Tagged: EU

0

Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

Rome, Year 16 AMT

By

I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had recently been changed,...

0

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Nov, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Gadarene Light

By

Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...

0

Autodidact / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

The Plagues of Greece, an Interview with Nikolaos Hidiroglou

By

First, the one homework submission. Vince Cornell sends in:   t is inevitable what we face. What we did once treasure we must now break. But first must we state our causes plainly. That this divide did arise from just cause Be assured, for we declare with one voice That our lives, our liberty, and our joy Are those goods which we must of our own secure. Britain, it was you that did bar our way, Cruelly depriving us of our base rights. Destructive became your rule over us, And we now do form our own government Building it upon...

0

Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

13 Nov, 2015

Trump: The Lesser Evil

By

Hillary Clinton’s take on a large percentage of the American people is drawing fire: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right, The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” and added, “some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The other half of Trump supporters are simply stupid and depressed, and people in Hillaryland should pity them. Let’s do some quick and very rough math.  In round numbers, the country has about 280 million people, about three fourths of whom—or 210 million—are old enough to vote.  Making...

4

Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Nov, 2015

Greece II

By

Athens may be the oldest city in Europe. It is certainly the oldest that is still significant. There were settlements on the Acropolis before the Greeks arrived, and, although the Athenians may have slightly exaggerated in claiming that their citadel was never abandoned in the Greek Dark Age brought on by the so-called Dorian Invasion, they are more or less right that they maintained some kind of polity throughout that grim period. Whether they can survive the new Dark Age, brought on not by more primitive northern Greeks–or still more primitive invaders from the Middle East–but by Athenian politicians who...

1

Bassani

7 Jul, 2015

The Greek Crisis and the EU Leviathan, by Marco Bassani

By

The Greek Crisis in Context: An Interview with Marco Bassani Thomas Fleming:  Prof. Bassani, as an expert on regional and autonomous movements in Europe, how do you read the situation in Greece?   Marco Bassani:  The Greek farce is in its essentials so simple that anyone with the slightest political sophistication should be able to follow the story, even as it is presented in the news accounts. It is a well-known story of “political parasitism” that has its climax in Italy.  Greece is a Southern Italy in miniature, but without either Lombardy or Veneto to support it. The only reason...