Recently, UCLA confirmed my belief that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of America’s worst Presidents. He not only did more than any other politician to create interst group politics, he not only centralized and increased government power to an unprecedented degree, but he prolonged the Great Depression by at least 7 years. That was the [...]
One of The Economist’s recent blog entries reminds me of why I like the magazine as much as I do, notwithstanding its faults. Can you see any mainstream American newspaper making this comparison?
“IMAGINE Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war and succeeded on his death in the [...]
If you haven’t heard yet, the horse-chestnut tree that gave famous Jewish refugee Anne Frank so much comfort in the early 1940’s has been condemned by the city. And I don’t mean “condemned” in the sense that the U.N. “condemns” things; I mean it’s going to be ripped out of the ground. The [...]
5000 years of religion in 90 seconds, that is. This is pretty cool.
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world’s most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are [...]
My coverage of several extremely important news stories has prevented me until now from replying to the recent posts of my friend and webmaster Joe - but much like my standing up for terrorists’ rights earlier this week, I now find myself wishing I’d acted far more quickly. Perhaps I could have saved Joe [...]
The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our “now” was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I’m afraid.
Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:
Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, [...]
The Declaration of Independence is still one of my favorite political documents. In fact, I have a copy of it hanging in my dining room. The Declaration was signed on the 4th of July, so what better topic to write about on America’s birthday? I was planning on writing just such a post yesterday to [...]
At the request of a poster on this site, I’ve just e-mailed the following letter to the postmaster of Final Frontiers’ website, advising them to remove all content authored by shady pseudo-scholar Dr. Ron Charles from their website. Approximately half of the e-mail, which I share below, is reproduced from my earlier posting concerning [...]
It’s easy to forget exactly how rich we are. Two days ago, as I was driving to work, I saw a van with a bumper stick. The van belonged to a typical Madison parent, one with school-age children. The bumper sticker stridently proclaimed “The Arts Are Not a Luxury!” Obviously, at some point, this parent [...]