Drunken Pumpkin

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my high school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at nearby table.

My wife asks, “Do you know her?”

“Yes,” I sighed, “She’s my old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn’t been sober since.”

“My goodness!” says my wife, “Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?”

Josephine…

Died May 5, 1821

I still have no idea why Jeff is so obsessed with Machiavelli, and especially The Prince. If Jeff was a shrewd, heartless businessman I could see it, but that’s pretty far from Jeff. He really isn’t all that heartless, either, sometimes. But if you know Jeff for long enough you end up owning copies (yes, plural) of The Prince. If you have ever read Sun Tzu’s Art of War, you should know what you’re in for in relation to this text.

Academics frequently argue about the nature of Machiavelli’s own thinking. Later in life he wrote another political treatise, that is largely ignored, where he contradicts nearly everything he said in The Prince. That, coupled with the fact that The Prince was written as a gift to Lorenzo de Medici, does seem to imply that Niccolo didn’t really think some of the stuff he was saying was necessarily good. (BTW to get a good idea about the de Medici’s think Bill Gates with more willingness to use violence to get his way.) But, if you read it and think about it, instead of reacting to it, you’ll see that Machiavelli wasn’t assigning a moral weight to any of the stuff he was spouting off. He even says that he was reporting on how the various principalities worked, not how they should work.

I like to think of Machiavelli as doing the same sort of job as Jesus, only from the other side. Jesus told us not to be jerks, because he knew that we were by default. Machiavelli proved to us that we were jerks and that the only way to change that was on our own.

Wow, is that flame bait for our Christian readers or what?

Tune in tomorrow when I enchant you with tales from purgatory.

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.