There’s Only One Way To Rank Marvel Movies. This Is It.
By Rhonda Robinson
Although you could say, I’m a most unlikely Marvel fan, David’s kind invitation to disagree with him is too tempting to pass up. Perhaps its because he dismissed Guardians of the Galaxy. Or maybe it’s because he placed Iron Man too far down on the list. Or it could be, I just wanted to defend my favorite superheroes. Whatever subconscious reasons propelled me to my keyboard, I think the Marvel Universe deserves our attention as creators.
The Essential Author Series Revival
By David M. Swindle
We’re re-launching the series as a new weekly feature of short blog posts highlighting useful fiction authors and non-fiction cultural writers.
“Last Best Hope of Earth,” or Mass Graves and the Gulag?
Some Thoughts on Griff’s Cultural Dispatches from the Alamo…
By David Churchill Barrow
I make it a point to read Griff’s “Cultural Dispatches from the Alamo” as soon as I see them pop up on Liberty Island. (But “from the Alamo,” Griff? Are things that bad? Fannon has been massacred at Goliad, no one is coming, and Santa Anna’s band is striking up El Deguello every day?)
Griff repeatedly and accurately traces the roots of so-called “Progressivism” and its attendant cultural paroxysms back to Marxism, but the divergence of classical liberalism (modern American conservatism) from the left actually took place almost a century before Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto came out. It is found in the vast differences between the American shopkeepers and farmers who stood at Lexington and Concord to “fire the shot heard round the world” and the peasants who stormed the Bastille – their respective causes and their leadership.
Boy Scouts: It Was Fun While It Lasted
“A boy is not a sit-down animal.” – Robert Baden-Powell, Founder of the Boy Scouts
By David Churchill Barrow
Baden-Powell’s military career was controversial, but that was inevitable, given that his wars were not against the conventional armies of Western European nations, but against Matabele, Ashanti and Zulu tribesmen, as well as the resourceful and tough-as-nails Dutch Boers of South Africa, who were pioneers in irregular warfare. (Note: kommando is a Boer word). It sickened him to see young lads from the slums of Liverpool and Manchester get killed far from home, for want of simple skills like reading a compass, following or disguising a trail, camouflage, etc., and so he wrote manuals such as Reconnaissance and Scouting and Aids to Scouting. Upon returning home, he was surprised to find these works popular with boys and various boyhood organizations, and so he converted them more directly for this purpose with his seminal work, Scouting for Boys, and thus the Boy Scouts were born.
Photo by Internet Archive Book Images
