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 3,000-year-old talking mummy creates dispute in Egypt Egyptians are arguing among themselves on a new study that has recreated the voice of a 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian priest. Egypt alarmed over Sudan's siding with Ethiopia in Nile water dispute
Sudan's rejection of an Arab League resolution supporting Cairo in negotiations with Addis Ababa over the filling of Ethiopia's Renaissance Dam has caused alarm in Egypt, already at odds with Ethiopia over construction of the multibillion dollar dam.
Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia - but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover.
 The Ghost of Dickens Past
By Cicero Bruce on Feb 06, 2020 09:00 pm Critics have well acquainted us with Charles Dickens the sentimentalist—lover of the oppressed, defender of childhood innocence, decrier of England’s industrial sweatshops. But seldom have they given readers a glimpse of the Dickens with whom Myron Magnet deals in “Dickens and the Social Order”: Dickens the philosophical traditionalist. Dickens and the Social Order, by ... Read in browser »  The Muslim World's Inferiority Complex by Raymond Ibrahim American Thinker February 1, 2020 https://www.meforum.org/60371/the-muslim-world-inferiority-complex Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution, said in a January 23, 2020 lecture aired on Ofogh TV (Iran) that Jihad and violence are a form of mercy to the world. Explaining that mercy for mankind had been the heart of Prophet Muhammad’s mission, Azghadi said that bloodshed through Jihad is merciful in the same way that surgery is merciful when compared to execution. – Middle East Media Research Institute Noah Rothman writes: America’s political class has never had enough faith in the voting public to level with them about what’s at stake. But Western interests in Syria did not cease to exist. Indeed, those interests seem increasingly imperiled by unabated violence and political chaos in the Levant. If Syria’s trajectory continues along its present course, Americans are going to be hearing a lot more about it. And soon. – Commentary Magazine
Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator named Alfred Aedtner.
After Heim fled on a tip that he was about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see justice done at almost any cost. As late as 2009, the mystery of Heim's disappearance remained unsolved. Now, in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded capture - living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family - while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that illuminates a nation's dramatic reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust.
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.
In this witty and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized, or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.
In 1943, Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, in which millions of villagers starved to death.
Relying on extensive archival research and first-hand interviews, Mukerjee weaves a rivetting narrative of Churchill's decisions to ratchet up the demands on India as the war unfolded, and to ignore the corpses piling up in the Bengali countryside. The hypocrisy, racism, and extreme economic conditions of two centuries of British colonial policy finally built to a head, leading Indians to fight for their independence in 1947. Few Americans know that World War II was won on the backs of these starving peasants; Mukerjee shows us a side of World War II to which we’ve been blind. We know what Hitler did to the Jews, what the Japanese did to the Chinese, what Stalin did to his own people. This tragedy has largely been neglected, until now. 
ALBERTO MINGARDI
Populism’s Echoes Historical lessons from Europe’s transformation in the late nineteenth century  Chernobyl: A Tale of Science and the Soul
by Flagg Taylor No matter one’s position in society, the vibrancy of communism, and its superiority to other systems, must be constantly affirmed. Read More » Judicial Supremacy and the Constitution by Greg Weiner Greg Weiner discusses the difference between the political constitution and the judicial constitution. Read More »  Happiness through Chutzpah: The Norman Podhoretz Story It was a privilege for us to give the Herzl Prize to the great Norman Podhoretz last Sunday. Read New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari's recounting of the day and tribute to this American patriot, proud Jew, and legendary conservative. The Religion of Liberal Democracy
Blake Smith How the Dreyfus affair inspired sociologist Émile Durkheim to develop an original, provocative, and optimistic view of the French Republic and the rights-bearing individual Read More
Women of the Gulag is a 2018 US short documentary film directed by Marianna Yarovskaya. and based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory(2013).Best Documentary Short shortlist nominee, 2018 Academy Awards.
Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill guides us through the thrilling period of the Renaissance and the Reformation (the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth century), so full of innovation and cultural change that the Western world would not experience its like again until the twentieth century. Beginning with the continent-wide disaster of the Black Death, Cahill traces the many developments in European thought and experience that served both the new humanism of the Renaissance and the seemingly abrupt religious alterations of the increasingly radical Reformation. This is an age of the most sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies and of newly found courage, as many thousands refuse to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. It is an era of just-discovered continents and previously unknown peoples. More than anything, it is a time of individuality in which a whole culture must achieve a new balance if the West is to continue
Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here.
Most of all, he was a social reformer. He didn't simply create places that were beautiful in the abstract. An awesome and timeless intent stands behind Olmsted's designs, allowing his work to survive to the present day. With our urgent need to revitalize cities and a widespread yearning for green space, his work is more relevant now than it was during his lifetime. Justin Martin restores Olmsted to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans.
Larry Diamond has made it his life's work to secure democracy's future by understanding its past and by advising dissidents fighting autocracy around the world. Deeply attuned to the cycles of democratic expansion and decay that determine the fates of nations, he watched with mounting unease as illiberal rulers rose in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, and beyond, while China and Russia grew increasingly bold and bullying. Then, with Trump's election at home, the global retreat from freedom spread from democracy's margins to its heart.
Ill Winds' core argument is stark: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals rely on US global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today's authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the 21st century into a dark time of despotism. We are at a hinge in history, between a new era of tyranny and an age of democratic renewal. Free governments can defend their values; free citizens can exercise their rights. We can make the internet safe for liberal democracy, exploit the soft, kleptocratic underbelly of dictatorships, and revive America's degraded democracy. Ill Winds offers concrete, deeply informed suggestions to fight polarization, reduce the influence of money in politics, and make every vote count. In 2019, freedom's last line of defense still remains "We the people." |
Introduction to Eric Hoffer's Classic "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".
FEMINISM: HOW WOMEN BETRAYED WOMEN
RESOLVING WORLD DISORDER
POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR MIDDLE EAST
HOW ISRAEL WINS
THE TREASON OF INTELLECTUALS: JULIEN BENDA
HAYEK & THE INTELLECTUALS
US STRATEGY FOR WINNING WORLD WAR IV
POLICY PAPERS FOR US GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
COMPOSITION FOR THE LONG WAR
PROSPECT MAGAZINE
CategoriesArchives
March 2020
EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ACE VENTURA
PAUL RAHE: REALISM IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, SPARTA
CONSCIENCE & TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
SHAKESPEARE
POSITIVE LAW vs. CONSCIENCE
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