I didn’t expect the book to be available for purchase at Amazon for another couple weeks. This
Working on e-versions now.
Category Archives: History
White House Youth
This isn’t creepy at all.
What color shirts do they get to wear?
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: ObamaCare and the totalitarian mindset:
Suppose some inventor hatches an idea for what he thinks would be a great and revolutionary new product. He raises money from investors, sets up office, hires people–and fails spectacularly. The company’s customer service is atrocious, the product is expensive and lousy, and the whole business plan is fundamentally flawed. Who’s to blame?
The news media, of course. After all, journalists could have put out stories touting the virtues of the product and explaining how to navigate the crummy customer-service system, and maybe then the whole business plan would have worked out.
That, at any rate, is the argument Paul Waldman puts forth in an article for the leftist American Prospect. Of course being a good leftist, Waldman is not blaming the media for the failure of a private business. But then neither would any nonleftist. Yet because the enterprise in question is a governmental one–ObamaCare, in case you’ve been away from Earth for the past two months–the argument somehow makes sense to him.
We find it not only wrongheaded but sinister (in every sense of the word). Waldman argues that journalists have a “responsibility” to provide “audiences with practical information that could help them navigate the new system”–and not just that, but to provide such information “repeatedly or people won’t get it.”
Remember, as the Democrats told us last year, government is the only thing we all belong to.
The Roots Of Fascism
“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.
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.