Ranking first this last week was Philip Giraldi’s focus on the very strange and disturbing state of American politics, with a high ranking former American military commander using the pages of the New York Times to seemingly call for a military coup against President Donald Trump, while Hillary Clinton seemed to suggest that Democratic Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian agent for her opposition to our endless series of military conflicts.  The resulting discussion of the decay of American public life quickly generated over 350 comments, totaling nearly 35,000 words.

Placing second was a massive 15,000 word essay by Anatoly Karlin, presenting a highly-novel and speculative solution to the Fermi Paradox, namely the seeming absence of broadcasts by other civilizations of intelligent life forms in our galaxy.  An inadequate summary of the complexities of this argument is that some have suggested that our universe is part of a computer simulation being run by a different life form, and that as we expand in numbers and locations, the simulation might run out of memory and be terminated.  To the extent that that other civilizations want to avoid such termination, they would work to exterminate all others found in our universe.  This sort of discussion drew nearly 50,000 words of comments.

Close behind was Andrew Joyce’s discussion of the intellectual arrogance of many Jews, who tend to glorify their own past in hyperbolic fashion by aggrandizing the works of Gentile civilization, while Linh Dinh’s sixth ranking column discussed the unusual implications of one of the lesser known essays of famed Jewish writer Franz Kafka.

In fifth place was a discussion of the recent verdict against noted conspiracy-activist Jim Fetzer, whose book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook was ruled libelous, producing a penalty of nearly half a million dollars.  Fetzer himself heavily participated in the nearly sixty thousand words of resulting discussion, with included both strong supporters and harsh critics.

Finally, rounding out our most popular featured pieces was Trevor Lynch’s review of the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which portrayed a vanished world of New York City life.