Victor Davis Hanson's lecture Hillsdale College

“Mr. Hanson, an accomplished classicist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of the great amalgamators of American political writing. He has a particular gift for bringing together a dizzying array of events, controversies and ideas and making sense of them by advancing a coherent argument that incorporates thousands of years of history… Mr. Hanson hits hard, but I don’t find his analysis unfair or partisan. There is enormous value, moreover, in thinking about toxic political developments not as problems of the moment but as destructive pathologies to which all societies are prone at all times.”―Wall Street Journal

Morning Entry

by John Russell Turner

I've been working at St. Joseph's hospital here in Savannah, GA for 8 and a half months. The people who run the place call my job "environmental technician"; but I call it "porter", because I take the trash out and dispose of things around the hospital. Here's how a typical day for me goes: I clock in, and head to our department office for a meeting. After the meeting is over-usually 15 minutes or so-I go to the chute room and empty the trash bins there. Afterwards, I go to seven different wards in the hospital and pick up their trash. Around mid-day I go up to the seventh floor and work my way down, picking up cardboard and biohazard on the way. So I walk about 15 miles a day, and three miles going back and forth to work from my apartment. It's not strenuous work, but the constant walking around the hospital gets a bit tough on my feet. I have a sturdy pair of walking shoes, however, and so it's all good.

I woke up a bit early this AM, so I have some free time to write this. Perhaps later I'll look more into a couple of AI programs I've been interested in. 

Politics and the English Language

by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

SONG AND DANCE MAN

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE SEVENTIES, I (and most of my peers) thought of Bob Dylan as someone our parents listened to, along with others like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and the hundreds of bands popular in the 1960's. That in itself was enough to relegate Dylan to the "uncool" list, as far as we were concerned. Besides, most of us were busy listening to bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, AC/DC, et al...and Dylan had an air of being highbrow, of being "relevant" and "meaningful", which alone was enough to make that fabled teen-age list of the uncool.

Elian Gonzalez Revisited

It seems like so long ago now, but I remember when I first became really interested in politics. It was the Elian Gonzalez affair, about twenty or so years ago now, that caught my attention.