The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Trump’s war socialism vs. “democratic” socialism
War is socialism. Your country’s government seizes private property and turns it into weapons, ammo and armies.
The Odyssey: Homer’s Religion, Part I
In reading the Iliad and Odyssey, we are struck immediately by the importance of the divine characters. Atheists will find this perplexing and perhaps conclude that Zeus and Athena are just literary conventions or perhaps something like comic book heroes with supernatural powers.
The Odyssey–Why Bother?
The first step toward understanding the Greek mind—how they thought about human life, about right and wrong, and about politics—a word they bequeathed to us—will have to be to take a plunge into the violent world of the Iliad and Odyssey
Italian: Delitto al Pinot Nero
We’ll be taking up more subjunctive forms and uses and looking closely again at the Passato Rimoto.
Crime in the Pinot Noir
Wednesday’s Child: The Copyists
The song with which this buffoon entertains the lunch crowd before passing round the hat is “Bella Ciao.”
Road Trip Ready: Audiobooks We’ve Enjoyed
In the near future, we have quite a long road trip planned to the Midwest. One thing we’ve found that greatly helps while away the hours, especially across northern Indiana where everything looks like the set of a dystopian movie, are audiobooks.
In the near future, we have quite a long road trip planned to the Midwest. One thing we’ve found that greatly helps while away the hours, especially across northern Indiana where everything looks like the set of a dystopian movie, are audiobooks.
America the Savage
I read the comments on articles on various new sites, including the Daily Mail, for whom I used to write an online column. Typical is the response to a piece on the In-N-Out Burger shootings in Idaho. Right or Left, Republican or Democrat, Americans are a very sick people, and th only proof you need are the innumerable posts rushing to blame the other side in a case where no one yet knows what motivated the murderer. Of the two groups, I blame the pro-gun rightwingers more, because they have a much stronger sense of reality, but their incessant name-calling...
Darkness Visible, the Elizabethans, Part V: The School of Night
So far, we have learned that the Renaissance, while it certainly celebrated human reason, also witnessed the revival of neopagan, anti-Christian magic. This Hermetic movement, which takes its name from the writings written under the name Hermes Trismegistus, aimed at finding the secrets of making gold, creating living creatures, liberating men from the Christian religion and Christian morality,
Italian IV.4: More Subjunctive Forms
Nearly every popular Italian language series with which I am familiar, including Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, etc, as well as the podcasts would have you believe that learning grammar is out of date.
Wednesday’s Child: Life and Dust
A couple of times a year I cook borsch. Fits of nostalgia aren’t the reason, and I would make this wholesome soup more often if beets, its principal ingredient, were easier to come by in the south of Italy.
