“Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left.”
The Left was just fine with Mussolini and Hitler until the latter turned on Stalin. Then they took over academia and rewrote history.
Category Archives: History
International Air Travel
We’ve come a long way.
Tehran, and Munich
The real parallels:
Iran’s motive for proposing to annihilate the Jewish State is the same as Hitler’s, and the world’s indifference to the prospect of another Holocaust is no different today than it was in 1938. It is the dead’s envy for the living.
Dying civilizations are the most dangerous, and Iran is dying. Its total fertility rate probably stands at just 1.6 children per female, the same level as Western Europe, a catastrophic decline from 7 children per female in the early 1980s. Iran’s present youth bulge will turn into an elderly dependent problem worse than Europe’s in the next generation and the country will collapse. That is why war is likely, if not entirely inevitable.
And Obama/Kerry seem determined to increase the likelihood, even if unwittingly.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
Obama’s commitment to rapprochement with Iran arises from deep personal identification with the supposed victims of imperialism. That is incongruous, to be sure. Persia spent most of its history as one of the nastier imperial powers, and its present rulers are no less ambitious in their pursuit of a pocket empire in the Shi’ite world. The roots of his policy transcend rationality. Israel can present all the evidence in the world of Iran’s plans to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and the Iranians can cut the Geneva accord into confetti. Obama will remain unmoved. His heart, like his late mother’s, beats for the putatively oppressed peoples of the so-called Third World.
I think that there is a lot of truth to D’Souza’s thesis.
The Ratchet Of History
The Democrats just nuked it.
I was thinking that myself yesterday, though not in as quite vivid terms.
[Saturday-morning update]
Six questions about the Senate’s nuclear winter.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Senate goes MAD.
JFK
I don’t really have much to say about him, other than what I wrote about space policy, except that I think he is the most overrated president in American history. Not the worst, but definitely the most overrated. Actually, though, I’ll have to confess that he only regained that status in the past few weeks or so, because prior to that, for the past five years, Obama had the crown.
Dear NASA
JFK just wasn’t that into you.
My space-related thoughts on the anniversary of the assassination, over at USA Today.
The Language Of Liberty
Some thoughts, and a link, from Mark Steyn.
Obama And Gettysburg
Not all that stunning, really, to close observers. I assume he calculates that he’s already gotten as much political mileage as he needs, or is likely to get, from his faux association with Lincoln.
How Safe Should A Frontier Be?
I have a piece up on that subject over at Reason. It’s a reprise of some of the arguments I make in the book, which I now expect to be available next week (my printer screwed up). I’d hoped to have them available for SpaceUp LA this weekend, but that’s not going to happen.
The Tea Party And Alger Hiss
A takedown of Cass Sunstein’s idiotic theory:
We aren’t seeing a right-leaning populist surge today because of Alger Hiss; we are seeing it because many Americans believe that President Obama’s liberal and technocratic agenda represents a threat to a way of life they value. We are seeing it because many Americans blame the establishment of both parties both for the financial crisis and for the vast transfer of resources to the wealthy that came after the crash. We are seeing it because whether you look at foreign or domestic policy, the technocratic suggestions of the Great and the Good have not been helping ordinary Americans much for the last 20 years.
Via Meadia isn’t a Tea Party house organ, and any tea parties at the stately Mead manor are more about Earl Grey than Ayn Rand. But we don’t think Tea Partiers are wrong to see President Obama’s political goals as fundamentally opposed to their own vision of what America should be. They aren’t angry because they are stupid, and deep disagreement with technocratic liberalism is not a mental disease.
But if it is, ObamaCare will cover it. One way or the other.