Life is rife with disappointments, none more bewildering, perhaps, than the crash of adolescent illusions. Ever since the distant days of youth I have had a soft spot for the nostalgia of the Russian gypsy song, those early twentieth-century laments that, rather like a gypsy fortune teller, seemed to foretell the impending loss of our homeland and of our liberty.
Long ago when Trump first took office, I advised him on Fleming Foundation to fire all his generals. Including the admirals. Instead, he packed them into his administration: Gen. Mattis, Gen. Kelly, Gen. McMaster. The only good one, Gen. Flynn, got railroaded by Trump’s own “Justice” Department, then later exonerated.
In a world growing evermore progressive – I suspect the Gadarene swine thought this tendency marvelous as they went off the cliff – one has to work hard to stay in place.
When I selected the first Bulldog Drummond for our ongoing discussion of books, it was partly because it is the kind of old-fashioned adventure that people like to read in the summer, and partly the author’s understand of certain fundamental things of life might remind readers of the “world we have lost.”
Afghanistan is not a natiom, much less a nation- state. It is patchwork of hostile ethnicities and regions engaged in endless conflict, alternately lapsing into a cold, or blowing up into a hot, war
Summertime and the living’s not just not easy, but when, even in the shade, it gets hot enough to fry an egg sunny side up it’s pretty much impossible. July, as the gentle reader may have read, was globally the hottest month since records began, and it now looks like August will be even hotter. You just can’t beat this kind of heat with mint juleps.
August 15 marks 50 years since Nixon took us off gold. Since then, gold has gone from $35 an ounce to $1,782. A better way to put it is: The dollar’s value was eroded from $35 an ounce of gold to $1,782 – a reduction of 1/50th of the original value.
Andrey Vyshinsky was Stalin’s prosecutor during the Great Purge of 1936-39. He came up with the phrase, “Give me the man and I’ll find the crime.” That’s not remote. In 2009, Harvey Silvergate, a Boston civil rights lawyer, penned a book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”
Bulldog Drummond VS. Indiana Jones!? Rex takes issue with Dr Fleming’s critique.
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
