Ray Olson at the Movies: The 1940s: Everything Changes, Introduction
The world is always at war, but twice the fact was admitted. And though war has a well-recorded effect of changing everything, that was particularly true of World War II.
Category: Feature
The Titanic and the Banality of Evil
Barack Obama has managed to sneak back into the news. The occasion was an interview with Christiane Amampour in which he compared the modest media response to the death of 700 illegal immigrants, whose boat sank before they could enter Greece, with the hysteria over the fate of 7 rich tourists who tried to visit the Titanic.
Memorial Day 2023: Democrats Letting VA Hospitals Decay Again
If you want to see what’s really going on in America, go to a major Veterans Administration hospital. Since Covid, you can’t go inside unless you have business there. But walk around outside and go by the entrance.
Rereading Homer’s Iliad, Book II
Instead of meeting with a massive protest, there is a stampede to the ships that is stopped, just in time by wiser heads. Old Nestor advises him to muster the troops according to tribes (phyla) and clans (phretres)
Chronicles of Wasted Time: White Lite
I am a little tired of hearing white Republicans complaining about reparations. Most of them supported discriminatory wealth transfer programs and did little or nothing to oppose affirmative action.
Rereading the Iliad, I A, B, C (updated 05/19)
In fact, we do have a lot to learn about ourselves from studying Homeric man. Homer’s heroes are extraordinary men, but they are not the etherial saints of ethical philosophers since Kant. ”To know the will as an ethical factor” is a gift reserved for few mortal men in any era, but ordinary people, even when they do not possess these abstract concepts, are capable of sitting on juries and pronouncing on questions of guilt and innocence.
Chronicle of Wasted Time
With the expiration of Title 42, the flood of illegals across our southern border is approaching the proverbial “biblical proportions”, though there is no sight of Noah or any ark under construction.
Tucker Purged: Send the Murdochs to Ukraine
Want some more of my observations on the Tucker Purge? I shall oblige.
Chronicle of Wasted Time 2: News Readers and Joke Writers
Sitting, like the late Otis Redding , and watching the tide roll away out of Navarino Bay, I find it hard to think much about TV land—a country inhabited by the minds of most of my fellow-Americans and the great bulk of the world’s population.
