Epicurus redux
All the Gods are dead except the god of war. (Eldridge Cleaver)
Archive of entries posted on January 2015
Bring back the draft!
Outgoing Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, says he’s concerned about retaining qualified U.S. military service members amid the “stress and strain” of more than 13 years of continuous warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. In one of his last interviews in the job he’s held since February 2013, Hagel refers to the “hidden consequences” of “nonstop …
The militarization of American police
From Chief Z. Z. Lawless, Mumsdorf Police Dept, Mumsdorf To: “Gifts for Good Guys”, c/o The Pentagon “My men and I sincerely appreciated the overnight railway-flatcar delivery of the CX-B Annihilator Halftrack Urban Ambassador, which is already earning its keep. Thanks to its jumbo rubber shells and its six-hundred-per-second firing capacity, those local mums are …
Getting on
There is no rest for the striver, the person who just has to “get on”, as my father called it. One goal reached and another emerges, and all the time the clock is ticking. In “Time”, by Eva Hoffman, the writer contrasts slow, “lived time” with her first experience of American time when she emigrated to …
Enjoyment and efficiency
“It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been …