The End-of-the Worlders are going from handwringing over a possibly stolen election–please don’t tell me you know it is stolen in fact because you don’t know anything of the kind–to declaring the death of the American republic. It’s the worst sort of ditto-head approach to politics. It begins by saying, “Say, this is about the best damn country that has ever existed” and go on in the vein of Babbit’s speech to the Zenith Booster Club.
Like the word’s Italian variant, coprifuoco, “curfew”–which is now in effect in several European countries–comes from Old French cuevrefeu, “cover fire,” advice to citizens to extinguish fires at a certain hour of the evening. My wife thinks it’s sweet. “It shows concern,” she says. “Just compare it to what we say in Russian.” In Russian the equivalent is “commandant’s hour,” meaning do what you’re told or be brought before the commandant and get the regulation nine grams of lead in the back of your head. Language gives nations away.
If BidenHarris make it into the White House, we’ll see the full restoration of the MIC: the Military Industrial Complex, as Ike called it. The latest appointment is Gen. Lloyd Austin, who aced out the expected pick, Michele Flournoy. Not surprisingly, the Woke Media are turning this into an “intersectional” battle: If confirmed, Austin would become the first black SecDef, while Flourney would have been the first woman to hold the post. But both are tied into the MIC
“Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star…” So said the Southern secessionists of the 1860s. Even with whatever differences the leaders of the CSA were certainly a much more culturally intact group than we are presented with today, even I dare say within our own state governments.
The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.
The Chorus, who have been obtuse throughout the play, have misunderstood Ajax’s parting words as a change of heart instead of a rueful admission that he misjudged the world he has lived in. The drama becomes more intense, when a messenger comes in to report on Teucer’s hostile reception in the Greek camp, and on the instructions he had received from Calchas the prophet NOT to let Ajax out of his hut.
“Resolved, That the Earth is Flat” was in my youth the stalking horse of high school and university debating societies, probably because to people of college age the proposition sounded startling enough to make them tingle with anticipation of controversy. Besides, since not one among them believed that the Earth was actually flat, deep down they were pleasantly certain that the outcome of the vote would in no way change their lives, and so on to law school they went. They have debates of narrower scope these days, as many of them, upon finishing law school, clerking for important judges,...
Although President Trump’s foreign policy was far from perfect, it certainly was an improvement from the peristaltic globalism it replaced. If Joe Biden becomes president – something still not certain, despite the Main Sleaze Media’s suppression of alternative narratives – we’ll be right back to bombing and invading.
For several decades I have plagued teachers and school principals with a few basic questions, without finding anyone of them who could give a reasonable answer. Until these questions are seriously addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education. It is not as if they are trick questions. They are the kind of queries that would be made of any human activity that absorbs to much time, energy, and resources.
The gentle reader may recall how once I waxed eloquent in lauding sloth, a vice that has done much to save Greek antiquities in Sicily. Vandalized in Greece by energetic locals, who routinely used the marble to build their rustic hovels, in Sicily these noble structures have survived largely intact for the simple reason that our peasants were too indolent to steal. That, anyway, was my working theory. More broadly, sloth is one of the few things that stand between man and the picture of man portrayed by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Always scheming, always inventing, always eager to...
