It’s long been my desire to create a story for the fall of the Western Roman Empire and some reasonable explanation for the thousand years of darkness that fell across Europe when it was gone. The more I discover, the more I understand that there isn’t any original thought that I can add to this maelstrom of conversation and debate, but I’m trying ( Read more... )

It will be hailed as the turning point in modern American history. Remembered as the moment when moderate, free thinking Americans started to take this country back from the right wing nuts that have driven it to near disaster. The rise of and institutionalization of the fascist police state in this country has finally been slowed. Returning to the ( Read more... )

It’s the title to that old New Order song. The part of it that comes to mind is the short chorus which I repeated above. I suppose I’m lucky not have it stuck in my head on one of the endless loops. I listen to too much music to have something really lame stuck in my head. I try to keep my musical tastes expanding, pointed at the horizon. That ( Read more... )

I’ve gone back to the books to see if I could glean new insight from books that I had read some time in the past. I was directed to a new sight for on line video and found the Terry Jones series on the Middle Ages that sought to dispel some of the mythology handed down to us from this period. He looks at the peasant, the Knight, the damsel, the ( Read more... )

Today was a day of discovery on the internet. I discovered YouTube and a collection of videos that explained the Hundred Years in a series of eighteen videos of about ten minute each. It’s a fabulous thumbnail sketch of what can only be explained as a cataclysmic time in the history of Europe. For the better part of a hundred years, the forces ( Read more... )

Movies are always a moody lot. The recent disappointing end to the Sopranos series is an example. There’s a total absence of closure. It doesn’t bother me that much one way or another, or actually it does. The writer producer Steven Chase said in interviews after the series finale that all the pieces were there. I wonder if his intention was to ( Read more... )

I just finished watching that mini series that ran on TNT a few weeks ago. ‘The Company’ was an over-fictionalized, over-dramatized, over-simplified time compressed depiction of the CIA during the Cold War. I give harsh description of the tale because I was confused as to the amount of truth in the story. The events were probably almost true as ( Read more... )

Life can be so cool at times. Here I am a relatively young man, and I’m watching live internet coverage of the shuttle mission now occurring over our very heads. Very, very cool. I was nine years old in 1969. Is that when Neil Armstrong left the first human footprint on the moon? Yea, I don’t remember that event as a searing memory. I was nine. I’m ( Read more... )

“AEI's purposes are to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism--limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate. Its work is addressed to government officials and ( Read more... )

I was listening to the news this morning when there was a lengthy piece on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They are an outlawed organization there but still a potent influence in the country’s politics. So much so that in recent elections Muslim Brotherhood activists captured 15 seats in the Egyptian parliament. Meanwhile, the Egyptian authorities ( Read more... )