To the readership: As he is heading to the mainland to visit family for a month or so, this author will be in lost in transit for the next few days. Expect posting to be light over the next week. Likewise, I ask the proprietors of the other sites I frequent (and occasionally start arguments […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC American Murder Mystery Hannah Rosen Atlantic Magazine. July 2008. Over the last decade crime rates in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago have all shrunk. A great American success story? Not quite. While the crime rates of the big cities fell, […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. A lot of good material has been published this week. I am a bit on the busy side, so the usual long winded responses will be replaced in favor of one-sentence summaries. THE REPUBLIC How Trillion Dollar Deficits Were Created New York Times. 9 June […]
War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations, Peter Turchin’s sweeping application of cliodynamics to the rise and fall of great powers, has been making the rounds recently. Both the Committee of Public Safety and Sublime Oblivion have posted responses to the book. As my past posts on cultural cohesion might suggest, […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC America, the Land of Limited Opportunity. We Must Open Our Eyes to the Truth. “Fabius Maximus”. Fabius Maximus. 31 March 2010. Fabius Maximus points to a painful truth: increasing inequality of income and declining social mobility is tearing our America apart at the […]
Author’s Note: A few days ago I finished reading Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648, by Geoffrey Parker. Parker is a renowned scholar of 17th century Europe, and for those unfamiliar with the period’s history I can think of no better introduction than this volume. This reading was the impetus for the following post. You can summarize […]
“Who does not know that wars, the mighty tempests, the pestilence, all the ills, indeed which afflict the human race, do so through the agency of demons?” (Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 83) So wrote the Saxon priest Helmold of Bosau nine centuries ago in his history of Eastern Europe, the Chronica Slavorum. I […]
A Collection of essays, reports, and blog posts of merit. Due to the particularities of my schedule, I will be unable to post much this next week. Perhaps the week after that as well. We shall see. To make up for this lack of material, I offer you a few interesting readings loosely connected in […]
I often find myself frustrated with the lack of historical perspective present in contemporary political discourse. History is something pundits have little use for– why bother when one can blame society’s problems on the politicians one wishes driven out of office? This proclivity to see evil only in the machinations of one’s political opponents is […]
A few older essays – long, but still containing insight: Man from the Margin: Cao Cao and the Three Kingdoms. Rafe de Crespigny. ANU Faculty of Asian Studies. Posted 7 June 2004. Dr. de Crespigny quite literally wrote the book(s) on the later Han dynasty and the “great disunion” that followed its collapse. In this […]
