Ukrainian Family in a German Monastery

 

Sergey, Maria and I at a monastery guesthouse 

When Cliff and I returned to Darmstadt from Denmark we met a family of refugees from Ukraine who are staying in a guesthouse at the monastery.  Sergey and Maria and their seven children between six months and thirteen years old are living in a house at the edge of the property. 

While we drank coffee together on the patio, the seven kids popped in and out of the house.  The oldest girl brought the baby out to see mom, then the oldest boy scooped the baby up and disappeared into the house.  

Sergey is Ukrainian, from Kyiv. Maria is Russian, from Moscow. Sergey speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Maria speaks Russian, English, and Ukrainian. They marked their 15th wedding anniversary on March 31st with their whole family in a car driving toward the border to seek asylum in the west.  Maria and Sergey lived in Sevastopol in Crimea, so they have been in an area of Russian occupation since 2014.  

When the Russians invaded, the fighting was not near their home, but missiles fired from Russian ships blasted over their city.  Maria talked about trying to tell the kids it would be okay, but after a month, they decided to leave. After a long journey, they made it to Darmstadt and the Land of Kanaan monastery.

Several times over the past five years, I have stayed in the guesthouse where Sergey and Maria and their family are now staying.  It was built for several men, usually visiting volunteers. There are several small rooms, a kitchen and a common room and two bathrooms with showers.  It was always so quiet. It was funny and delightful to see kids zooming in and out, running and riding bikes.

I am very glad to see another family safe from the war Russia inflicted on Ukraine and the democratic world.

A Thousand-Year-Old Church in Denmark and What I Learned about Burial

 

Just after we crested a small hill on a drive in Denmark, this beautiful Church was 500 meters ahead. My friend Cliff and I stopped to take a picture of what turned out to be a thousand-year-old Church of a type very common in Denmark. It is called Sorbymargle Kirke.  

Just after we stopped, the caretaker, Carina Rasmussen, drove up and offered to let us see the inside of the Church.  The design, long and narrow, is replicated across the country in Church large and small.  

There were very old drawings on the wall.  

But the real revelation was the graveyard.  I had seen another Church the day before with an immaculate garden cemetery.  This one is lovely.

Do you see what's missing?  I didn't. But it was not until we visited another Church where I saw old headstones in what could have been a granite recycling bin that I got the story on what's missing--old headstones.  In America, graveyards are the biggest problem faced by people who design roads and bridges and housing projects. We bury people in durable caskets. People here are buried in biodegradable caskets. The plot is a 25 or 50 year rental. By then, the current occupant is part of the soil and someone else moves in.  

The headstones get recycled as stone.  

The graveyards stay small and clean. there are no cracked, faded, broken 300-year-old headstones.  

One of the wonderful things about travel is seeing culture in a way you never could except on the ground in the place you are visiting.  And in this case, getting the answer to a question I never knew to ask.

Danish Ferry Crewman Who Worked in Thule Greenland and Served with Elite British Regiment

 

On Wednesday, I waited on the dock in Elsinor, Denmark, to board a ferry to Sweden.  A member of the crew walked up and asked if I was just waiting or boarding the ferry that was leaving in two minutes.  I said I was waiting for the next one to meet up with my friend who was a foot passenger.  I told him I was going to Sweden just to ride my bike. 

We started talking about travel. Then about the military. He was in the Danish Army in the 90s and served with the elite British Army cavalry reconnaissance unit known as the Life Guards.  He had seen my armor tattoo and showed me the Life Guards tattoo on his shoulder.

Then he said he worked for a year on the American Air Base in Thule, Greenland. He still had the THULE identification tag on his key ring.  He was there between 2008 and 2009, about the time I left for Iraq. We made a couple of jokes about differences in climate between the two bases.  I told him I have an uncle who was assigned to Thule in 1972, around the same time I first enlisted. Martin said with a huge smile, "I wasn't even a dirty thought back then!"   

Martin said his job on the ferry didn't pay much, but he really liked his co-workers and the work. I told him that was my goal in work, to be with great co-workers and do a job I liked.  We talked about how different travel is now compared to before the 9-11 attacks. But for both of us travel is worth whatever hassles come with it.  We both prefer trains, ships and cars to flying.  

After we talked, Martin continued went to work loading the ferry. I was delighted to find it was the ferry "Hamlet" within sight of Elsinor Castle.  

