Obama: we don’t need no steenking fact-checkers…
…because it’s much more fun to, you know, make stuff up. Facts are not stubborn things, they’re slippery things.
Continue reading →Category Archives: History
We knew the Nazis were evil…
…but sometimes we forget how nit-picky crazy they were [the following excerpt is from The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War]: To enjoy full civil rights under the new regime [in Austria after Germany’s takeover] each person required a … Continue reading →
Allan Bloom: on learning history and cultural relativism
I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again. But I thought I’d present … Continue reading →
Has Egypt come full circle?
Will Mubarak actually be released now? Maybe, just maybe, could people be entertaining the thought that Mubarak’s repressiveness was a reaction to the situation in Egypt at the time he came to power? And that said situation has not changed … Continue reading →
Detroit is bankrupt
Literally. The article says it’s the largest city in the US to ever file for bankruptcy, but New York came mighty close in 1975. I know, because I owned a very small NYC bond at the time, and I remember … Continue reading →
History and immunity
America has been so fortunate, and in many ways so outside of history’s darker corridors, that we have forgotten what we should have known, and neglected to teach it to our children. It’s like a population (think Native Americans before … Continue reading →
George Wallace, Republican
…Not. And so, Chris Hayes of MSNBC was right to apologize after referring to Wallace as a Republican. He said his statement had been “a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.” But it was a lot more. This was no random … Continue reading →
Distrust vs. security, domestic and foreign: Part I
Richard Fernandez always has something interesting to say, and this post of his is no exception: For much of history our ability to harm ourselves was fortunately limited by the crude nature of our means. But by the dawn of … Continue reading →
Watergate vs. Scandalgate: why didn’t Nixon destroy the tapes?
Scandalgate (a name that, for want of a better term, has been given to the current spate of brouhahas simultaneously hitting the Obama administration) is raising the specter of Watergate, which celebrated its 40th anniversary about a year ago. I’m … Continue reading →
Why was there no Benghazi rescue attempt?
I’ve been thinking that the very simplest explanation is that unless the administration was assured of success they weren’t going to try, because the last thing they wanted was a failed mission. And just when I was thinking of writing … Continue reading →
How do you teach critical thinking?
“Teaching critical thinking” can sometimes be a cover for “teaching kids to question traditional values, and to accept our point of view instead” (i.e. leftism). But there’s no question that if it is used to refer to helping students get … Continue reading →
Lenin, Dostoevsky, and me
[NOTE: The other day I happened across an old post from March of 2009. As I read it, I realized that I was probably describing one of the earliest manifestations of my change experience, even though I wouldn’t have called … Continue reading →