Two Winter Poems
The first is by Robert Louis Stevenson…. The second is by Thomas Hardy There will be more.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
“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.
Crocodile Tears
Reading stories on the teapot tempest over the sinking of ship and the subsequent attack on the survivors made me think, for just one second, that the Mainstream Media were finally going to tell the truth about Israel’s illegal and savage attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.
Wednesday’s Child: A New Congo
How to speak about politics without sliding into the pervasive banality of mainstream political discourse?
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.
How Many American Will Come Home From Venezuela in Body Bags?
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
