“The other thing. . . was that this little spot, the Bahamas lowland, was a turquoise jewel that you could see all the way to the moon. . . . It was like it was illuminated, like a piece of opal. And you could see that all the way to the moon. And I kept […]
“If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it” [Yvonne Hitchens] Hitch 22, A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens was a middle class Brit, but received an upper class education. Perhaps this explains his ‘contradictions’. A part of him would be unable to […]
Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003 It was November 8, 1932, the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin was sealing his power. The forced collectivization of farming in the Ukraine was well underway, and starvation was killing millions. The Politburo was becoming a sinister band of complicit murderers. There […]
Mirage, Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Nina Burleigh, Harper Perennial, 2008 “Napoleon Bonaparte was more than just a celebrated man, he was the nearest thing to a rock star the late eighteenth century would see.” In 1798, just before Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the American West and […]
In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell provides a clear treatment of the economic principles that underlie capitalist economics. First he explains the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism, then he shows how even educated people tend to misunderstand these basic concepts. This book is not just an introductory course in economics, it is an explanation of its counter-intuitive […]
In the United States, mass production produced consumer products. In Hitler’s Germany it produced military power. Hitler hid this build-up brilliantly, with a pervasive dual use strategy, and he successfully used anti-communism to camouflage to the British establishment his intentions in Europe. In a short six years time, the United States had cars, and Hitler […]
“The more you can know, the more you can learn” E. D Hirsch, Jr. American public education have declined progressively, and undeniably, despite the massive funding of the academic education establishment. This decline is so broad and profound as to be near unbelievable. For E. D. Hirsch, Jr. the chief cause of this, amazingly […]
“Acknowledgement of the death of God is a bomb that blows up many things, not just oppressive traditionalism, but also values like compassion and the equality of human dignity on which support for a tolerant liberal political order is based. This then is the Nietzschean dead end from which Western philosophy has still not emerged.” […]
It has been ten years since the strange episode of Elian Gonzalez. His mother risked and lost her life bringing him to the U.S. on a small boat from Cuba. Castro demanded his return and President Clinton complied. The boy was ‘repatriated’ at the gun point of US Marshals. “The boy should be with his […]
There was a time when rock-and-roll fostered truly original, creative art. Young people from nowhere, like Neil Young, with a talent for guitar, an honest voice, and a gift for ballad phrases and melodies, wrote and recorded great songs, not knowing really how or why. They expressed the angst of nobody-ness, and in turn achieved […]
