War, much like marriage, is a necessary institution that responds to human need. Sexual desire and the impulse to violence—which can be fueled by cupidity—are both part of the human condition. In a state of nature, unfortunately, human needs are fulfilled without ceremony: rape, promiscuous sex, and incest, in the case of sexual desire, and raiding parties, looting expeditions, ambushes, and genocidal mass murders, in the case of violence.
Maybe Trump won’t invade Venezuela. Or maybe he’ll just launch some Tomahawks, blow up some government buildings in Caracas, and the CIA will a foment a coup to put in power an associate of Nobel Peace Prize Winner María Corina Machado
General MacArthur, it is true, overstepped the limits of his authority, but now Senator Mark Kelly, retired Navy captain, insists that American military personnel have the right to disobey the President–and thus a fortiori senior officers–if they regard an order as illegal.
Or take another example, drawn from my four-year-old son’s videothèque – the sinking of the Titanic, which some inscrutable whimsy makes the child obsessed with at the moment.
If wolves and chimpanzees can usually resolve conflicts within the group without massive blood-letting, why are modern human communities so wracked by violent crime? And, while it is true that in wars between groups of carnivorous mammals, the death rate can be very high, the numbers are only a small fraction of the human beings killed in brush wars that barely make the newspapers. Why, then, are human wars so devastating?
In this ten minute audio–I hope to graduate to video soon–I describe how I made a pretty good Serbian dinner, despite several mistakes. If anyone would like written recipes, I should be happy to supply them.
Let’s also get real about the real reason for this war: The Europeans and neocons want to destroy Russia.
If there are any remaining students, please sign in now…Informal imperatives, pronouns with informal imperatives, asking directions, booking rooms….
A delegation from the Moscow Patriarchate arrived in Washington yesterday to work over those in the administration who do not yet believe that the Kremlin is an embattled bulwark of enlightened conservatism.
