history – Post Tenebras Lux

Haters Gonna Hate

ByLars October 9, 2013 0 Comments

I missed this one yesterday, but Digby (and The Economist) got it exactly right: When Mr Obama stops speaking as a partisan advocate of ambitious liberal goals, adopts his mature school-principal voice, and demands simply that political players adhere to reasonable norms of democratic governance, Republicans are left with nothing to oppose except the reasonable norms of democratic governance. ...

Magnificent And Depressing

ByLars August 27, 2012 0 Comments

This got posted up while I was on vacation in San Francisco, so I missed it. Luckily, someone in my Twitter stream was still posting it up today, so it didn't completely pass me by. It's a graph from Pew Social Trends Report by way of The Atlantic, of the last sixty years of economic activity in America. All of it. Of course, any graph that tries to represent such an incredibly large amount of...

Congress Mandates Socialized Healthcare – in 1798

ByLars January 22, 2011 0 Comments

From Rick Ungar in (of all places) Forbes magazine, who actually went and did the research himself, comes the story of the founding fathers themselves (who, as Ungar observes, didn’t have to speculate much about what the intent of the founding fathers was, LOL) mandating that private sailors purchase health insurance to be used in (gasp!) government-owned/run hospitals and clinics:In July of...

Time For The War On…Thanksgiving?

ByLars November 21, 2010 1 Comment

Yep, if you thought the right-wing’s recently-founded tradition of wailing about how the 78% of Americans who consider themselves Christian are oppressed and under attack, especially at Christmastime, was nutso, you’re going to just looove the even-newer "War On Thanksgiving™."You heard me right. Courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times, Happy Thanksgiving, you lazy, turkey-scarfing...

About The Real Origin of Those Tea Parties?

ByLars April 5, 2010 14 Comments

One of the things I've been meaning to write about ever since the explosion onto the national political scene of the "tea parties" (Dawn of the Teabaggers, I sometimes refer to it) is the nature of the actual, original Boston Tea Party. As you might expect, the teabaggers of today have the spirit of the the original nearly completely wrong, just like they've mistaken the spirit or intent of just...

Update on Auschwitz Gate Sign Theft

ByLars January 5, 2010 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the disgusting theft of the sign which stood over the gate to perhaps the most infamous of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz. In that post, I speculated That’s why I’m 99% sure that whoever stole the Auschwitz sign at this late date is not some justifiably angry relative of a victim of the “camp’s” atrocities, but rather a thoroughly vile, latter-day...

The Arc Of The Moral Universe

ByLars January 3, 2010 0 Comments

In 1853, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said:I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.In several speeches in the 20th century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. updated,...

What Kind Of Sick Bastard Steals The Auschwitz Gate Sign?

ByLars December 18, 2009 1 Comment

(From Ha'aretz in Israel comes the story) Anyone want to guess? I'm pretty sure I don't even want to know, other than to hear they're thrown in the slammer for good. For theft? No, because of what they stole. In the years immediately after the war, it wouldn't have surprised me (had I been alive) to learn that a group of angry Jews tore down the sign. That seems entirely logical as a response...

The Thomas Paine Glenn Beck Doesn't Want You To See

ByLars November 17, 2009 3 Comments

Right here. A taste: It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. and There...

The Wheels Of Justice Grind Slowly

ByLars November 12, 2009 0 Comments

…but they DO grind, and sometimes, you just have to stop the day and draw in a large lungful of life-giving air, when you read stories like this: Bible looted on Kristallnacht returns to Vienna home By The Associated Press A 16th century Hebrew Bible looted by the Nazis from a library in Vienna during Kristallnacht, the start of the Nazi pogrom against Jews six decades ago was returned to...