But that’s just me.
Charles McNamara, Phd student in Classics at Columbia, is writing his thesis on the history of certainty in antiquity and its afterlife in Early Modern Italy.
And he’s also co-editing a volume on ambiguity in Latin literature with Michael Fontaine (Cornell) and William Short (University of Texas–San Antonio).
It comes out from Brill next year.
my family invented it!
Over the weekend, my mother pulled out some scrapbooks her mother had put together and there was a little family tree written by grandmother Anna Leroi Waterman–going back to our first forbears in the U.S.: John Alden & Priscilla Mullins.
Not that my mother really cares; she wanted to show me the photos, including her mother and two sisters working as waitresses in a resort on Lake George in the summer of 1926.
It was my mother’s great-aunt Blanche Allyn who enrolled me in the Mayflower Club when I was ultra wee. And guess what: Blanche was my grandfather Waterman’s aunt. Both of my mother’s parents were Mayflower spawn.
My brother has decided that for this Thanksgiving we should delve deep into the Puritan question–he’s planned something of an event along those lines.
But my question is: why isn’t my mother’s side rich WASPs?
toward exposing the sewer discharge of Trump’s rhetoric.
The New York Times’ editorial board cross checks Trump with McCarthy and Wallace.
And now what we need is a contrast and compare to Hitler and Stalin.
As the Times writes, “History teaches that failing to hold a demagogue to account is a dangerous act.”
And let’s keep it real: Trump has the needle pegged over only a few notches than the balance of the GOP aspirant bench.
I will allow myself five minutes to feel glosserific!
Turn to page 108 of the December Vanity Fair.
Always remember: it’s the people in this country who most stridently espouse hyper-patriotism who are the least democratic.
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept itemizes the number of neo-con boot-lickers whose total lack of detachment and objectivity haven’t earned them a tincture of censure from CNN.
Jim Acosta can lather up the comic book rhetoric all he wants. Won’t get into a lick of trouble.
It’s only the news staff who don’t go along with the right-wing hysteria and the militant statism and the drooling over intelligence and military figures no matter how discredited–James Woolsey, anyone?
They are reprimanded, shamed, and forced to beg for forgiveness.
I don’t mean bombs-bursting-in-air stuff.
I mean, like when you’ve gotten to the bottom of all those small plastic grocery bags–the 125th Street Fairway has really solid ones–that you use as little garbage bags.
Is that what Democrats say when they meet someone really hot at a party?
This speculation prompted by my starting Mark Hertsgaard’s important late-1980s book, “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,” which details twin disasters of the 1980s: the way the Democrats ceased to be an opposition party and the way that the media refused to hold Reagan accountable.
All accomplished by expert stage management on the part of Reagan’s handlers.
Frat boy, cartoon-brain provocation from a representative of a major network.
Will CNN even discipline him?
It’s great that the President is finally calling out the mad-dog warmongers and opportunistic immigration-phobes, but why can’t he bring himself to confront them by name? Does he understand that by not naming names he is enabling these individuals–and yes, I mean scoundrels like Marco Rubio, Jeb!, and Lindsey Graham.
That’s what military escalation will accomplish. Look what happened with us post-9/11. Endless, savage, unproductive war. Make that counter-productive, as we see with the rise of ISIS as a direct result of our Iraq invasion, something that at least Bernie Sanders was willing to point out at the Dem debate.
Unlike so many Dems, Sanders refuses to allow the Republicans to dictate what aspects of their performance in office are acceptable to criticize.
Nadia Prupis at Common Dreams reports some of what the few sane, prudent voices in geopolitics and media are advising.
“ISIS ‘is hoping to precipitate a Western ground offensive in Syria that would be as disastrous as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the very invasion that fed what would become the “Islamic State’,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at the Paris School of International Affairs at Politico Sunday.
“But as Institute for Policy Studies fellow and peace activist Phyllis Bennis explained in an op-ed for The Nation, ‘wars of vengeance won’t work for France anymore than they worked for the United States.'”
