I’ve been reading about Charles Ponzi. What a man. In some vague way his story continues the argument of last week’s post about Donald Trump, but in this instance there’s no need to dot the i’s. This time round I invite the gentle reader to come up with his own farfetched interpretations and fanciful allusions.
New Year’s Day has not always been January 1, for during the long Middle Ages it was the Feast of the Annunciation on March twenty-fifth that marked the New Year. On that date the Angel Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin Mary with the good news that, enwrapped by the Holy Spirit, she would become the mother of him whose name is Emmanuel….
Along with law, a legitimate government will preserve custom, and well nigh universal social traits of the human race, like distinctive sex roles, marriage, parenthood, etc., would only be trifled with by a tyrannical government.
I have received a number of queries about different aspects of my most recent book, and, rather than answer each one privately, it seemed a good idea to make it a public forum. I may soon transfer it to our Forum section, but I shall begin it here on the front page.
The worst news was the return of the threat of nuclear annihilation, which had vanished after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The new Eve of Destruction arrived courtesy of Joe Biden’s “Armageddon” foreign policy, as he described it.
But setting aside national peculiarities, one might suggest a general rule, which is that, generally speaking, the people empowered to make decisions for a community should belong to that community and have to face the consequences of their decisions.
It has been some years since the first half of this program was aired and so we briefly recapitulate some assumptions about what we’ve covered in the series so far before diving into the role of Shari’a in Islamic societies and what is implied for Shari’a in Western societies.
Now, as in all good Trollope novels, there is at least one moral theme that runs like a conspicuous thread throughout the variegated fabric.
A reader’s comment on last week’s post triggered an inchoate thought, and in its wake a lucid recollection. I remembered my erstwhile and now late father-in-law who, among his other dubious accomplishments, was a friend of Donald Trump, most closely so in the latter’s Ivana phase.
When I was a kid growing up in a Detroit suburb in the 1960s and 70s, the only time the lights went out was during a severe electrical storm where the tornadoes knocked out the power lines. Snow, even seven feet?
