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Visiting the Reagan Presidential Library over a year ago impressed upon me the Gipper’s charm and cordiality toward Gorbachev.  Yet Reagan was also fiercely resolute in his conviction that people desire to forge their own destinies.  It was the two Cold War leaders riding horses together as much as it was Reagan’s defiance at the Brandenburg Gate that ended the threat of communism in Europe.

It was a fine example of the “neo-noblesse oblige” that had been the template since World War II.  Countless perished in that conflict due in no small amount to the failure of “gentleman diplomacy” on the part of the upper crust.  But for its time, that was sanity.  And then a new sanity dawned with the rising of a false sun over Hiroshima.

Yet Ronald Reagan… was insane.  Or so we were told by pundits and academics.

Speaking of peace while drastically building up the ...

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You are waking up to something that most of us never, ever even dreamed we would be seeing.  That the flags of the United States and North Korea are being displayed with one another in an official capacity would drop jaws alone.

But then, this…

Two men who in the space of a few hours have accomplished more than their respective predecessors achieved in the previous seventy years combined.

The end of the Korean War is at last at hand.  Kim Jong Un has indicated he wants full stepdown of a nuclearized peninsula.  Time will tell what the full measure of that intent yields, of course.  But there really is a sense that the leader of North Korea is being genuine.  Maybe Kim has done something even more impossible than what we are seeing on the world stage.  Perhaps he is stepping out of the long shadow of his father ...

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Perhaps if Ambrose Bierce were still with us (and who knows, we don’t know what became of him since he disappeared somewhere in Mexico during its revolution) he might have made the following addition to his famous work The Devil’s Dictionary:

COMMUNISM, n.
A simple idea, that with innocent charm and seductive promise makes monsters of men.

“It just hasn’t been attempted correctly!”  How many times are we going to hear that one?  Looking around the past few days at the celebrations of the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, my head cannot but shake in disbelief.  That even today, there are many who will scream that communism will not only work but be a raging success… if the right people could be in charge of it.  And of course they will claim that they are the very “right people” who should be at the controls and trusted to ...

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For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the “classic” Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro…

Turns out: quite a bit!
Here’s what I came up with after reaching back into the inner fog of time immemorial, or at least those strange days of college. Trying to find analogies on the App Store of everything that most of us had as Internet utilities on our PCs or, if you were fairly wealthy, laptops. Don’t even think that we had smartphones in those days. “Internet” and “phone” usually meant waiting until your roomie was finished talking to his girlfriend before you could fire up
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Forty years ago tonight. Here’s the post that I composed on this evening in 2005.  But YouTube wasn’t as pervasive as it is today.

So here is Gordon Lightfoot’s forever haunting ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

The tradition will continue today.  The church bell at Mariner’s Church will ring thirty times: one for each man on the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and once more in memory of all who have perished on the Great Lakes.

As I wrote ten years ago tonight: Here’s to a good ship and crew....

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Worth noting that we are currently in the midst of the eighth-hundred anniversary of Magna Carta: the founding document of English law and a cornerstone of liberty for many nations down through the ages.  Including the United States.

“Sign HERE, Johnny-boy.”

Ahhh yes: John, King of England.  A monarch so disastrously bad that not once since and never again has England put a king named “John” on the throne.  He spent years wrecking havoc on the country he was supposed to be leading (sort-of like the past three or four presidential administrations here), wasting money and manpower and countless lives on wars in France and such.

Finally, enough was enough.  A bunch of the barons of England decided that the time had come to lay the smack down on King John.  So they showed up in force, arrayed in their armor and finest weaponry and, ahem… “invited” John ...

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Law enforcement officials at the scene of the explosion, June 3rd 1985

Within minutes the skies turned a roiling black.  Rain, and then a vicious hail poured out like wrath across the fields.  Law enforcement and emergency personnel ran for cover.  Stones of ice pelted the vehicle, and those who had been within it.  Steam arose from the asphalt of the highway… but it did little to dissipate the acrid aroma of high explosives and smoking metal.

Years later, one of the detectives who had come from Kentucky remembered the storm.  It was as if God Himself “was pissed”.

As well He might.  Looking down from on high at this culmination of madness fueled by pride and jealousy.  If God could be moved at all to anger, surely it must be here.

And there in the midst of it all, wrapped inside the crumpled wreckage: the bodies of two little ...

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Yesterday on this blog we remembered the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide.  One day after that came another historic event of World War I, also happening to be associated with Turkey.

It was on April 25th, 1915, that Great Britain along with most of her Commonwealth nations (Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and India) as well as France launched what is arguably one of the most ambitious operations of twentieth century warfare: the Gallipoli Campaign.

British infantry land on Lemnos during the Battle of Gallipoli

The Gallipoli offensive had as its goal the securing of the Dardanelles between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which would have given Russia a sea route to its allies.  But the British and French figured that they’d do better than that… by capturing the Ottoman capital of Istanbul.  The amphibious assault landed on two beaches of the ...

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They had been ridiculed and spat upon for hundreds of years.  The ultra-nationalists in power launched dehumanizing propaganda against them.  Their semblance of official protection had been stripped away and made them relegated to a class of life undeserving of life.  Their property was confiscated.  And in the end they were beaten and butchered and starved and raped and shot and crucified and whoever was left were herded onto railroad cars to be sent off to concentration camps stretching from border to border.

And it took place nearly thirty years before the Nazis implement their “final solution”.  But it was not a Germany frenzied by the mad ravings of a failed artist, or any other European nation.  It was instead the Ottoman Empire.  The time was World War I.  And the target for extermination was Armenian Christians as well as many other minorities that did not fit the criteria of ...

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This is a photo of William Overstreet Jr. of Roanoke, Virginia, taken in recent years:

william overstreet jr., world war ii, roanoke, virginia
Photo Credit: The Roanoke Times

Mr. Overstreet passed away this past Sunday afternoon.  He was 92, and one of the most decorated airmen of World War II.

This is a photo of Bill Overstreet when he served in the Army Air Force during the war:

william overstreet jr, world war ii

And this is the maneuver that forever put Overstreet in the history books:

william overstreet jr, bill overstreet, eiffel tower, paris, france, world war ii, messerschmitt

This dude engaged in a dogfight with a German Messerschmitt Bf 109G over Nazi-occupied Paris.  And Overstreet, flying his P-51C, chased the Messerschmitt by flying through the arches of the Eiffel Tower!!  Overstreet soon after blasted the Nazi plane out of the sky.  It was a move that sent the morale of the French freedom fighters soaring.

Now… that is seriously hardcore.

Overstreet, a pilot in the357th squadron, was the recipient of hundreds of medals during ...

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