Richard Sale has written an intelligent essay upon the diseased state of the public mind of Americans: The Menace of the Crowd. Wikipedia has a stub article about Richard Sale (journalist). Sale’s essay was published on the website, Sic Semper Tyrannis, run by “Colonel W. Patrick Lang [who] is a retired senior officer of U.S. … [Read more…]
Col Pat Lang (ret), a Green Beret and military intelligence officer, has written another of many short and authoritative commentaries on the current messes which are the US civilian government and US military. Of the two, the military seems to be the far lesser mess, even to the point of being reformable so long as … [Read more…]
In the article, The Cognitive Dissonance of Spying, subtitled It’s Always Illegal and Often Immoral, Philip Giraldi, who has served as an officer of the CIA and also of the DIA (military intelligence), tells us: It is being reported that the attempt by Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan to steer the CIA away from … [Read more…]
Military men, even the warriors or “rough boys”, hold a variety of opinions on political issues, including how to use the military. My readings in history and in the news and blogging sites of the Web have led me to believe their opinions tend to be better founded and better reasoned, in terms of basic … [Read more…]
Eric Michael Johnson posted an essay on empathy at the Scientific American website: We Contain Multitudes: Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, and the Song of Empathy. In this essay, he notes the confusion which followed the publication of On the Origin of Species when “critics claimed that Darwin’s theory divided moral sentiments from divinity and pitted … [Read more…]
This is the third and final part of this essay. The first part dealt with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of … [Read more…]
This, What Keeps the States United?, is a well-written and clearly reasoned review by Joseph Baldacchino of a book, Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century edited by Donald Livingston. (I haven’t read the book though I’ve read writings of some of the authors.) It deals with the general problems in American political and … [Read more…]
God’s Creation can be described in terms of `mystery’ when we speak in certain modes, poetic or spiritual, but that’s not the truest way for a Christian to speak. It’s not the truest way because Christians, of all human beings, should be faithful to the Creator and open to what He’s telling us through this … [Read more…]
There is a short article, Myth of Family Meals in Parent-Child Bonding Gets Debunked , which speaks in a common-sense way though the title is rather misleading. What the underlying study and the article point out is that family meals are a result of healthy and strong relationships between parents and children rather than being … [Read more…]
I’m going to take a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals somewhat out of context: The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. [second essay, section 19 from the translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989] What is … [Read more…]