C. S. Lewis: Soldier, Scholar, Poet, and Secret Agent

Fascinating new information, reported directly by the person who discovered it:

“C.S. Lewis Was a Secret Government Agent: A recent discovery unveils an unknown chapter in the life the famous Oxford Don.”
Harry Lee Poe, Christianity Today, December 10th, 2015

He happened to see an old phonograph record on Ebay, which turned out to be of a lecture that Lewis scholars never knew he had given—until now.

Call the Islamic State ‘Daesh’, Help Delegitimate the Terrorists

“The state of donkeys in Iraq and Syria”

Did you know that the term for ISIS or the Islamic State preferred by many of its Arabic-speaking victims is “Daesh” (pronounced “die-EESH”)? The reasons for this are complex, as explored at length by Alice Guthrie at Free Word, but the short version is that thanks to various connotations and cultural context in the Arabic-speaking world, calling the terrorist group “Daesh” delegitimates them by making them sound “little, silly, and powerless,” but also “implies they are monsters, and that they are made-up.”

Semi-declared Sorta Kinda War Thing

The comic strip This Modern World by “Tom Tomorrow” is usually pretty liberal (if you’ve never read it, suffice it to say that “Archives are currently closed for repair. / In the meantime,the past few years of TMW can be found at either Daily Kos or The Nation.”) but sometimes also pretty funny.  The current strip pokes fun at “slacktivism” and the NSA, which many from across the spectrum can unite on, and also at the current administration’s prosecution of the war itself, proving that there are some liberals still willing to be anti-war when a Democrat is in office.

(Read the rest of the strip here.)

Memorial Day

To mark Memorial Day, Mark Steyn reflects on the interesting history of the Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.  (Note that link will expire.)

And somehow this combination — an improvised camp-meeting chorus with an in-joke verse about a Boston Scotsman — became the most popular marching song of the Union forces, the one bellowed out as Sherman’s men marched through Georgia in 1864.

Wikipedia has the lyrics.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Union Army Attacks Security Guards, Takes Hostages

When I wrote about Hoffa’s uncivil remarks earlier this week, my friend Professor Tevyeh reminded us that some of unions’ history “suggests that violent ‘rhetoric’ isn’t just rhetoric.”

He’s not kidding.  Hoffa said, “this is your army,” and as if on cue—in case any of us thought unions only meant it as a metaphor for bloc voting—an army of five hundred union workers invaded and forcibly took over a port facility, taking hostages and destroying property, to protest the company’s using not even non-union workers, but workers belonging to another union.  Via the Foxhole and Big Journalism, here’s the story from the Associated Press: