More wisdom from Babylon 5

Londo, the Centauri ambassador, is editing a report on potential enemies to make them seem more menacing. Naïve assistant: "But they are a very spiritual people!" Londo: "Leave that in. That always scares the...

A war to end war

Today in the Globe and Mail, "There was a war in 1812? Really?"Earlier this month, Peter Jones in the Globe and Mail: But the real legacy of the War of 1812, government claims aside, is simply that there was never a repeat. Tensions remained, small cross-border incursions took place, and fortifications continued to be built and maintained for another half-century, but the primary...

Breivik, coward

Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, deserves no better than to be classified as a malicious coward and exhibitionist.If he was really dedicated to the cause he proclaimed, he would have shot or blown up someone important.Instead he went for a large number of easy kil...

The Sultan's Organ, by John Mole

John Mole noticed my personal and professional interest in Islamic history and sent me a most interesting book, The Sultan's Organ, a book that is not salacious in the least, concerns an Englishman, Thomas Dallam, who around 1600 transported a gift from Queen Elizabeth and a ...

One of the best things I've written

Those allergic to even the slightest touch of braggadocio should stop reading now.Last night and this morning I reread something I wrote a while back that I think is really very good, in its conception,  its analysis, and in its expression as an effective piece of writing.It wasn't "Democracy's Place in World History," which I wrote back in 1991 with Phil Paine; I hope that...

Old Ironsides!

OK, despite my critical view of the War of 1812, I remain a fan of the USS Constitution.  With luck, she  sails again tomorr...

Nevsky, by Ben McCool and Mario Guevera

In our time artists have a lot of choices of which genre  they will use to tell stories that inspire them. One common strategy has been to take tales that originate in comic books or graphic novels and fill them out by using all the resources of the movies. The Marvel superhero...

The eternal mystery of Muzak

Why is "Cisco Kid was a friend of mine" playing in a grocery in North Bay, Ontario  in August, 20...

Homecoming

As the most regular readers know,or at least suspect, I am back home after being away for three weeks. Once again I was out camping in Western Pennsylvania for the duration of the Pennsic War of the SCA. While we were there we experienced some of the extreme weather of 2012. We got the wet and stormy variety. When we got there the landscape was too dry for open fires, but the first...

A stunning pair of images

Over at TomDispatch.com: How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan -- or America A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad By Peter Van Buren Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses...

Canadian chivalry

I just heard about this:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2174625/Modern-day-knight-crosses-Canada-horseback-spread-values-chivalry.htmlI was alerted by Jeff Sypeck at Quid plura?  He has an interesting collection of links on Charlemagne, including a notification of a Brazilian Portuguese translation of his own book!http://www.quidplura.com/?p=3...