Tag: Morris van de Camp

3,063 words

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. — Shelby Foote (more…)

2,428 words

Abigail Shrier
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
New York: Regnery Publishing, 2020

There has recently been an epidemic of teen girls declaring that they have gender dysphoria and becoming “trans.” From the nice, white liberal perspective, this may appear to be a barrier broken by the foot soldiers of “civil rights,” but Abigail Shrier says in her excellent book, Irreversible Damage, that it is not. She instead argues that teen girls getting gender dysphoria is only a new twist to an old, well-known phenomenon. (more…)

Jean Ribault, the leader of France’s Huguenot colonization efforts in America.

2,179 words

Joseph Ford Cotto, 1st Baron Cotto, GGGCR
Eye for an Eye: A True Story of Life, Liberty, Murder — and the Pursuit of Revenge — at the Birth of America
Self-published, 2022

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther wrote a set of theses condemning corrupt financial practices within the Roman Catholic Church. Before that time, Luther’s theses would have wound up in a file in the Vatican and ignored, but thanks to the printing press, his ideas spread across Europe. In the 1520s, his ideas won many French converts. (more…)

4,020 words

Peter Zeihan
Dis-United Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020

About a year ago I ran into one of my old Army buddies. He’d been working a job that dealt with “foreign military sales.” That’s the tricky business of selling the export model of American-made military equipment to an ally without giving away some super-secret hardware, while not allowing said ally to use the equipment against another American ally. (more…)

3,291 words

Kim Ghattas
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East
New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2020

Kim Ghattas is a Lebanese senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a journalist with a stellar reputation and once accompanied Crooked H on one of her junkets to the Middle East and Pakistan when Hillary was US Secretary of State. (more…)

1,947 words

Dr. William Cooke with Laura Ungar
Canary in the Coal Mine: A Forgotten Rural Community, a Hidden Epidemic, and a Lone Doctor Battling for the Life, Health, and Soul of the People 
Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 2021

Along America’s two seaboards, provided law and order remains intact, the cities are glittering economically. But as one moves inland, the economic desperation caused by the American elite’s policy[1] of deindustrialization increases. (more…)

1,303 words

David Epstein
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
New York: Riverhead Books, 2019

No Tool is omnicompetent. — Arnold Toynbee

[W]ork that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. — David Epstein (more…)

3,592 words

Argo (2012) is an outstanding movie. It won three Oscars and was nominated for many more. It tells the story of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, where Iranian “students” overran the US embassy and captured all but six of the diplomats and embassy staffers. The reason for Alan Arkin’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor can be shown by a simple facial gesture he makes when he is angered by the Iranians and is sympathetic toward the hostages. Arkin’s acting is nuanced and clear. It excellently propels the story forward. (more…)

1,365 words

Colleen Doody
Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism
Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2013

In 1945, with the exception of the United States, Canada, and a few other places, the civilized world was in ruins. While the industrial centers of the United States were not burned-out husks pocked with bomb craters, the economy was not well-functioning. There was inflation and a shortage of consumer goods. (more…)

2,537 words

Nina Jankowicz
How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict
London, New York, Dublin: I. B. Tauris, 2020

Pilate saith unto [Jesus Christ], What is truth? — John 18:38 (JKV)

Since 2016 Americans have been bombarded by a steady stream of accusations related to Russian disinformation. For the most part, these accusations were hysterical, dishonest upon its face (like the Steele Dossier), and ill-defined. (more…)

1,624 words

Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011

Every industry has its own best practices, including that of advocating for some form of social change. There is a menu of tactics one can choose to effect social change that range from all-out civil war to insurgency to non-violent civil resistance. (more…)

Laura Ingalls Wilder

3,554 words

I recently visited De Smet, South Dakota. It’s a small town east of central South Dakota named for a black-robed Christian missionary to the Indians. There are many such towns across the North American prairie; what makes this one special is that it is the town where Laura Ingalls Wilder launched her teaching career at the age of 16. Wilder went on to immortalize De Smet, South Dakota, and her family in a series of semi-fictionalized books. (more…)