“I have never had a friend or an enemy that I have not repaid in full” One translation of the inscription above the tomb of the Roman dictator, Sulla, 138-78 B.C.

The “Gray Lady” (the New York Times) carries the banner, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, but it might consider changing it to “All the Fiction We Can Think Of”. No greater example of the decline of the newspaper can be found in it’s ongoing initiative of the 1619 Project, an example of revisionist history at it’s poorest.

In 1963 the Democrats faced a crisis as great as Watergate, but they were saved by the assignation of President Kennedy.  Bobby Baker, the “child of the Senate” was under investigation for bribery, fraud, and numerous other felonies.  The investigation ended when Lyndon Johnson became President as the nation was focused on the new President and his determination to make his mark on the Presidency.

How do you write the history of a political movement which killed between 100,000,000 and 150,000,000 men, women, and children? You gather some of the best historians in Europe under the direction of the Director of Research for the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris and have them examine the archives in the former Soviet Bloc to reveal the crimes committed by generations of those who felt they could change human nature.  Instead, they tortured, murdered, deported, starved, and exploited the hundreds of millions under their control.

In this excellent little article, Stella Morabito puts before us what many have found to be true; the sad state of ignorance among many of today’s youth. I gave a lecture a couple of years ago to a group of 20 something veterans, hopefully among our best and brightest. I made a reference to the “burning bush” (it is a great scene in the movie, The Great Santini) and I had to stop as I could tell by their expressions that the reference had gone right over their heads. I asked if anyone of them knew what the “burning bush” was in Biblical history and not one of them had the slightest idea. How about Moses? Again, blank faces. It was an amazing experience for me and I altered, on the spot, the intellectual level of my talk. I lowered it to a level where I could get facial feedback from each of them. Image being trapped in a world where you have no points of reference, no sense of history, where you face each day with as if it is your first on a strange planet with nothing to guide you, to help you handle every challenge. You would have to feel frustrated, alone and stuck in a situation where everything seems to be set against you. This seems to be the world which we see played out on the streets today, with mindless riots, looting and destruction. Here is how we have gotten to this place. What a waste of human potential. https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/10/deep-inside-rioters-are-angry-that-they-never-learned-anything-but-lies/

“Treaties are like young girls and roses; they last while they last”-Charles DeGaulle

Canada, the land of happiness, a land where its citizens are liked worldwide and a land where the government on the side of every citizen.  Except if you are an investor.

This article has an excellent video on the drug and homeless issues in one of our richest cities. San Francisco spends over $1,000,000,000 a year on the problem of homelessness but the problem continues to grow and make life for tax payers expensive and dangerous. Money is not the problem, the policies are the problem but it appears that the “leaders” are a bit slow to learn. Well worth your time. https://www.city-journal.org/the-truth-about-homelessness-in-san-francisco

When the introduction of a book describes the author as “nearly as good a specimen as ever worshiped Mars”, you know you are in for a book which not only describes the day to day life in the trenches of World War I, but also a perspective from a warrior who went on to symbolize the ideal for the inter-war philosophy of the “heroic struggle” which so motivated many of the youth of Germany after the war and led to the rise of Nazism.

For nearly eighty years, Dreiser’s novel, written in 1900, was only available in a basically censored version.  The Pennsylvania Edition goes back to his original manuscript and presents this tale of a young woman, on her own, and the two men who love her as the author intended.  Why was this American classic not published in its original form? Because Dreiser’s wife and his friend Arthur Henry, along with the publisher, felt it was filled with too much sex and was too dark.  With that in mind, the reader of this version must remember that the novel was written in 1900 and given our norms of today, seeking the lurid sexuality which was censored (by the author at the instance of the publisher, his wife and friend) will be hard pressed to find anything to stimulate the senses.

This excellent novel will give the reader an excellent idea of Chicago in 1900; a time of rapid growth and opportunity, when job seekers with no skills could find work which would give them some skills, when many of those same workers could be exploited by their employers and a time of a strict moral code.  In this time, two men love a young woman who gradually learns the ways of the world.  One of the men will leave and survive, the other will be destroyed.  In effect, this is the American version of a novel by Balzac or Zola who so outraged the staid establishment of their time.  Even though the United States has a First Amendment and did not have a national censor as in France, given the time, the novel in its original form would have created a major furor.

The characters are well developed, and one can sense the emotions as they progress through the novel.  I first read this novel forty years ago and probably once a decade, I re-read it, picking up more from each reading.  It is though, a melancholy book and the reader should be prepared at the end, to set the novel aside and put one’s emotions back in order.  You will also find that the human condition has not changed very much over the past one hundred plus years.