Take Five: Why Can’t We Just All Get Along
Baby, it’s dumb outside! The revolutionaries are blaming Trump for the divisions they have been creating for over 50 years.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Ecumenism for Orphans by Carl Hildebrand
Ecumenism for Orphans –Carl Hildebrand “Ut unum sint…” Zivania—the “dry traditional aperitif” of Cyprus. My American vulgarity wonders how it would go with Coca-Cola. Not as good as Jack and Coke, but I won’t let that get in the way. Some months ago, I lived off-and-on in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, whose current partial occupation by the Turks since 1974 is only the latest chapter in that Levantine island’s storied history of invasion and seizure. Cyprus’ strategic position, jabbing its spindly north-eastern finger of land into the armpit of Asia Minor, made the occupation of Aphrodite’s famed birth-place a...
French Riots and American Climate Misreporting
The French riots must have more behind them than a revolt against gas tax increases to fund climate programs. As we’re seeing in the revolts of common people against the rancid ruling elites throughout Europe, and with Trump’s election, large chunks of the population now longer want to go along with seeing their livelihoods reduced and their families destroyed to make the elites feel good about their absurd abstractions, such as Gaia worship. Yet the Main Sleaze Media continue to pump out Fake News and nothing but Fake News. A good example is the climate “reporting” in the Los Angeles...
Sicilian Trog
This is perhaps my sixth trip to Sicily. I say “perhaps,” because I’m not very good about dates. It’s not that my math skills are particularly deficient. As a schoolboy, I always tested higher in math than in verbal skills. It’s not even my almost complete lack of interest in mathematics, which has kept me blissfully ignorant of most higher math. My real deficiency is something I regard as a virtue: an instinctive refusal to apply numbers to the phenomena of human life. Aristotle did not make the mistake that has been made, over and over, by philosophers since Descartes...
Sicilian Trogs, Preface: Conclusion. Arrivederci, Roma
We had decided to stay in a little hotel in the center, the place in which we had spent a week during our first trip to Italy, 30 years ago. I had been foolishly attracted to the Alberto Cesàri, when I discovered that Stendahl had passed a good part of his sojourn in Rome in this very place. It was and is an unpretentious place, though about five years ago they added a rooftop bar and breakfast room. In 1988 most of the guests were tourists like us, but this time we were the only Americans, except for a Fox...
Not Christmas Yet by David Wihowski
Not Christmas Yet. Avoiding the incessant vocal vandalism done to traditional Christmas carols and holiday chestnuts is all but impossible if you go anywhere in the American marketplace between now and January 1. Unfortunately having one’s ears stuffed with cotton is not particularly polite when in public. While I love good Christmas music, and there is a wealth of fine music for that holiday, the season of Advent is all but ignored by all but a few. In a sort of personal resistance to the American obsession with the holiday spirit, prior to the holiday, I listen only to Advent...
Sicilian Trogs, I: Preface
Speaking a different language forces the traveler to wonder how in the world foreigners manage to distort English—and vice versa. In Italy a bar is a place to get coffee and a pastry, have a light lunch, drink a glass of wine, but it is not for serious drinkers and does exclude children.
The Decline of the American Empire, Part III: The Health of the State
Growing up, my only training in the martial arts was the experience of getting beaten up by older boys until I learned how to inflict pain even when losing a fight. It was a useful lesson, and just as useful was my intuitive understanding of the basic principle of judo, which (so I have been told) is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be...
Tom Farr, Jesse Helms and Abortion
I knew Tom Farr when we were undergraduates at Hillsdale College in the mid-1970s, then young conservatives in Washington in the mid-1980s. He is a fine man without a prejudiced bone in his body. It’s so unfair he’s being publicly trashed for being a “racist” after he was appointed to be a district judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina and received the highest recommendation from the American Bar Association.
Wednesday’s Child: A State of No Conscience
“In an instant I had my lifelong foe by the throat. After so many years of waiting and longing, he was mine at last. I tore him to shreds and fragments. I rent the fragments to bits. I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering. At last, and forever, my Conscience was dead! I was a free man! I turned upon my poor aunt, who was almost petrified with terror, and shouted: ‘Out of this house with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before...
