Hi again. For yet another time, I've fallen behind in posting on the blog. Quite honestly, it's hard to get up the energy partially due to news:
First, I have moved away from Virginia (don't worry, the title isn't changing and I will always remain a Virginian at heart) to West Virginia. I know, I know, it's West Virginia. But I'm very glad to be here since I am now pursuing my PhD in history!
Second, I'm engaged! Her name is Maureen. She's conservative, Catholic, another classics/history person, and the best thing that's happened to me.
Hopefully, between wedding plans and grading undergrad quizzes, I will have time to make the occasional post.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Novum Imperium Romanum, Part I
I haven't posted in awhile. I will attempt to make up for it with a series of posts... well, at least three ;-)
Between the articles I've been reading daily and history books (The Climax of Rome by Michael Grant), I really want to on how I think this country is becoming the Roman Empire. Before I do that, I want to take the time with this post to say how I think this idea of us being Rome is in itself a phenomenon that never goes away. Plus, when used by the Left today, usually they're wrong and don't have a grasp of history.
First, I find it humorous that the Left under Bush the Younger thought us similar to the Roman Empire. Their mantra is that Western history is passe and that we don't need to study it. "There's nothing you can learn from studying the history of the West that you can't learn from anything else." Actually, according to liberals, the West is unique because of it's violent, bigoted, greedy history, etc. And of course this assumes that you want to study history at all, which as we all know is not that important anyway. We've advanced to a postmodern understanding of man where pretty much any discipline is valid: I know I learned life lessons when I studied the history of country music.
So rejecting history, why is it then that these same people turn to back to Rome? And they have: remember that phony Julius Caesar quote that made the email rounds in 2002 (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/caesar.asp)? Supposedly, Caesar or Shakespeare or whomever warned us about leaders (aka Bush) "who bang the drums of war"? It was totally ok to reference the classics then. Too bad Barbara Streisand never had one of her assistants actually check the veracity of that quote.
More recently there is the silly 2007 book, Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy. One of the history adjuncts here at Marymount actually assigned this book to his European history survey course. (As a side note, this was a really stupid assignment. The students had to find a review in an American paper and compare it with one in a foreign paper for biases. Leaving aside the problem of how to find these articles, what does this have to do with the first half of the survey course of European history? It's not even an academic book.)
So why does the Rome analogy always come up? Well, first of all, there's a lot of debate as to why Rome collapsed. It took so long and there were so many factors that you can almost take any cause and make it appear to the main factor in Rome's decline: economics, military, environment, decadence, immigration, and the list goes on. I'm sure you could make Elvis impersonators the cause if you stretched it. There's little doubt what caused the Aztec or Nazi empires to collapse: conquest from the outside.
Second, everyone's heard of Rome. It permeates our culture; and not just classical buildings in DC. "Oh yeah, Bush was totally like Joaquin Phoenix from Gladiator." Nobody would really make a comparison to the collapse of the Hittite Empire (the who?).
So it's a standard trope that everyone uses, including the Left when it suits them. In my next installment, I will show how recent comparisons of Rome to our military were off the mark.
By the way, I want to conclude by acknowledging that the Right makes those same comparisons. Usually coming at it from the angle of immigration or decadence. I'm more sympathetic to that point of view, but every time Pat Buchanan makes a reference to our overstretched military antagonizing others like Rome, I gag a little.
Between the articles I've been reading daily and history books (The Climax of Rome by Michael Grant), I really want to on how I think this country is becoming the Roman Empire. Before I do that, I want to take the time with this post to say how I think this idea of us being Rome is in itself a phenomenon that never goes away. Plus, when used by the Left today, usually they're wrong and don't have a grasp of history.
First, I find it humorous that the Left under Bush the Younger thought us similar to the Roman Empire. Their mantra is that Western history is passe and that we don't need to study it. "There's nothing you can learn from studying the history of the West that you can't learn from anything else." Actually, according to liberals, the West is unique because of it's violent, bigoted, greedy history, etc. And of course this assumes that you want to study history at all, which as we all know is not that important anyway. We've advanced to a postmodern understanding of man where pretty much any discipline is valid: I know I learned life lessons when I studied the history of country music.
So rejecting history, why is it then that these same people turn to back to Rome? And they have: remember that phony Julius Caesar quote that made the email rounds in 2002 (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/caesar.asp)? Supposedly, Caesar or Shakespeare or whomever warned us about leaders (aka Bush) "who bang the drums of war"? It was totally ok to reference the classics then. Too bad Barbara Streisand never had one of her assistants actually check the veracity of that quote.
More recently there is the silly 2007 book, Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy. One of the history adjuncts here at Marymount actually assigned this book to his European history survey course. (As a side note, this was a really stupid assignment. The students had to find a review in an American paper and compare it with one in a foreign paper for biases. Leaving aside the problem of how to find these articles, what does this have to do with the first half of the survey course of European history? It's not even an academic book.)
So why does the Rome analogy always come up? Well, first of all, there's a lot of debate as to why Rome collapsed. It took so long and there were so many factors that you can almost take any cause and make it appear to the main factor in Rome's decline: economics, military, environment, decadence, immigration, and the list goes on. I'm sure you could make Elvis impersonators the cause if you stretched it. There's little doubt what caused the Aztec or Nazi empires to collapse: conquest from the outside.
