The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
I look differently on the Tech Left’s “deplatforming” of Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and others. It’s not a show of strength, but a symptom of weakness. The whole point of the Internet is it’s dispersed. It’s not true it was created to survive a nuclear war, although it was created by the Defense Department in the late 1960s as a dispersed system, “The idea being that defence projects being carried out at universities and research labs could communicate with each other, without worrying about the unreliable network links of the late 1960s.” Those earlier links depended on central areas that...
The more I travel in Italy, the more often I think that my original choice of cloister – Palermo – may have been the outcome of a rushed decision, like getting married to the girl next door with whose father you liked going fishing. The Sicilian capital has nearly a million inhabitants, and the fact is that cities all over the world do not get better when they get bigger. Admittedly, Italian social organization provides an antidote to urban sprawl which is not found elsewhere, in that within every city, even one as large as Rome, there are dozens, sometimes...
Community control of schools run by dedicated teachers who looked after each child individually runs counter to the modern assumption that every human endeavor can be turned into a science. Every real “science” requires a theoretical framework, hence the need in educationism for theories of cognitive development and child psychology. Even the acts of learning and teaching must be analyzed, broken down into their components, tested, measured, and graphed with all sorts of coefficients and Greek letters that really mean very little more than up and down, more and less. In the years when I was reading grant proposals...
The empire of our good friend Clyde Wilson is spreading. Not only does it encompass Shotwell Publishing but it now includes Reckonin, a Southern political website developed by his daughter, which just put up a revised and expanded version of my off-the-cuff piece, “What is To Be Done?”
“The Profane Ballad of Ecclesiastical Reform”
There’s only way with recalcitrant clerks,
Saith experience under the sun:
In Fear, the latest spasm of gossip and fear-mongering by the infamous (among people of sense and decency) Bob Woodward, the gullible American public is given a portrait of the Trump White House as a cross between Bedlam and the palace of Caligula. Trump supporters are outraged.
I laughed when I read ex-CIA Czar John Brennan’s gripe that taking away his security clearance was “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” I once had a security clearance. Although not as high as his, it was pretty high, Top Secret-Special Intelligence. When I was training to be a Russian linguist and radio intercept operator, 1978-89, the FBI talked to everybody in my background, asking such questions as: Did you ever vote for the Communist Party-USA? They talked to my next door neighbor, and receive a glowing report. “He’s been...
From the beginning, the goal that Dr. Fleming and I envisioned for this series was self-knowledge through discovery of the Christians from whom we have come to be alienated by schism. Let us try to understand, then, how it was that brethren and disciples of Jesus Christ became strangers to one another.
I have always thought that Jefferson’s advocacy of the separation of church and state was in part inspired by his distaste for the political power of the Yankee clergy. Remember, the famous letter about “the wall of separation” was addressed to a group of Baptists in Connecticut, who were independent of that State’s established Puritan church. One can still find die-hard Calvinists who denounce Jefferson as an atheist. For some reason they never mention that John Adams became a Unitarian. Through the 19th century Jefferson remained a very popular symbol among the people and occasionally among writers, but New...
A Lutheran pastor from Texas suggested the two poems by Frost. The first makes a wonderful pair to Clyde Wilson’s piece on Jefferson
