The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings reminds me a lot of another congressional hearing in the early 1990s. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I’m thinking of the testimony by the 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ in 1990, just prior to the United States first war in Iraq. To understand this […]
Most candidates who run for President are merely aspiring criminals. But Hillary Clinton has always been exceptional. She has the nearly unique distinction of having already been party to numerous criminal acts, some of which are so serious that just a lifetime ago she would have been hanged for less. In the 1980s, Hillary and her husband Bill Clinton, […]
A few years ago, I created these two videos for an educational software program I was working on. These videos were never utilized, but I rather liked them. The footage was compiled from several dozen public domain videos downloaded from Archive.org. The music I used is under creative commons license available here. Feel free to use […]
“One of the few good things about modern times,” Kurt Vonnegut observed, “If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” Rarely a day goes by without another act of senseless violence occurring in the US. The motives seem to vary wildly: religious fanaticism, white supremacists trying […]
Today is President’s Day, officially still known as Washington’s Birthday. It’s a day where we celebrate the contributions of America’s executive branch, apparently regardless of what they’ve done. Of course, no one cares when Washington’s Birthday actually is; it’s always observed on a Monday to ensure consumers can shop on their three-day-weekends. The modern President’s Day is actually the result […]
Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release a report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years after 9-11, but the contents of the report are practically irrelevant since the decision not to punish those responsible makes it an exercise in historical archiving at best, nothing more. After his inauguration in 2009, President […]
In early 1095 AD, Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent a letter to Pope Urban II warning that the Turks were about to overrun Constantinople. Hoping to reunite the Church, which had been in schism for 50 years, the Pope gave an impassioned speech at the Council of Clermont decrying the atrocities being committed by the Turks in their westward […]
