Our military academies have curricula of a very high order, so why are we turning to widespread use of mercenaries? What’s the connection, you ask, between good teaching and mercenaries? History teaches us that mercenaries are used when there isn’t enough support for a war at home and when great powers become exhausted, corrupt and [...]
Read More...I understand the argument for a volunteer army. It’s a powerful argument. Its proof is how very good our army is. But I think ultimately it’s a deeply flawed argument, because if we are to remain a democratic republic the rich should not be sending the sons and daughters of the poor to war. And [...]
Read More...Permitting the fox to police the chicken coop has not resulted in a significant increase in the production of eggs, but it has scrambled the once vaunted American Dream, fried our impulse to help each other and poached our collective brain. We’ve tried a quarter century of free-market, trickle-down sleight of hand. It has done [...]
Read More...(Transcript of Hot Copy No. 44, a podcast for The Student Operated Press). There is nothing like reading something you have written aloud for finding and correcting its infelicities. An article, maybe just a headline, may be perfectly grammatical and yet awkward. If it sounds smooth it will read well. But what is just as [...]
Read More...There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought [...]
Read More...Remember the blonde with the gold circle pin who was the standard of everything you couldn’t live up to in high school? She reminds me of the handmaiden of globalist greed that masquerades as our foreign policy. We assume everybody secretly wants to be like us. But we never ask ourselves: does this mean that [...]
Read More...If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is [...]
Read More...The soldiers we see in Iraq, looking more and more like cyborgs with their night vision headgear, and the soldiers who won the great tank battles of Desert Storm because of their night vision capability, could not have carried out their missions were it not for a son of Iraq named Abu Ali Hasan al [...]
Read More...Just a few postings ago I talked about art buyers missing a big bet by limiting their search parameters to Hudsoniana in the Hudson Valley of New York. The dominant mindset has always been to comb the valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics for pastoral art to hang in country homes. But these locales [...]
Read More...The New Yorker magazine’s incendiary new cover caricatures Barack Obama in Osama bin Laden head dress. Michelle Obama is seen sporting an afro and an AK47, and they’re fist-dapping in the Oval Office. The cover article is favorable to the couple, the cartoon’s defenders say, being intended as satire. It’s meant to drum up attention, [...]
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