Laundromats Have Tourists Again!

 

Amy, Lee, Jane and John

American tourists are back in laundromats in Europe

Five years ago, I started making trips across Europe and Israel with just a backpack. Carrying just a few pieces of clothing has many advantages, but it also meant weekly trips to laundromats.  I like doing laundry, but the laundromats turned out to be much more fun than I expected. 

Other tourists from all over the world use laundromats in big cities so I met some very interesting people while resupplying myself with clean clothes.  But COVID changed laundromats just as it changed so many other things.  This current trip I am on is my fifth trip to Europe since July of last year.  

Until last week, I did not see any tourists in laundromats from France to Poland. At the beginning of this trip, I washed clothes in Rome in an empty laundromat.  But last Thursday, I went to a laundromat near the Pantheon and met three sisters traveling together in France. Actually, there are four sisters, one was off doing something else.  

Amy, Lee and Jane are currently living in Chicago, DC and Detroit.  We talked for a while about where they had already been--the Louvre, Versailles, and many other Paris destinations. The next day they were going on a tour of the Normandy coast.  They have another week in Paris then back to America.  

A few minutes before the laundry was dry, Jane's husband John joined us.  He saw my armor tattoo. He had an uncle who was a tank commander in World War II.  

Next week I am staying in a monastic guest house which has its own washer-dryer so I won't need a laundromat.  

In the same laundromat in which I met Amy, Lee and Jane, I met a couple from Australia and a bike racer from California. That was in 2017. The story is here.   

My favorite laundromat story was from 2019 in Jerusalem. That is here. 

Matthew Adamson on Academic Career Paths and the Interplay of Maps and Reality

 

At a conference on the history of science and diplomacy in Paris, Matthew Adamson talked about the history of uranium exploration and mining in the nuclear age. He had a mercator map of the world with all known uranium deposits as part his presentation.  

At a break, we had a chance to talk about the interplay between resource maps and the people who use them.  As the maps become more detailed and more reliable, they exert influence on those who use them.  When I worked for a global chemical company, the map of actual and potential raw material became a big part of business growth meetings.  Each potential source of uranium can be a source of peaceful power or weapons.  Adamson's map has business, regulatory and threat dimensions. 

At lunch we talked about he came to be Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College's campus in Budapest, Hungary, as well as External Researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest advising on the history and institutional context of use of radioisotopes.

Adamson studied French and French literature at James Madison University, graduating in 1996, then began a PhD program at Indiana University in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He completed the program in 2005. But in 2001 he had moved to France as part of his doctoral studies and met his future wife, who was from Budapest.  

She got a job in Budapest in 2005. Matthew followed and found a post at an McDaniel College Budapest and has been there ever since.  

I hope to see Matthew at a future conference, or possibly if my future travels take me through Budapest. 

The conference was organized by the Science History Institute at La Maison de la Chimie.

Deutsche Panzer Museum--World War II Tanks

Panzer I, the little tank with no cannon and two machine guns that was the majority of the tanks used in the invasion of Poland and France.

On Saturday, June 18, after we left the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, I saw a sign for the Deutsche PanzerMuseum. We stopped and tour the large facility for a couple of hours.  The museum has tanks from World War I to the recent years.  The tanks on display are painted and restored and in very good condition. There are so many tanks on display I decided to break them up into categories. This post is World War II main battle tanks.  

The museum did not have a Panzer II, but they had a turret. The Panzer II has the same chassis used later on the Marder self-propelled gun. 

The Panzer II has a 20mm cannon and a machine gun in the turret.

The Panzer 38(t) was developed in 1935. It has a 37mm gun, like the Panzer  II. It was a very reliable tank used early in the war.

Panzer III with a 50mm main gun.

Panzer IV, with a 75mm gun, the main tank of the Wehrmacht on every front from the beginning of the war to the end.

Panzer V, "Panther" with a long-barrel 75mm gun.

Used from 1942 to the end of the war on all fronts.

The Panzer VI "Tiger" tank is the most famous German tank of World War II. It was used in service from 1942 to the end of the war. It was armed with an 88mm gun and had heavy armor. It had reliability problems early. Production ended in 1944 in favor of the Tiger II "King Tiger".

 

The Tiger II "King Tiger" was a larger more heavily armored version of the Tiger I produced only in the last year year of the war in limited numbers.

Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

#RazomforUkraine Volunteer Sergiy Blednov

 

Sergiy Blednov restocking 

the combat medical kit assembly line

Sergiy Blednov was one of the first people I met at #RazomforUkraine when I started volunteering in March.  I noticed him right away because he was carrying heavy boxes of supplies to refill the assembly line where we made combat medical kits for soldiers and larger backpacks for medics. 

During the first days I volunteered I was part of a group that was unwrapping thousands of tourniquets for the assembly line. 

The assembly line at #RazomforUkraine. 

To the right in the foreground is Olena Blyednova, Sergiy's wife.

On the third Saturday I worked, there were more than 20 volunteers and the boxes on the three assembly lines emptied fast. I had learned where most things were stored over the previous two weeks. When Sergiy went to another part of the warehouse, I started refilling boxes.  When Sergiy came back, he saw me filling a box and said, "You are taking my job."

I said, "No, I am Sergiy two. Ya Sergiy Dva!"

He caught the joke right tossed it back, "Sergiy two, or Sergiy too?"  

"Takosh i dva!" I said getting near the limits of my ability to speak Ukrainian, "too and two."

From then on Sergiy and I both filled boxes.  And made many jokes.   

Sergiy and his wife and daughter emigrated to America in 2016.  His son followed in 2019. Before coming to America Sergiy worked in aircraft manufacturing in Kharkiv.  He later worked in software and programming. He now works for a software company based in Arizona which allows him to volunteer with Razom in the morning then go to work in the afternoon when the day begins in California.  

In three weeks I hope to return to volunteering with Razom. Sadly, it seems volunteers will still be needed to make medical kits for Ukraine. 

Many Dimensions of Parenting in a Podcast and in my Life

One of my sons is in a rehab program in Minneapolis. The arrangements were made by one of my daughters who has been caring for him since last August.  Before that another daughter was taking him in at her house sometimes for weeks at a time trying to help him find work and to live independently.

Having six kids, three adopted and three the other way, is complicated.  I began the journey of parenting confident that nature and nurture were about 50/50 influences in a child's life. Over the past 30 years, I came to believe children pop out about 90 percent who they are. Parents, siblings, environment and passing comets are the other 10 percent.  

In a recent episode of her podcast "Honestly," soon-to-be-first-time-parent Bari Weiss assembled a panel of authors who recently published very different books on parenting.  I did not agree with everything they said, but I did not disagree with everything they said--which is my default setting with modern parenting experts.  Here is the panel:

I especially liked Doucleff and the whole idea of a village raising kids. It's a great discussion.  Here's a link or you can subscribe to Honestly wherever you get podcasts. 

Unlike many parents I know, I went into parenting knowing I would get a lot wrong. But the compensation for the over-confidence I started with has been how much the six kids who call me Dad have helped each other (and helped me) through difficult periods of life.  

Okay. Maybe the nature/nurture split is 80/20.

Science Diplomacy Conference in Paris at La Maison de la Chimie

 

Maison de la Chimie, Paris

On June 13 and 14, I attended a conference on science and diplomacy in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie.  The two-day conference had been organized long before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.  The title of the conference:

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War

Most of the conference was the unchanged from its planned format in 2020, but the public panel on the first evening was about how governments and international scientific organizations in most of the world acted within 48 hours to exclude Russian researchers from international collaboration.  

The six panelists had a variety of views about what could be done and could not be done now that Russia invaded a neighbor.  One of the panelists, Joachim Hornegger, a university president in Germany, can help Ukrainian students at his school, but not Russian students. He said many of the Russian students say they are against the war and do not want to return to Russia, but by law he cannot provide any assistance.

John Krige, a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of ten books on science diplomacy, said Russia was completely in the wrong to invade Ukraine and even the issue of collaborating with individual scientists who say they are against the war is difficult: support for Putin among Russians in science and technology increased after Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.  Other Russians in science and technology emigrated after the seizure of Crimea.

The conference was part of an annual series since 1998 by the Science History Institute of Philadelphia called the Gordon Cain Conference.  I worked at the Institute from 2002-2015 so I attended several of the Cain conferences. Some of them were among the best history of science presentations I have ever heard. I am going to write separately about a few of these conferences. I will also write more about other participants I met and talks I heard at this year's conference.

