The past year has brought several challenges for me. In early November 2021, I suffered the start of the retina problems that then continued to plague me for several months. (Comment from my first-born: “Mom, you know you’re not 30 years old any more”… Not terribly well-received by me at the time, though I’ve come … Continue reading Emulating Serena Williams: My career redirect
What is it about those entitled White guys who defy the norms of decent grooming to present themselves as “lovable rogues” and thereby somehow also defy the norms of truth-telling and probity to achieve outstanding success in their careers… all of it based on industrial-scale fraud and lies. And by doing this, they bring whole … Continue reading Mop-haired fraudster lies way to success. Wide harm ensues.
The Washington Post reports variously today that the U.S. government is either “privately encouraging” or more actively “pushing” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reconsider his stance against negotiating with Russia so long as Vladimir Putin remains President. The more deeply reported of those accounts, the “privately encouraging” one, is sourced to “people close to the … Continue reading Thoughts for Armistice Day 2022
In August 1578, Portugal’s young King Sebastian planned and personally led an audacious military expedition against Ottoman forces in Morocco. It was a disaster. Four hours of heavy fighting left 8,000 dead on the Portuguese side. English-Wikipedia tells us that those killed included Sebastian, whose body was never found, and “almost the whole of the … Continue reading 1580: Spain’s brief vision of a unipolar world
So Charles, from the family of Windsor (formerly known as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) will be getting formally “crowned as King of England, Wales, and Scotland on May 26, 2023. A few weeks ago I wrote about the opportunity this would give us to consider the imperial origins of the “Crown Jewels” that will be flaunted on that … Continue reading WaPo picks up on UK ‘Crown Jewels’ story…
I am already looking forward to the coronation of Charles Windsor, to presumably be held during peak tourist season in 2023? This gives us enough time to do more research into the provenance of the obscenely extensive holdings of the House of Windsor (known until a speedy 1917 name-change as the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha)… and … Continue reading Britain’s Crown Jewels: Time to decolonize, repatriate!
I’ve been re-thinking how to proceed with my Project 500 Years. (Actually, as of now, Project 607 years, but who’s counting?) I have a number of ideas of new approaches I might use. But since I’m currently a little fixated on how the era of Western hegemony of the world order is currently ending, I … Continue reading Learning from Gen. Douglas MacArthur
The image above shows some of the victims of the RAF’s “Battle of Hamburg” As we know, when U.S. Pres. Harry Truman and his advisors decided on the first-ever use of an atomic bomb, in early August 1945, they were well aware that the main victims of this explosion would be the large civilian population … Continue reading When the ‘West’ decided it was good to bomb whole cities
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. Air Force dropped a single atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb had the explosive power of some 15,000 tons of TNT. It ignited a fire- and wind-storm that destroyed everything in the city except a few unusually sturdy structures and released plumes of radiation that … Continue reading Two-piece swimsuits and the trivialization of nuclear terror
Throughout the present century, the corporate media here in the United States, and much of international discourse, has been in a furor over “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Why, in 2003, the (G.W.) Bush administration even led an international coalition to go into the once-proud country of Iraq and, basically, destroy the whole country’s infrastructure and … Continue reading What’s so special about nuclear weapons? (Or, when did “WMDs” become a thing?)
