Update: I have added links to several other good blog posts addressing the NAS report at the bottom of my post. The past few months have witnessed pundits of all persuasions declaring that the culture war is over. Conservative commentator Matt Lewis recently wrote in The Week that conservatives lost, and Ann Friedman’s sub-title in [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2013/01/history-and-the-culture-wars/
I just watched this excellent interview of Michigan State Representative Brandon Dillon by Amy Goodman. It is well worth a look.
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/12/more-on-the-future-of-labor-and-capital/
A strange thing happened this week. And while it garnered attention by many for what has become known as the GOP’s characteristic lack of empathy, there was something even more strange operating at a different level. Senate Republicans voted down the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a treaty with roots [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/12/paranoia-and-conquest/
When a United States Navy EP-3 Aries surveillance plane made an emergency landing on Hainan island in the People’s Republic of China on April 1, 2001, most casual observers were stunned. The official line was that the collision between the EP-3 and a Chinese fighter jet sent to intercept it occurred over international waters, making [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/07/week-old-bread/
Last month I wrote about my concern that the American right would focus the machinery of imperialism on domestic politics. Yesterday, Sarah Palin – the half-term governor of Alaska and vice-presidential disaster – provided an excellent example of how that is manifest. In just under 70 seconds Palin portrayed the sitting President of the United [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/05/thank-you-sarah-palin/
I have been thinking quite a bit about imperialism lately, and decided to put a few thoughts “on paper.” Mostly, I am concerned about the future of the enterprise, for it appears to be morphing into something even less attractive than before. To begin, let us agree that America is an imperial power. If our [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/04/the-future-of-imperialism/
Yesterday I finished reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a fictionalized account of Siegfried Sassoon’s pacifist declaration against the Great War and his negotiated treatment for neurasthenia in Craiglockhart hospital. The Great War earned its name partly because of the tremendous failure of diplomacy that led to its inception, the stunning failure of strategy that accompanied an [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/03/iran-and-a-nations-covenant/
History is Hot: An Unfinished Work of Cecil B. DeMille Introduction and Thesis On the morning of October 20, 1994 – two years after funding a project to develop the National Standards for History for the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) – Lynne Cheney penned an editorial for the Wall Street Journal entitled “The [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2011/11/history-is-hot/