A century and a half ago this week, South Carolina began the grand experiment as to whether there is an "opt out" clause hidden between the lines of the Constitution. The Ordnance of Secession, adopted on the 20th, said nothing more than "We're outta here!" in the legalese of the time. On Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1860, South Carolina adopted ( Read more... )

The original historians were what we might call polemicists today. They used the past, or events in distant lands, as a platform to write parables that were intended to advance a current political or social goal. Students of German history are familiar with Tacitus' Germania, in which he painted the Germans as what later generations would call " ( Read more... )

Click to view

There's a lot of anger that the banks were bailed out, back in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Here's a reminder of why they were bailed out:

Watching the paper markets freeze is a experience I won’t ever forget. There was a palpable sense that we might be watching the end of Western Capitalism ( Read more... )

While I knew wealth is concentrated in America, I had no idea how highly concentrated it is. For example, I'd incorrectly assumed that the bottom 120 million of us had at least a couple percent of the wealth that exists. I was wrong.

A second source claims that, in 1983, the "bottom 40%" had about three times as great a share of national wealth ( Read more... )

One aspect of a number of discussions I've been involved in lately, is how we can tell truth from spin from propaganda. An increasingly large number of people claim that everything is opinion. To someone who had grasped the outlines of the scientific method before he memorized multiplication tables, this is astoundingly ignorant. I mean, it's like ( Read more... )

Many people like to understand the world, by reducing it to parts, and studying the parts. That will give you a lot of in-depth understanding of how that part works, but not how the parts interact. Here's an example ( Read more... )

Many of the best ideas, come from being the first to see the connections between knowledge that lots of people have, but haven't thought about in the right way to put together. Charlie Stoss did that in a recent blog post:

There's a deceptively simple question that's been bugging me this week, and it is this ( Read more... )

So, I was all set to do blistering commentary on Glenn Beck, but I keep procrastinating on the actual writing. Suffice to say that I'm totally unsurprised to learn that he was not aware, on June 4th, that he was promoting the work of someone who was convicted in 1944 for conspiring with Nazi agents to overthrow the US government. (That would ( Read more... )

Suppose you heard someone say ". . . my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany . . ." How would you think that person's father died ( Read more... )