neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Ebola and the great forgetting: the best of times, the worst of times WHO director Margaret Chan said yesterday that the current ebola epidemic is “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.” On the one hand, I’m happy that WHO is taking the outbreak very seriously. On the other hand, the statement puzzles me. It either indicates a problem that’s merely semantic and involves a disagreement over the definition of a historical term, “modern times,” or it could mean that Chan is ignorant of the history of one of the greatest pandemics the world has ever known, the 1918-1919 influenza strain. If the problem is just a disagreement between Chan and me on what the term “modern times” means, than no harm, no foul, no problem. An early post I wrote on this blog was called “The tsunami and the forgetting.” William Sardo: People didn’t want to believe that they could be healthy in the morning and dead by nightfall, they didn’t want to believe that.Narrator: It was the worst epidemic this country has ever known. Read the whole thing. Dr.
Washington Letter George Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport Gentlemen: While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens. The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people. The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. G.
Why Haiti and the Dominican Republic Are So Different The day after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, Christian televangelist Pat Robertson sparked outrage with his comments on The 700 Club that the nation's history of catastrophes owed to a "pact with the devil" that its residents had made some 200 years ago. How else to explain why Haiti suffers, while the Dominican Republic — which shares the 30,000 sq. mi. of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola — is relatively well-off? "That island of Hispaniola is one island," Robertson said. "The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty." Robertson's rationale is more than suspect, yet the differences between the two nations are undeniable. Much of this difference is geographic. When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, he named the land La Isla Española. But while both countries struggled with democracy, economically they began to diverge.
Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism You can't accuse the NSDAP of downplaying the "Socialist" bit On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism. Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The clue is in the name. Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. What is it based on, this connection?
The Age of Bad Holocaust Novels: Adam Kirsch Reviews John Donoghue's 'The Death's Head Chess Club' When Theodor Adorno made his famous pronouncement about there being no poetry after Auschwitz, he was thinking about good poetry. Art that successfully transforms reality, elevating it to a plane of harmony and permanence, can only be a falsification of an experience as violent and inhuman as the Holocaust. In time, however, writers emerged who showed that a different kind of art can do some kind of justice to horror—an art not of beauty and transformation, but of fragmentation and austere witness. The poetry of Paul Celan, the prose of Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, created the style we still associate with authentic writing about the Holocaust. That style renounces beauty and cleverness in the name of more sustaining values like humility and truth. Not coincidentally, all of those writers were themselves victims and survivors of Nazism; for them, the Holocaust was not just another literary subject, but the central truth of their lives. The answer, in this case, is that it doesn’t.
Renaming Mount McKinley Obama's Insult To Competence Politics: President Obama says he's changing the name of Alaska's Mt. McKinley to Denali. Given President McKinley's record on racial healing, fiscal discipline, global power and disaster response, Obama's got some timing. Ohioans were right to take President Obama's unilateral changing of the name of the 20,200-foot peak to Mount Denali as an insult. The mountain, North America's highest, was named after one of America's best presidents, William McKinley, a native of Canton, Ohio. It's not just that the decision bypasses Congress' naming authority, as Rep. Though forgotten, McKinley, who was assassinated by an extremist, was renowned for his competence and achievements. The Ohio Republican was a staunch ally and supporter of equal rights for African Americans at a time when "progressives" such as Woodrow Wilson favored re-segregating the federal workforce while others, such as Margaret Sanger, plotted to reduce the number of black babies.
Mises Daily Old people in Sweden say that to be Swedish means to supply for your own, to take care of your self, and never be a burden on anyone else's shoulders. Independence and hard work was the common perception of a decent life, and the common perception of morality. That was less than one hundred years ago. My late grandmother used to say something had gone wrong with the world. She was proud to never have asked for help, to have always been able to rely on herself and her husband, proud that they could throughout their lives care for their family. I'm happy that when she passed away at the respectable age of 85, she did so with that dignity still intact. My grandmother, born in 1920, was of the last generation to have that special personal pride, of having a firm and deeply rooted morality, of being a sovereign in life no matter what — to be the sole master of one's fate. Their morality assured they could survive any condition. Theoretically, it is perhaps understandable and even enviable.
Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution Photo THE Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by , and joined by abolitionists including , resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.” The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass. Continue reading the main story But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact, as Lincoln and Douglass explained. Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. (himself a slaveholder) opposed the ardent proslavery delegates and stated that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” Photo
Scholars Debunk ‘Times’ Article on Temple Mount History is too vast, and time too short, to waste on fool-proofing for nonsense, which is why you won’t find serious historians spending their time de-bunking late-night pseudo-documentaries about the alien landing in Nevada that set off the Cold War or the super-secret advanced society that ruled the lost continent of Atlantis. But what happens when a marginal, crackpot theory makes its way into a major media outlet, where it has been deployed, consciously or not, for insidious political purposes? From Thursday’s New York Times: Within Jerusalem’s holiest site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims, lies an explosive historical question that cuts to the essence of competing claims to what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate. The second paragraph frames the issue of the temples’ location as a matter of legitimate difference—in fact, a bone of serious contention among experts. It appears that that they did no such thing. Magness added:
An Account of the Leopold and Loeb Case A tragedy of three young lost lives, a dead fourteen-year-old victim and the imprisonment of two teenage killers, unfolded in Chicago in 1924. The murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold that shocked the nation is best remembered decades later for the twelve-hour long plea of Clarence Darrow to save his young clients from the gallows. His summation, rambling and disorganized as it was at times, stands as one of the most eloquent attacks on the death penalty ever delivered in an American courtroom. Mixing poetry and prose, science and emotion, a world-weary cynicism and a dedication to his cause, hatred of bloodlust and love of man, Darrow takes his audience on an oratorical ride that would be unimaginable in a criminal trial today. Even without Darrow in his prime, the Leopold and Loeb trial has the elements to justify its billing as the first "trial of the century." Loeb and Leopold had an intense and stormy relationship. Ransom note sent to Franks
List of Presidents of the United States by age This is a list of United States Presidents by age. This table can be sorted to display United States Presidents by name, order of office, date of birth, age at inauguration, length of retirement, or lifespan. Age at inauguration is determined by the day a president assumed office, not the day of the election. Two measures of longevity are given; this is to allow for the differing number of leap days occurring within the life of each President. The first figure is the number of days between date of birth and date of death, allowing for leap days; in parentheses the same period given in years and days, with the years being the number of whole years that the President lived, and the days being the remaining number of days after his last birthday. Where the president in question is still living, the longevity is calculated up to November 4, 2015. Overview[edit] Age of presidents when assuming office approximately follows a bell curve (mean age marked by red line, c. 55 years) See also[edit]
Bernie Sanders Wants Me to Apologize for Something I Didn’t Do It’s hard getting old. Bernie Sanders is getting old and he’s not thinking straight. It doesn’t help that his political philosophy is out of whack. His latest scheme to get votes is demanding that white America apologize for slavery. Not to mention the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, the expanding welfare system, the War on Poverty, naming streets after Martin Luther King, Jr., establishing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Slavery was evil from the get go. Let’s get a few things straight. First, I’ve never kidnapped anyone or enslaved anyone. Second, neither I nor any other non-slave holder should have to apologize for something they did not do. Third, my ancestors came from Italy and settled in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Then there are the Chinese who were used like slave labor in building the railroads. Calls for apologies and reparations are all about money and the consolidation of political power. Comments comments
President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points 8 January, 1918: President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV.
Why the Holocaust Should Matter to You People tour the nation’s capital to be delighted by symbols of America’s greatness and history. They seek out monuments and museums that pay tribute to the nation state and its works. They want to think about the epic struggles of the past, and how mighty leaders confronted and vanquished enemies at home and abroad. But what if there was a monument that took a different tack? What if this museum was dedicated to memorializing one of history’s most ghastly experiments in imperial conquest, demographic expulsion, and eventual extermination, to help us understand it and never repeat it? Such a museum does exist. I lived in Washington, DC, when the Holocaust Museum was being built, and I vaguely recall when it opened. The answer is yes. The transformation the visitor feels is intellectual but also even physical: as you approach the halfway point you notice an increase in your heart rate and even a pit in your stomach. Misconceptions The museum is not maudlin or manipulative. What Can We Learn?