In two weeks I hope to be in Warsaw, Poland, volunteering at the main train station to help feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Since March I have been volunteering with #RazomforUkraine in New Jersey making combat first aid kits for the Ukrainian Army.  Going to this conference and hearing how sanctions affect research and policy around the world gave me another dimension of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing suffering everywhere. 

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins. Book 21 of 2022

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and 

Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins

Nita Wiggins was born in Georgia just at the time People of Color in America became truly equal under the law--the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Her book Civil Rights Baby is the story of her life in an America that took a big step closer to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence of equality for all. 

Throughout her childhood, Nita is an earnest high-achieving student with a goal of becoming a journalist, specifically reporting on sports in Dallas and about the Dallas Cowboys.  Her path to Dallas through Georgia and West Virginia was not easy, but Wiggins tells a tale of achievement and growth, until her dream is realized in 1999 and she arrives at KDFW in Dallas--a reporter and weekend anchor covering the Dallas Cowboys.

At this point in the book, the trouble begins and the villains become vivid.  The latter half of the book is her fight against bosses and colleagues who undermine her and throw obstacles in her path.  

But in the end, her story takes a turn that I could not imagine in an American TV sports reporter. As part of her work in Dallas, she covers Texas-native Lance Armstrong during the years he dominated the Tour de France. Wiggins falls in love with France and Paris and becomes proficient in French. When KDFW ends her contract, Wiggins went to Paris, applied for and landed a job as a professor of journalism at  l'Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.

Since 2009 she has been teaching journalism in Paris and doing other consulting work.

The book is full of stories of her interviewing luminaries of the sporting world, including Muhammed Ali, Evander Holyfield, stars of Dallas Cowboys from her era and from the past, some of the greats of NASCAR, and many others.  

Early in her career, Wiggins interviewed Rosa Parks. The book ends with a lovely play on words that a city needs parks to be peaceful. Paris has enough parks, Wiggins says, Dallas does not have enough: "Dallas also need Parks--enough people with the tenacity to change the system as Rosa Parks had done." 

---------

Two previous posts about meeting Nita at my favorite bookstore in Paris, the Red Wheelbarrow,  and talking NASCAR at lunch.

First twenty books of 2022:

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

-----------------

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Rome-ing The World, from Kansas, to Iraq, to Kosovo, to the Eternal City

 

Melanie Sanders Meier

The last time I saw Melanie Sanders Meier in person was in 2009 when we were both deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq.  She was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Kansas Army National Guard and was working as an Inspector General on the sprawling air base in southern Iraq.  

This morning we had coffee together in Trastavere, Rome, where she has been a college student since 2015. She messaged me on Facebook on yesterday to say she lived in Rome. It turned out to be not far from where I was staying.  

I knew that after she returned from Iraq (her second deployment) she ran for the Kansas state legislature where she served until 2014.  She then left politics and deployed again, this time to the staff of K4, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.  She was assigned to be second assistant to the commander who was Italian. In fact, all of the twenty people working in her section were Italian except her.  She loved working with the Italian command staff.

At the end of the deployment, she found that she could use the GI Bill benefits she earned from post-9/11 deployments to go to college in Trastevere.  With the housing benefit from the GI Bill and low tuition, she was able to live comfortably in Rome. Next month she will finally complete the communication degree she has been working on since 2015 at the American University in Rome, and in no rush to finish.  

It will be a bachelors degree which she can add to another bachelors degree and two masters degrees. Melanie attended the Command and General Staff College and completed a masters degree in Strategic Studies at the US Army War College in 2015. She worked on the courses at night in Kosovo. 

She may stay in Rome. Melanie has considered Tunisia among possible places to live; she has never lived in Africa. We talked about Spain as a place many American and British expats live. America is not on the list of places where she wants to live. 

Melanie plans to travel Europe after graduation.  It's what college kids do.......

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt: Book 20 of 2022

This book is on my list because it was the subject of the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center for politics and Humanities at Bard College.  I had tried reading Kant's philosophy and made the 200-year-old joke, "I just Kant......."

But Hannah Arendt writing about Kant is a lot more interesting, at least to me, than the writings of the reclusive German philosopher himself.  This book is a sort of stand in for what should have been Book 3 of The Life of the Mind, which the VRG read earlier this year. 

Arendt wrote Book 1, Thinking, and Book 2, Willing, in the years preceding her death on Thursday, 4 December 1975. On the preceding Sunday, 30 November, she put a sheet of paper in her typewriter and wrote Judging. She also wrote two epigraphs.  

