In Leonard Wibberley’s 1955 novel The Mouse That Roared, the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States, intending to lose quickly and collect Marshall Plan-style reconstruction aid. One character notes that there is no more profitable undertaking than declaring war on America and being defeated.[1]
I am an avid traveler and have been flying for most of my life. Business trips, family vacations, ski weeks, a recent multi-week swing through Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Air travel has changed from something approaching a service industry into something closer to a toll booth with wings. The seats got smaller, the fees multiplied, and the schedules got less reliable. And now the executives running these companies aren't even trying to hide their ambitions.
Seeing Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral seemed fitting: Z-Man’s money-laundering operation in Kyiv was the proximate cause of Graham’s death. Had the senator not been working so hard to add to the butcher’s bill in Europe, he would still be alive today. Surely there is a lesson here for some people to see.
Thirty years is a long time—long enough for one generation to grow into adulthood and another to begin.
With time, great public tragedies pass into history. Dates remain. Photographs endure. The language used to describe them becomes familiar through repetition.
Inflation has a curious habit of exposing the weaknesses of certainty.
Every generation of economists eventually encounters a moment when the neat formulas begin to wobble. The numbers refuse to behave. The models require adjustment. The economy, inconveniently, continues to act like a living system rather than a machine following instructions.
John Reed was one of the foremost left-wing leaders during America’s early 20th-century Progressive Era and had much in common with today’s Democratic Socialists.
John Silas “Jack” Reed was a Zohran Mamdani of his era. Both rose in left-wing American politics in their late twenties and early thirties, embraced socialism, and framed politics through class struggle and oppressor/oppressed themes. Both believed America’s political and capitalist systems had to be radically transformed -- or dismantled -- for working-class liberation. Were he alive today, Reed would likely see eye to eye with the NYC mayor.
The American Revolution did not end when the last British soldier departed our shores. It began a remarkable experiment in self-government founded on a revolutionary idea: that every person is endowed by the Creator with inherent rights that no government may rightly take away. Those words, penned in the Declaration of Independence and later protected by the Constitution, changed the course of human history.
The ENIAC, built by the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 and used to calculate the parameters for America’s first hydrogen bomb, weighed 30 tons, performed 5,000 additions per second, and consumed 200 kilowatts. Today, cellphones are millions of times faster and use 1–5 watts. Quantum computing, still in its early stages, promises similar scaling within a few decades.
From Wikimedia Commons: Classical Figures in an Italian Landscape (Jan Frans van Bloemen, between 1682 and 1749)
Until I came across Monty Don on television, I had no particular interest in gardens. Showing viewers the way, he would dwell on the virtues of attention and patience, with allusions to an unspoken moral order. Through this mediation, curiously modern and faintly absurd, I entered an ancient European conversation: the garden as refuge for the troubled spirit.
For decades, Western policy toward Iran has been shaped primarily by concerns over nuclear proliferation, missile capabilities, sanctions, and regional deterrence. These issues have dominated diplomatic engagement with Tehran.
Human-rights abuses—including executions, political imprisonment, internet shutdowns, and the systematic suppression of dissent—were repeatedly condemned, particularly through United Nations resolutions. Yet they rarely became a determining factor in shaping Western strategy toward Tehran.
Zohran Mamdani (DSA-hole) said of Israel’s Prime Minister:
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. The architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people. For the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia. For the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live. For the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them. For the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists.
The socialistas are taking over the Democrat party, and the establishment Democrats are so addicted to power and corruption that they just don’t care. They will say or do anything to save their seats (and stay out of prison).
Their only strategy is to demonize President Trump and oppose everything he does, even when he helps their own constituents. If the Democrats win the midterms, the radical socialistas will run the show.
