Naimisha Forest
Reaching for Heaven on Netflix
'I don't feel at home in this world anymore'
I am always late to pop cultural happenings. The movie I don’t feel at home in this world anymore won the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Grand Dramatic Jury Prize in January 2017, but I discovered and saw it only the other night, in some obscure basement at Netflix.
Looking up the movie reviews, I was astonished that not . . .
Posted in: filmmoral philosophymusicnihilismreligion
Towards the Korean Century?
That President Trump will meet Kim Jong Un to negotiate over North Korea’s nuclear program is news not only astonishing but auspicious – promising of success. South 
Korea’s national security adviser Chung Eui-yong met Kim on Monday and conveyed Kim’s offer to the White House last night:
“I explained to . . .
New York Times unsure about democracy
The New York Times editorializes on the Italian election: “Demagogues win as Europe’s populist tide sweeps Italy.”
Demagogues? In its modern pejorative sense, a demagogue is one who seeks power by exploiting the prejudices of the mob. But in the original 5th century BCE Greek usage a demagogue could also be simply . . .
Posted in: democracyeuropeimmigration
Red Wednesday
I first got an inkling that the Islamic Revolution will fail when I read about the popular 
Chaharshanbe Suri - red or fiery Wednesday - festival in Iran. Chaharshanbe Suri is on the eve of the last Wednesday before Nowruz, the Iranian new year, in March. People build bonfires in alleys and on street corners. They leap over the . . .
The strange birth and death of "Fake News"
Do you wonder why you'd never heard about 'fake news' till late in the 2016 election campaign, when, suddenly, apparently overnight, the American big media pack took up the danger that 'fake news' poses for American democracy?
How did that happen? Here is a Ted Talk by investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson on the carefully . . .
Nothing to beat a good (literary) Western, eh?
Jack Schaefer (1949). “Shane”
"He rode into our valley in the summer of '89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father's old chuckwagon. I was on the upper rail of our corral, soaking in the late afternoon sun, when I saw him far down the road where it swung into the valley from the open plain beyond."
. . .Votes for the Dead
In 500 words or less, explain why the following statement is either right or wrong, both right and wrong, or, perhaps, neither right nor wrong:
"I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time...
. . .
Posted in: conservatismdemocracytradition
Cover image credit: http://Pinterest
