An American tourist in Russia
All discussions about Ukraine, particularly the tentative Istanbul peace talks, remind me of the 1939 film adaption of Gone With the Wind. Early in the movie, the southern gentry learn that President Lincoln is building an army to attack them and are enraged. The shrewd and self-serving scallywag Rhett Butler tries to persuade the other men … Read more
A Russian prostitute, a German terrorist, a Texan lawyer, and a failed children’s book author walk into a bar. It sounds like the setup to a joke because none of those people seem to have anything in common, but they do. They’re all sponsored by the US government, and at least partially owe their success to American tax dollars.
I understood the Holodomor better, strangely enough, when I visited Armenia. In Yerevan, their capital city, there is a memorial and museum to the Armenian Genocide. The memorial built by the Soviets, and the museum built after the Cold War and partly funded by American money. My first impression of this place was how strange … Read more
Since 2022 I have argued that there was an obvious and growing schism between the military and civilian leadership of the USA. There have been such schisms in the past like Korea, Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in those conflicts it was typically military leaders who were overly aggressive while civilian leaders insisted … Read more
I have written about this fatal scale error several times before and I think it’s time to revisit it. Fatal scale error is frequently occurs with children, and is referred to as “fatal” because the child attempts a task that is impossible, like trying to fit a beach ball in his mouth, or sit on … Read more