The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Fleming

6 Feb, 2017

The Left’s Right to Silence Dissent

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Trump’s first two weeks have been, if not especially interesting, predictably exciting.   A pattern has already begun to emerge:  Trump attempts to carry out one of the promises on which he successfully campaigned for the White House, and his measures are met with criticism, abuse, and public rioting.  It will be some time before we can know whether this pattern is merely a temporary panic attack or one that  holds for the duration of his term in office. By now my readers probably do not need to be told that the Bill of Rights does not protect people who...

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FF / Podcasts / Season 1

4 Feb, 2017

Christianity and Classical Culture, Episode 10: Odysseus and Ethics

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In this first podcast of 2017, Dr. Fleming explores the notion of “ethics” within the constructs of the Odyssey and within the character of Odysseus himself. Can a liar and someone unfaithful to his wife be seen to be ethical? What are ethics in the ancient world? And how do they relate to Christianity? Original Air Date: February 4, 2017 Show Run Time: 52 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner   Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2017. All rights are reserved and any duplication without explicit written permission is forbidden.

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Fleming

2 Feb, 2017

The Xanthippe, Part 4: The Tyranny of Expertise

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Socrates:  Then where does this leave us? Xanthippe:  Why ask me?  You’re the philosopher in the family.  I have no idea where we are or even when we are.  Can this really be  Athens in the archonship of Diocles? Socrates: But even if you don’t know the time of day, you know where we stand in the argument.  First, we are agreed that Pheidippides’ philosophy, which he got third hand from the Scythian she-wolf, is false. We cannot simply dismiss our obligation to fellow-citizens by saying that everyone is master of himself. Xanthippe: :  Certainly we cannot. Socrates: So we...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

1 Feb, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (5)

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“Well, where is the getting down to the nitty-gritty then, eh?  The bedroom stuff you promised us? ” What I want the reader to glean from the preceding, anticipating some of my yet stranger claims, is that the Pasternak family had been split from the beginning.  The female line, issuing from the mother, produced Boris and Josephine.  Alexander and Lydia took after the father. When it comes to genetic roulette, a special deity protects the integrity of the big loser.  Rosalia gambled away music, but ended up with a devoted husband.  Boris staked his all on being like everyone else,...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

1 Feb, 2017

Trump’s First 10 Days: Battling Obstructionist Republicans in Congress

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By John Seiler President Trump – it’s great writing that! – now is facing a problem similar to that of President Reagan in 1981: His own fellow Republicans are obstructing his agenda. For Reagan, the main problem was the old “root canal Republicans,” such as Bob Dole, then the chairman of the Senate’s Finance Committee. The phrase derived from Democrats going on huge spending binges, then Republicans being the supposed “adults” who performed painful oral surgery with tax increases to pay for everything, as they did under President Eisenhower in 1953 and President Nixon in 1969. The result was Republicans...

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Peters

28 Jan, 2017

Robert’s Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood)

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When I entered the first grade – we did not have Kindergarten – I first encountered numerals posing as numbers. When we wrote the one’s – 1111111 – across the page, I was a whiz at mathematics; however, my primeval sense of logic rebelled at the notion that 1+1 could equal 2. Cats had little cats; plum trees had plums; 1’s could, therefore, only beget 1’s. In the third grade, we had to write, using Arabic numerals, from 1 to 10,000. When I got to 1,100, I thought that I was through. Earlier, before I started to school, I contemplated...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

28 Jan, 2017

Sanctuary: None Dare Call it Treason, Part I

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On Thursday (January 26) the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported: “A top official in Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration is no longer employed with the city after she was thrown out of a downtown restaurant last week for alleged intoxication and a confrontation that followed with police. Bettina Anjanete Gardner, deputy director of international affairs for the city, was arrested Jan. 19 and charged with disorderly while under the influence after an alleged run in with managers at the Hard Rock Cafe…  After she was arrested, Gardner told police “I have people in Washington” and suggested that she would involve a member...

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A Life / Fleming

25 Jan, 2017

A Life in Shreds and Patches–An Insertion

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My first love was for astronomy, which I later abandoned for chemistry.  I have no idea what drew me to astronomy, but it had little to do with speculations on cosmogony, much less on the mathematics needed to pursue any serious study in the field.   I think my first impulse was the desire to give names to what I saw in the sky.  We moderns are hopelessly “lost in the cosmos,” to borrow a phrase from Walker Percy.  Few of us can even name the trees and flowers in our yard or identify the birds that come to feed....

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Phillips Red

25 Jan, 2017

Trump’s Cabinet of Peers

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When Trump first started naming his cabinet picks, there was a lot of noise from both sides complaining about some of his choices. The liberal mainstream media, who clearly don’t like Trump, were obviously trying to cause dissension in the ranks of Trump supporters by declaring certain of his nominees a betrayal of his campaign promises and his base (Puzder, Mnuchin, Priebus). This was transparently disingenuous. Do they really expect me to believe that they wouldn’t be perfectly happy for Trump to betray his base? Simultaneously, and contradictorily, they attempted to outrage Trump’s enemies by declaring others of his picks...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

25 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: A Fallen Lion

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  Lev Navrozov, my father, died last night.  The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess.  He had lived his whole life in a kind of autistic cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer to the congenital intellectual whose brain is, or ought to be, his sole active organ. There was a Russian science fiction novel of the 1920’s...