out a fair amount of explanation. In addition, because of our very limited technology, the recorded material had to be dry–we...
This is a poem I loved in the days I regarded myself as a cynical roué and was only a very foolish romantic.
My post last week occasioned a lively discussion. Not all of it was on point – divertingly, I was made to learn the meaning of “small ball” and “on base percentage” – but let us press on in more or less the same vein. As the gentle reader may recall, last week’s post involved a man in a Russian village who stands to lose his children because one of them has taken up crocheting and there is no television in the family home. For those who wish to follow the story, the man’s name is Ivan Sidorov and the village,...
Civics classes are often instructed that the three branches of the general government are supposed to be “equal.” But is this so? From where does this idea come? This language of the equality of the branches is nowhere in the Constitution itself. As a matter of fact, for a long time after ratification the common notion regarding which branch of the national government was to be primary favored the legislative.
