In this episode Dr. Fleming and Stephen continue to discuss the role of the gods in Homer as well as the outlines of Greek religion in general, its practices, “commandments,” and theology. We also briefly explore the age-old discussion: why do the good suffer?
So it would seem that the gloriously rational chimera, on which the hopes of many a totalitarian ruler are presently pinned, has landed. AI, we are told, is here to enslave populations in places like China or Russia, to win elections in places like the U.S. and Great Britain, and to do just about everything else except make a good cup of tea.
The greatest fact of Lincoln’s career is the war he imposed upon the nation, a conflict that changed the nature of war in the civilized world. As one of Lincoln’s favorite generals observed, “war is hell,” and it has been hell at least since General Sherman gave us the example of total war.
I might begin with the vernacular observation that, like all of Saint Thomas’s five ways, the argument from design seems rooted in human imagination. At some point we wake up and look around and see that the world is wonderful. We may be the Hebrew psalmist: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1), or Saint Francis, who sang of brother sun and sister moon
The modern American regime under which we live has only a few heroes, most of them entirely bogus: a pair of womanizing presidents–Franklin Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy–a philandering plagiarist who betrayed his country, Martin Luther King, jr., and the second founder of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
It’s a sobering recollection, actually, in the time of coronavirus, which is said to have carried away some 300,000 lives, mainly of the elderly or the infirm, in the span of a hundred days, causing a global commotion unseen since the last world war. Yet during the same hundred days, in the spring of 1994, nearly one million people died in Rwanda…
“Notice how the little black girl is telling the adult white woman what detergent to use. The black kid is a two-fer. The rule in advertising is even more explicit than in government grants
In this episode of Utopia Limited, Dr. Fleming discusses the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that is the namesake of the series, as well as a dystopian classic set with some of the same ideas about English government: G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
The other night I had a long and tortuous Corona-inspired dream. I had finally managed to get out of Illinois and the good old USA. I was in Paris at some kind of event or function I had helped organize, but it was in a strange part of Paris that looked more like Chicago or Minneapolis. It was one of those boring “procedural” dreams where you find yourself in the wrong room and cannot seem to locate the correct floor, and when you do, your number is nowhere to be found. Miraculously, I got everything straightened out, and it was...
Ella Fitzgerald, Marcus Aurelius, Draza Mihajlovic, Prokofiev, Willie Nelson, John Crowe Ransom
