The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
This is a country where Joe Scarborough, who is so fake he has to lie about his Thanksgiving day, is accusing Donald Trump of insanity. If it hadn’t been Morning Joe, it might have been Matt Laurer. What a country. The only clever thing I have ever heard from John Podhoretz (Full disclosure: I have never met the pizza man though I did have dealings with his parents) is his remark that Trump should be impeached for forcing on our attention the moronic Lavar Ball, who single-handedly has done more to explode the idea of racial equality than anyone since...
The city-state is the seed-bed of civilization, but the concept seems alien to the American tradition. Nonetheless, our cities once did possess, at least before the revolution, many of the same chartered rights enjoyed by English and European burgs. In the Anglo-American world, the liberties of cities was defined by the charters they received either from the Crown itself or from the Royal Governor and legislature: Williamsburg, for example, was chartered in 1695, Wilmington in 1763. Many of the older cities and towns of the Eastern Seaboard had been chartered municipal corporations, though in the decades following the revolution, the...
My wife used to say that coming from Palermo to London is like falling from the calyx of a flower onto a bed of metal shavings, and with every passing year I marvel more and more at the accuracy of that description. In reverse the shock of the change does not work as powerfully, probably because the brain, like eyes after a spell in darkness, needs time to adjust and take it all in – the sunlight, the smells and the smiles. Each time I return, I can almost literally feel the mind thawing out as I hand to Mimmo,...
In this episode of Christianity and Classical Culture, we begin a two episode miniseries examining the Myth of Progress. Why is modern culture ugly? How is this related to progress? How is “progress” properly defined? How do we see it in art and architecture? What are some cities that demonstrate an ordered an organic growth? Original Air Date: November 30, 2017 Show Run Time: 59 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.
The Pentagon really exists for one thing: to spend your tax dollars. When’s the last time they won a war above the size of Grenada in 1983 or Panama in 1989? Recent losses include wars in: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. The Pentagon is the DMV with tanks, planes and nuclear bombs. According to an Atlantic Council article by Stephen Blank in Newsweek, the Pentagon now thinks it can save Ukraine from Russia by sending in anti-tank weapons: “There’s a real possibility that the United States will finally send lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine. “The country has been fighting a defensive...
There have been many press accounts, including Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s series of articles for the London Telegraph, on the increasingly strict censorship of opinion in Europe. Public criticism is usually taken to be the sign of a robust society, but it is increasingly difficult to describe Islamic attacks on Jews and, in the aftermath of the recent Islamic invasion, information on the robbery, assault, rape, and murder committed by immigrants has been rigorously suppressed. In 1995 the EU sacked economist Bernard Conolly for criticizing monetary union, and it took six years for the European Court to act on the case. When...
A version of this was presented some years ago at a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina Cities like Charleston and Siena and Edinburgh are a great deal like nations: They have their own identity celebrated in songs and stories and a peculiar slant on history. These real cities are not merely aggregations of aliens who “dwell together, in Eliot’s phrase, “to make money from each other.” They are enduring communities, with a common faith and identity, that have a future only because they have a past. I have come to see that in this respect Charleston has been throughout its...
In this episode of Islam: The Real Truth About the “Religion of Peace”, Dr. Trifkovic continues his explication of portions of the so-called “theology” of Islam by contrast with Christian concepts of creation, scripture, tradition, sin, fallenness, predestination, angels, devils, and the afterlife. Original Air Date: November 22, 2017 Show Run Time: 32 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Srdja Trifkovic Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner The Fleming Foundation · Islam: The Real Truth About the “Religion of Peace”, Episode 4 Islam: The Real Truth About the “Religion of Peace”℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2017. All Rights are Reserved.
I no longer have a house in London, but the sense of homelessness that envelops me here like a shroud is probably nothing to do with entries in the land registry. It is more to do with November wind, swirling bestially inside my coat and making restaurant awnings flap like exploding grenades, with drizzling rain that stops and starts with a nauseating periodicity, with passing pedestrians who avoid your eye as they roll and unroll black umbrellas. London in November is like being a mourner at a funeral, and who ever felt at home in front of an open grave...
Despite our many problems, there remain many good things occurring in America. This Thanksgiving 2017, here are seven of them: 1. Second Amendment, First Freedom. Because Americans possess more than 300 million firearms, our governments – federal, state and local – know there’s a limit to how much they can push us around. Certainly we have way too much government. But the extreme level of repression and control the “free” countries of Canada, Australia and Western Europe (except Switzerland) suffer don’t exist here. As I related earlier, the police themselves don’t want to take our guns because it’s too dangerous....
