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Iran: Before the Next Move

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (Noon Eastern Time) Donald Trump is talking about whacking Iran again. On Saturday, after casting an early ballot in Florida, he said the United States was “thinking about doing it, and maybe tomorrow,” or might reach “a nice, big, beautiful agreement” instead. Today he said there would be no strike today, and that he’s weighing a deal or action to “finish them off.” On October 8 he promised no attack before the midterms on November 3. A week later he told a rally crowd in Alaska, “Wait till you see what we do to Iran.” NPR reports that American and Israeli planners have drawn up a short, intensive campaign for early November. The White House and Pentagon have plans to use the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB). Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried nuclear-related facility in Iran, has been named out loud. “We may have to go there,” Trump said. “We’ll knock it out fast.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces Israeli voters on October 27. After Trump endorsed him, he told voters...
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Thomas Aquinas: My Perspective

[ Read Part One ] So, I've reviewed how Copleston interprets Saint Thomas Aquinas and I think it is a useful way to consider the man's mind. There are some things I find very appealing about Aquinas. The system of Aquinas has a basic physicality, an embodied understanding similar to what we find in Aristotle. He starts with the physical world. Matter and form, potency and act, things that change. Not the self or memory or some inward turn toward God the way Saint Augustine begins the Confessions . Aquinas starts with what's standing in front of him, and works outward from there. Nothing is in the intellect that wasn't first in the senses. That's a useful insight whether or not you buy anything else in his works . A concept isn't the object of knowledge. It's the means. When I know a tree, the concept is how I reach the tree, the actual thing standing in the yard. The senses come first, and the mind builds on top of what they hand it. He carries the same ...
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Thomas Aquinas: An Overview

Frederick Copleston was my first guide through most of western philosophy. I read his whole series The History of Philosophy a couple of years before I traveled to India in the mid-1980s. Library copies. I bought my own nine-volume set much later when I could afford such things and I still go back to different sections of it every year to brush-up on something. Copleston introduced me to Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Ockham. In almost every case I met the philosopher through Copleston before I either read him directly or ran into some other major interpretation. William Barrett's Irrational Man was another early door into Nietzsche and Sartre, for example. But Copleston gave me the whole history, the Greeks to the mid-twentieth century. I made a New Year’s resolution to reacquaint myself with Thomas Aquinas. Don’t ask me why. There are a lot of great minds I could have chosen. But it has been a couple of decades since I last delved into his ph...
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The Missiles of October

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (11am Eastern Time) In October 1962 the missiles sat on launch pads in Cuba and the world waited to see whether they would fly. In October 2026 they fly every night. They come out of Yemen and fall on Riyadh, Dhahran, Abha and Medina. The Houthis are kicking ass. The Saudi-led coalition says they attacked Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport 20 times this month. The airport strikes between October 6 and 12 killed at least 20 people and injured more than 370. The important international airport is still closed. On Tuesday a Houthi missile set the executive headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran on fire. On Thursday Saudi air defenses intercepted a cruise missile over Medina, then a ballistic missile in the same area. Medina. The second holiest city in Islam. A summit between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman), scheduled for Riyadh on October 24, has been postponed. Canada, Ja...
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Listening to Lutoslawski: Part Three

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Proof of purchase. [ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] Sometime around 1988, Jennifer and I were spending regular weekends visiting friends in Atlanta. I usually managed to work in a trip to a music store. I was building my classical collection at the time, the standard stuff everybody owns, Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and so on. I had started browsing the “modern” section for anything that looked new and interesting. I didn't know anyone connected to contemporary classical music. The internet was not even a thing back then. Couldn’t ask AI. I had to stumble around in the music on my own. One weekend I stumbled upon a CD with a balding, aged man on the cover. Lutoslawski Conducts Lutoslawski . Philips. The Berlin Philharmonic. It looked like a recent work, only a few years removed from me. I had no idea who Lutoslawski was. I am fairly sure I could not have pronounced his name. But it was the Berlin Philharmonic which I knew well. A top-tier distributor. I gave it a try. The m...
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Riyadh and The Midterms Join the Battlefield

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (4 pm Eastern Time) The Houthis hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's international airport yesterday. Saudi authorities report 12 dead and 309 injured, the deadliest attack on any Gulf Arab country since the war began. It was the third strike on King Khalid International Airport in a week. The Wall Street Journal reports direct hits on two buildings of the domestic terminal complex. This evening another projectile struck Terminal 4, a passenger terminal, injuring more people. The toll is still rising.  India says one of its citizens has died of wounds from yesterday's attack. The Houthis have declared Saudi airspace a zone of military operations and warned everyone away from Saudi airports, and their media chief boasted that they had shut down Riyadh's international airport. Every major player in the region (minus Iran) condemns the attack. Suddenly, the airport is the center point of this sprawling war. I wonder whether the Houthis achieved ...
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