The lesser Democrats (Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and now Biden) are minor comic figures from one of Tom Wolfe’s satires. (Think of The Bonfire of the Vanities.) Each has clawed his way to the top of a different greasy political ladder that stops well short of the presidency. And each now waves around his 10-point, single-spaced resume, crowing about how he followed all the rules, so now it’s his turn. It’s only fair. Watching such stunted people flail around at the end of their tethers is ultimately kind of … sad.

But Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg are different. They’re major characters, and from a more important writer. Each of them could have sprung from the pen of C.S. Lewis, and stepped out of the pages of the dystopian satire That Hideous Strength. In fact, the two candidates seem like colleagues at the conspiratorial think-tank, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.).
— Read on stream.org/democrats-2020-two-c-s-lewis-villains-and-a-bunch-of-tom-wolfe-lampoons/

Looking back at the album, Roland Orzabal commented, “Pop music was still a growth industry. It hadn’t sort of stagnated, stalled, diversified into streaming like it is nowadays. We were young, we were both good-looking and we had the right music. As we move further and further from that decade and you keep hearing ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’, in various forms I do think it is an era-defining album”.

Curt Smith “You would never normally get three songs that strong in an album. But balance that out with tracks like ‘Listen’, ‘The Working Hour’; all those things that give it air and give it time to breathe I think is what makes it something more than just the sum of its parts. I think the album had a lot more depth than a lot of those other albums of that time. And albums of more depth tend to stick around longer”.
— Read on www.udiscovermusic.com/news/tears-fears-big-chair-reissue/

Track 1: “The Trenches.” Under­scored by ambient whistling, rifle shots, and single notes struck on a piano, Brad Birzer’s voice fades in softly at first, repeating, and echoing over itself. He speaks C.S. Lewis’s description of his expe­rience in World War I: “The frights, the cold, the smell of human excrement, the hor­ribly crushed men still moving like crushed beetles…” 

Then, cue an electric guitar intro, a chorus of “This is war!” and, finally, drop in some heavy metal drumming.  

These are the opening lines and sounds of the pro­gressive rock epic chron­i­cling the meeting, devel­oping rela­tionship, and, ulti­mately, failed friendship between J.R.R Tolkien and Lewis. Birzer, pro­fessor of history, wrote this seven-track album, “The Bardic Depths,” in col­lab­o­ration with pro­gressive rock musician Dave Bandana. 
— Read on hillsdalecollegian.com/2020/02/brad-birzer-writes-lyrics-for-progressive-rock-album/

To transcend or to break through this delusion of progress, a true scholar, Hulme continued, must attempt to see the gaps in both senses, recognizing them and allowing them to exist. In other words, much like Friedrich Hayek will proclaim with the “knowledge problem” several decades later, true scholars must be humble and be content with knowing what we do not know. The modernist, of course, hates ignorance more than anything else, and in his blind zeal to know all things, he will create “knowledge” where no knowledge is possible, thus truly derailing centuries upon centuries of fine work and of understanding of the human person. Ironically, in his hatred of religion, the modernist merely creates a new, shallow, and false religion. The modern, Hulme understood, is nothing short of a full-fledge Gnostic, ultimately seeing the universe as pre-determined, mechanistic, and absent of free will.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/te-hulme-religious-attitude-bradley-birzer.html

The world must raise their voices and stand up for persecuted Christians, Hungarian State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians Tristan Azbej said on Thursday.

Azbej was one of eight speakers at a side-event of the National Prayer Breakfast that was sponsored by the organization Save the Persecuted Christians.

“All of humanity should stand up and come to the aid of persecuted Christians,” said Azbej.
— Read on catholicherald.co.uk/news/2020/02/07/hungarian-government-urges-defence-of-persecuted-christians/

Now, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, we have Red Storm Rising’s more than worthy successor, Red Metal, by Mark Greaney and Lt. Col. Hunter “Rip” Rawlings IV. While Lt. Rawlings is new to me, I have been reading Mr. Greaney’s novels for over a decade. He roared onto the literary scene during the revival of Tom Clancy co-authored books around 2010 and with his own extraordinary novel and hero (or anti-hero), The Grey Man, a year earlier. I have had the chance to praise Mr. Greaney several times, but never enough. Mr. Greaney is, in every way, our current and better Tom Clancy, taking thrillers into the twenty-first century. By this, I mean that Mr. Greaney fully understands that we live in a post-Communist world, a world of fundamentalisms as well as of nation-states and tenuous alliances. His own analysis of world affairs—though couched in fiction—is every bit as interesting as that coming out from any current periodical or think tank.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/making-sense-chaotic-world-red-metal-bradley-birzer.html