Second, everyone's heard of Rome. It permeates our culture; and not just classical buildings in DC. "Oh yeah, Bush was totally like Joaquin Phoenix from Gladiator." Nobody would really make a comparison to the collapse of the Hittite Empire (the who?).
So it's a standard trope that everyone uses, including the Left when it suits them. In my next installment, I will show how recent comparisons of Rome to our military were off the mark.
By the way, I want to conclude by acknowledging that the Right makes those same comparisons. Usually coming at it from the angle of immigration or decadence. I'm more sympathetic to that point of view, but every time Pat Buchanan makes a reference to our overstretched military antagonizing others like Rome, I gag a little.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Sir Orca?
Gordon Brown is making Ted Kennedy an honorary knight. Would that be for his long political career or amazing, Olympic swimming feat at Chappaquiddick?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkLvJheTU5ryjXjiiDoyIHbENt-AD96N7FU01
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkLvJheTU5ryjXjiiDoyIHbENt-AD96N7FU01
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Mummies Redux and Another Sane Court Ruling
The Supreme Court just ruled in favor of Pleasant Grove, a city that had been sued by a fringe group that wanted it's founding rules placed next to the 10 Commandments in a park. This is very important and 9-0 ruling. I believed this is how the court would rule, but I never would've guessed that it would be unanimous. I like being pleasantly surprised. This is a great precedent: just because you have a right to say something doesn't mean that all of society must acknowledge your speech. This group can still go and worship in their pyramid with no hindrance from the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/washington/26scotus.html?hp
Check out what I said when this case was on the docket: http://arlingtonline.blogspot.com/2008/11/mummies-10-commandments-and-supreme.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/washington/26scotus.html?hp
Check out what I said when this case was on the docket: http://arlingtonline.blogspot.com/2008/11/mummies-10-commandments-and-supreme.html
Friday, February 13, 2009
A Sane Court Ruling
Let me start out by saying that I'm always reticent when a court makes a ruling on science. It's a little disconcerting that someone with a JD is now an expert on anything from particle physics to microbiology. That being said, finally a court has ruled that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) and autism. This has been a nut job conspiracy theory for years now. "Well, maybe mercury in the vaccine might have caused autism." And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt. No one has ever demonstrated why there would be a connection between the two.
As someone who has been around autistic and handicapped people all his life, I sympathize with these families. But most of them just wanted money, maybe to help their families, but still. This ruling was also a slam at the trial lawyers. And hopefully, there will be fewer people who do not vaccinate their children because of some pseudo-scientific rot gut.
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2009/02/13/health-buzz-court-rules-on-vaccines-and-autism-and-other-health-news.html
As someone who has been around autistic and handicapped people all his life, I sympathize with these families. But most of them just wanted money, maybe to help their families, but still. This ruling was also a slam at the trial lawyers. And hopefully, there will be fewer people who do not vaccinate their children because of some pseudo-scientific rot gut.
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2009/02/13/health-buzz-court-rules-on-vaccines-and-autism-and-other-health-news.html
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Really? A center-right country?
So after Obama got elected, a lot of people said, "Yes, he did run on the left, but this is still a center-right country. There's only so much he can do." Well, I don't think we live in a center-right country anymore. I think we might finally be shifting to a center-left country, pseudo-European socialist country.
Consider this: in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected president, he ran as a "New Democrat" and stated that "the era of big government" is over. He even promised a middle class tax (once in office though, he enacted one of the largest peace time tax increases in history). He had left wing beliefs, but could only get elected as a centrist. Also recall that once in office, there was public outrage over many extraneous programs in the 1993 Budget Bill, for example the infamous "midnight basketball" program. These all told cost 10s of billions of dollars, more money back then... I guess a lot of money any time.
Now look at today. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, their fellow traveling Marxicrats are working on "stimulus" bill (a euphemism if there ever was one) that will cost somewhere around 900 billion dollars! And the price is still rising! And this is in addition to a $700 billion bailout just 6 months ago!!! There is no outcry from the public. Admittedly, the bill is not that popular according to some polls, but its hardly a backlash.
Obama openly ran as a socialist-esque, far left wing Democrat. His opponent, McCain, that monument to imbecility, tried to be a Neo Teddy Roosevelt. Very left and sort of left, those were our choices. Now that the Marxists are securely in power, we're going to see socialism like never before. How is it that we've gotten to the point where these were our choices in president? Ronald Reagan and Scoop Jackson they're not. Socialism is here again!
Now look at today. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, their fellow traveling Marxicrats are working on "stimulus" bill (a euphemism if there ever was one) that will cost somewhere around 900 billion dollars! And the price is still rising! And this is in addition to a $700 billion bailout just 6 months ago!!! There is no outcry from the public. Admittedly, the bill is not that popular according to some polls, but its hardly a backlash.
Obama openly ran as a socialist-esque, far left wing Democrat. His opponent, McCain, that monument to imbecility, tried to be a Neo Teddy Roosevelt. Very left and sort of left, those were our choices. Now that the Marxists are securely in power, we're going to see socialism like never before. How is it that we've gotten to the point where these were our choices in president? Ronald Reagan and Scoop Jackson they're not. Socialism is here again!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Who owns the Moon?
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