The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1977. Since her death, Arendt scholars have wondered what would be in the final book.  Judging was clearly very important to Arendt, especially in the context of politics.  I would love to have read Book 3. The things she wrote about judging were lucid and delightful.  In a 1971 lecture she discussed the difference between thinking and judging: 

The faculty of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, "this is wrong," "this is beautiful," etc.,is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated in a way similar to the way consciousness and conscience are interconnected.  If thinking, the two-in-one soundless dialogue, actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think.  the manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And indeed this may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.

The third book of The Life of the Mind would have been brilliant.

First nineteen books of 2022:

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree: Book 19 of 2022

For more than a year, I have read this little book a page or two at a time.  It is a review of Ancient Greek grammar for Francophone students.  Each page I read had me looking up a dozen words in French.  The Greek was easier because every grammar in every language uses common words with regular declensions as examples.   

So it was easy to puzzle out the noun being declined or the verb being conjugated.  

I occasionally read books like this because if I read a French Grammar or an Ancient Greek Grammar written in English, I would be thinking in English.  Reading about Greek in French keeps me from reverting to English meanings.  I can look at French in terms of Greek and vice versa.  

Is this method effective?  I don't know.  But it presents me with linguistic puzzles I would not see any other way.  

First eighteen books of 2022:

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

A Veteran Talks About His Family at the Dick Winters Leadership Memorial

Dick Winters Leadership Memorial, Ephrata, Pennsylvania

On Memorial Day I visit the grave and the memorial statue of Major Dick Winters who commanded Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from D-Day to the end of World War II.  I wear my Army Dress Blue Uniform, one of two days each year I wear it--the other is Veterans Day.

This year, a couple about my age were walking by and took a picture of me in front of the statue. We talked for a while about the draft, national service, and  what an amazing guy Dick Winters was.  As we spoke another veteran showed up. He wore a hat indicating he served in Korea during the Cold War.  As it turned out from 1962-64.  When the couple left, the veteran, Don Kitchen, said he wanted to tell me a story, but he needed to sit.  

Donald Kitchen

There are commemorative bricks in front of the statue. Don pointed at the row of bricks near where I was standing.  Four were men with the name Kitchen:

Don talked briefly about his Dad the WWI veteran and a little more about his brothers who fought in WWII. One was a paratrooper, the other flew 35 missions in a B-24 Liberator bomber.

But he really wanted to tell me about going to the 50th anniversary of the landing at Normandy on June 6.  He went as a member of the Pocket Testament League, a group based in Lititz, Pa., that distributes the Gospel of John and other Bible books to soldiers and students and others around the world.  

As he talked about the ceremony, he mentioned the many world leaders were at the ceremony, including the American President at the time, whom he referred to only as "Clinton." 

In 1994, a chorus of Conservatives and Evangelicals said President Clinton was unfit for office. Character was all that mattered and Bill Clinton was a draft dodger and had paramours.  The Falwells, the Grahams, Dobson, Robertson and lesser lights of Christendom condemned Clinton incessantly. 

The Perfect Moral Relativist

In 1994, the conservatives, Don Kitchen among them, were right about character. When Edmund Burke defined conservatism the character of the leader was at the center of what was necessary for a well-run city, state or country.  

So I asked Don about Trump and utter lack of character he demonstrated by cheating in business, paying off porn stars, saying on camera he was entitled to grab women wherever and whenever he wanted to, and then he bragged on TV about dodging the draft: according to Trump, Don and I and all who served during the draft were idiots. 

Don responded that Trump did "have some problems" (the same problems as Clinton, plus more, with the amplifier turned up to 11), "but his policies are pure gold."

Fifty years ago, I heard from Evangelicals I served with that Moral Relativism was the poison that caused the wars in Europe, the rise of the Nazis and the Commies, and that those who follow the Gospel believed in an absolute standard of righteousness.  

My first roommate on active duty, Don Brandt, told me that.  I would have sworn on a stack of his Bibles that he believed what he said.  But like Don Kitchen, when we talked in 2020, Don Brandt supported Trump completely. His immorality was not an issue. 

The moral relativism that was the greatest danger to America in the last century according to conservative Christians, is the public position of Trump-worshipping Americans who call themselves Christians.