The Athenian Plague witnessed by Thucydides, Part One
Thucydides account of the plague that struck Athens during the war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League is among the most cogent and relevant descriptions of a pestilence.
Thucydides account of the plague that struck Athens during the war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League is among the most cogent and relevant descriptions of a pestilence.
Sane Americans are getting on with their lives. This means living with the knowledge of death.
This is a story that requires no retelling. Anyone who is not very familiar with the account in Exodus (basically chapters 5-12) will at least have seen the Cecil B. De Mille movie.
A close relative, in a comment “by the way,” hoped I was taking COVID seriously, since the problem was becoming acute in her part of California. It was a reasonable remark, and I responded: I take all potentially fatal diseases seriously, but the media are as usual lying to the public almost as badly as the Chinese government has been lying. Looking at at the Italian situation—far more drastic than here in the States—99% of the people dying have been old—average age 79 years nine months—and with underlying conditions, cardiac, respiratory, diabetic. Telling athletic young people to fear death is...
A podcast in which we begin to ask what lessons are to be learned from the Panic Virus
Botticelli and Michelangelo, Amerigo Vespucci, Sam Houston and Bob Wills, Marcus Aurelius and Kenneth Grahame, Bud Abbott and Rob Roy, Gregory La Cava, Micky Dolenz and Yuri Gagarin….
I used to have a Greek friend from Alexandria. Alex was a businessman who became a professor of business. He used to say you couldn’t argue with communists, because after you had refuted every argument of theirs from A to Z, they’d say, “What about A?” as if it had never been discussed. It is the problem with all ideologies, and I do mean all, including especially anti-communism.
Then let us look back together at the last decade of the rotten old Millennium, a thousand years of treason against human equality. It was an age of white male villains who subjugated women, tortured the differently gendered, enslaved Africans, murdered and raped the peaceful followers of Mohammed, vilified and plundered the harmless Mongols who, in search of peace and prosperity, tried to make their way into Europe.
Most of the history we learned in school is on par with the news we get from CNN, and in podcast this series we shall be reexamining some of the great heroes and/or villains of the past 3000 years.
Once or twice a decade in the mass media—news mass-produced for the masses of consumers by the masses in the press—stories about secession movements flare up like a cheap match and then burn out. Most recently, we have heard about disgruntled people in the Pacific Northwest who want to break away from their masters in Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento and join with the sturdy yeoman of Idaho. How little they know! Washington today is Colorado yesterday, California the week before—and Idaho tomorrow. The progressive virus is not a paper tiger put together out of newsprint and television images: It is...