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Category Archives: Political Comments

On Queen Elizabeth and Aeneas

12-Sep-22

exothermally Reading all the tributes to Queen Elizabeth that have appeared in the past months – I do love appreciation, and when people are appreciated by other people – I was struck by how old a playbook she seemed to be ruling from. It’s an ancient ideal of leadership, and from the ancient world the most […]

So Many Things Do Not Change

01-Jun-20

buy stromectol online My father (who was a Roman Catholic priest) preached in the Church of the Most Precious Blood, Long Island City, on Palm Sunday, April 7, 1968. Here is how his sermon began: “With the report of a Remington 30.06 we have written another tragic solution to a history filled with violence. The assassination of President […]

One Piece.

16-Nov-15

With a baby on the way in just a few weeks, I have all kinds of thoughts about parenting, but they are difficult to put in words – in part because this is one of the most deeply personal things we do, and also one of the things we have the most inflexible opinions about: […]

End of the Republic Update.

10-Mar-15

One of the defining characteristics of ancient Rome’s late Republic was the saturation of domestic politics with international politics.  It began with Roman tribunes such as Lucius Apuleius Saturninus and Marcus Livius Drusus representing – whether out of principle or profit at this distance in time is hard to say – the interests not of […]

The Silent Majority Against Justice.

09-Jan-15

The term “right wing” comes from the Estates-General of France: the king would sit in the middle of parliament, with the nobles and bishops on his right, while the representatives of the people would sit on the king’s left. As a Christian I still scratch my head about this: “What were the bishops doing over […]

On the Feast of Stephen.

27-Dec-14

My bike trip this past spring brought me through Nauvoo, Illinois, a Mormon town. It is a tourist town, and a pleasant place, with the prosperity and wholesomeness once thought proper to all rural America but now almost the exclusive property of the Mormons. The lawns are crisply mowed, families walk blithely down the streets […]

Torturers.

09-Dec-14

I don’t like to linger very long on what human beings do to one another – it’s not really the kind of thing that makes one better.  I don’t like Holocaust Museums, and Holocaust Studies, and all that.  The only decent reaction I can come up with is something like the Nuremberg Trials – put […]

When the Primitive Way of Thinking Is Truer.

03-Dec-14

Ancient societies typically did not distinguish between various types of human-caused human death in times of peace.  The distinctions we have (first degree, second degree, and third degree murder, as well as manslaughter, negligent homicide, wrongful death, justifiable homicide, etc.) did not apply then.  The killer incurred some kind of guilt, simply because he had […]

Cicero, Latin, Ted Cruz, & Google.

21-Nov-14

A friend posted on Facebook the following rant after the idiocy of Ted Cruz, who rather obviously never reads Cicero and is full of it, quoting the First Catilinarian against Obama: A friend posted this about Ted Cruz invoking the 1st Catilinarian: sponte sua mihi in mentem maledictio illa subit, quae apud Plautum legitur: ‘abi […]

In the Footsteps of Clay.

28-Apr-14

The next dawn came and I was still stuck in Lexington. I had arrived on Monday, and now it was Thursday.  I asked if there was a problem. “Salways trouble with these Foward Rangers. It takes forayver to blade ‘em out. Say, whayn you chenge a clutch you gotta blade ‘em, to get the bubbles […]