The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
If we were to take on Diogenes as our role model, as we attempt to shine our light in the nooks and crannies of American journalism, whom could we name? To make the game more amusing, we should, in addition to picking out the eccentrics, also have to name a famous contemporary who typified the regime lackeys that are the true heirs of Pulitzer and Hearst.
Back when the Ukraine War started earlier this year, I warned the real danger was it could go nuclear. I said every article on the war should point that out, even though few were. Finally, people are talking about that a lot
A criminal case, expected to last for another six months, is now being heard in Manchester Crown Court. The gentle reader may recall my fitful interest in public sensations of this kind, most recently the Depp libel trial, as these would transport me into that epoch of yellow journalism where liberty of conjecture reigned supreme, so unlike the straitjacketed press in our day.
In most novels, this suicide would be the end of an uninteresting and unnamed character, but here it is just the beginning, as he continues to wander about, more lost than ever before.
The Virtues, which were once the foundation of all serious moral thought, have been reduced by modern philosophers to a set of abstractions that mean little to men and women wrestling with the problems of everyday life. In this podcast, listeners are introduced to the robust and living conceptions that animated Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Thomas Aquinas
Authorities are prioritizing keeping violent criminals out on the streets rather than behind bars where they belong. It’s time to consider a more effective and permanent alternative to incarceration.
The problem, from the beginning of the postwar conservative movement, was not merely the incompatibility of conservative instincts with liberal individualism, but with liberalism’s failure to understand the nature of man (to say nothing of the nature of woman).
Scanning the papers, I noted with interest that the Montecito house presently occupied by the British immigrant formerly known as Prince has nine bedrooms and 16 bathrooms. The bedrooms are neither here nor there. I’m not a Leveller or any other sort of Communist. It’s the number of bathrooms – great enough, I should think, to serve a medium-sized airport – that got my goat.
No, the title of this brief announcement does refer to the birth of a baby, trailing clouds of glory, into the abyss of human life in the New America. It is the title of a Charles Williams novel that has been termed a “theological thriller.”
This is the text of a little speech I gave at the New York City Yacht Club in 1992. Yes, don’t say it, a rather unusual venue for a professional trouble-maker.