My drive to work this morning looked very strange. Lots of cars parked in the desert, people getting out and standing around. With cameras. About halfway between my house and my office, I saw it. It looked like a very… Continue Reading
So it seems that the fires of revolution which were sparked in Tunisia, and came to full flame in Egypt, have spread to Bahrain and Libya as well. You can tell that these are serious protests because people who have… Continue Reading
As neo-confederates celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of South Carolina’s act of treason in defense of slavery, I am grateful for a link to Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic. Coates tells the story of Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who commandeered… Continue Reading
Stephen Decatur was, perhaps, the first war hero of an independent United States. He was born in 1779 and when he was 17 he found himself working for a shipbuilder and then serving on board a U.S. navy ship. He… Continue Reading
Alvin C. York was born in 1887 to a very poor family in Tennessee. His father died when Alvin was 24 years old, and Alvin had to help his mother raise eight of his younger brothers and sisters. He was… Continue Reading
From several of my favorite blogs comes a story that I find very touching. A ten-year-old boy in Arkansas, with early ambitions of becoming a lawyer, said he starting thinking about the words in the Pledge of Allegiance, and decided… Continue Reading
On November 9, 1989, an obscure post commander in the (perversely-named) German Democratic Republic named Harald Jäger, perhaps unwittingly, ended European Communism as a global political force, setting in motion unleashing a chain of events that led to the collapse… Continue Reading
If anyone deserves an award with the thoroughly awesome name “Badass of the Week,” it’s got to be this 18-year-old Kashmiri woman named Rukhsana Kauser. Abigail Adams once wrote to her husband while he was at the Continental Congress, “Remember… Continue Reading
The human rights hate speech law that has been used of late to investigate and punish people who say things that the commissars do not like has been found to violate that nation’s Constitution. You’ll recall a particular magazine publisher,… Continue Reading
I’ve been really, really busy with that trial so I haven’t done a ton of writing here these past several days. But I look back on the news of this week and last, and I see a lot of hand-wringing… Continue Reading