September 10, 2022

How Queen Elizabeth II honored the bicentennial of our independence

Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, who just went to her eternal reward, has been termed an "accidental queen" — this on account of the abdication of her uncle, King Edward VIII, in 1936, when the crown passed to her father, ...

September 2, 2020

From World War to Civil War?

Seventy-five years after the formal surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri, it is a little difficult to get one's arms around how much has changed since then.  In the 75 years from V-J Day to today, America has changed, from united as w...

August 2, 2020

Our Thirty Years’ War

Sunday, August 2, 2020, marks thirty years since the United States became embroiled in what seems endless wars, at great cost, in Southwest and Central Asia.  That was the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait.   It seems that an ambiguous commen...

April 12, 2020

Imagining Post-Coronavirus America

Post-virus America can be a decentralized, more accountable country in school, business, and government. My parents' generation, that of the War of 1939–45, looked forward to the peace with wistful ballads like "When They Sound the ...

December 25, 2019

This Christmas, We Need a Visit from the Real Saint Nicholas

Saint Nicholas was born in the third century, to an affluent family in Patara, a Greek city in the Roman province of Lycia, in modern-day Turkey. Nicholas was a priest during the reign of Diocletian (reigned 286-305), an emperor who embarked ...

November 11, 2018

November 11, 1918: The End of the Unnecessary War

One hundred years ago today, the war to end wars ended. It was not the end of war, despite the wishful thinking of H.G. Wells, and it was unnecessary, due to an accident of history: the early death of the second Kaiser of Imperial Germany, Frederi...

November 17, 2016

Bureaucrats to Adak

In the short amount of time since Donald J. Trump became president-elect of the United States, I have heard some talk to the effect that he could expect resistance from personnel of the various departments and agencies of the federal government. ...

June 29, 2012

'Moving Forward'

When in the course of American history, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered an opinion that the public regards as outrageous, it sets in motion the political equivalent of Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For every action ther...