A number of people opposed to the new flu shot are complaining about the language being used to characterize their position. In particular, they reject the word “refuse.” Of course they are right, but, if they would only consider what they are up against, they might have second thoughts.
An FB friend posted a Charlie Rich lyric.. It took me back a few years. I was a bit late in learning to appreciate Charlie.
What are we going to do about China’s threats against Taiwan? More importantly, what are we going to do with the tacky music at the end? Someone place tell me who sang this monstrosity.
My remarks on the late Don Rumsfeld sparked a set of responses that evolved into discussing the cause of the Second Gulf War. It may be worth a little time to wonder if such explanations are of any value.
Some conservatives are already ridiculing an Atlantic Monthly hit job on the late Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently, they don’t realize that a magazine staff writer is an expert on war and management. (This guy brags about how astonished DOD aides were, when he outlined his critique of the Iraq War.)
Journalists are like doctors: They know everything, especially in fields they have no experience in.
In recent decades Anthony Bukoski has emerged as one of the best writers of short fiction, not just in America but in the English language. He has turned the ugly streets of his native Superior, Wisconsin, into a literary landscape as mythical as Faulkner’s Mississippi and Tolkiens Middle Earth and populated it with unforgettable characters whose failures and follies are redeemed by their self-respect and their capacity for love. Of his earlier collections, I wrote previously: Anthony Bukoski is one of the finest fiction writers in America. Stolidly remaining in the grim ruins of Superior, Wisconsin, he has...
This is the second draft of the Chronology–from Rome to Mussolini. I have also included prose translations of several poems of Agathias Scholasticus, the historian who completed Procopius’ unfinished history of Justinian’s wars. I hope also to post translations of Sidonius Apollinaris and Venantius Fortunatus.
As politicians go, the governor of Florida is one of the best we have, but he is not an educated man and does not at all understand the evils that have been perpetrated by American public education, and, since he does not understand the causes of the problem, he is incapable of devising a workable solution.
The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship. Cyrus’s general policy was to reverse the forced resettlement of inflicted on subject nations by Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, whose strategy of divide et impera would be emulated by later tyrants.
Few details of the story of Exodus have been securely confirmed by archeologists. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that nomadic Hebrews made their way out of Egypt back to southern Canaan, where some of their people appear to have been living already.
