Two Winter Poems
The first is by Robert Louis Stevenson…. The second is by Thomas Hardy There will be more.
Category: Fleming
“What A Country!”
This morning my wife asked me why Gavin Newsome has been behaving so foolishly in public. “That’s easy,” I told her, “He’s watching Donald Trump and picking up cues.”
Autodidact–Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, Hamlet
Hamlet is, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, a death-obsessed neurotic, and the similarities between the play and the film must have given Franco Zeferelli the brilliant (if zany) idea of casting Gibson, a morally unstable movie star of limited talent, as Hamlet.
Shall/Will and Should/Would
Nothing better indicates the mental confusion of postmodern Americans than their constant abuse of modal auxiliary verbs like shall and will, should and would, can and could. In introducing the Italian conditional, I included the following preface which may help some to understand how future and conditional are formed in English.
Studying War: Toward A Workable Just War Theory, Proem
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.
Senator Kelly Vindicates MacArthur
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.
Studying War: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
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?
