via email...   What a difference a century makes! Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1906 : ************************************ The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years. Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars. There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads. The maximum s...

Check out this article for some thoughts on Nation building -- in France.  Perhaps seizing France from the Nazi's was a bad policy after all...

The POW abuse case has really made the line between those who hate all things Americans and those who believe the United States is a force for good in the world.  I happen to be one of those people who falls into the latter category.  Some US soldiers abusing POWs is not a good thing. But it needs to be kept in the proper perspective. It's not systematic and it wasn't torture in the way that most people think of torture (it was more akin to pre-interrogation humiliation).  But reg...

Over the years, Americans have died all over the world fighting for causes that, at the time, seems pointless. It is only in the long view that many of these actions can be judged. The war on terror, which includes the "battle" in Iraq is no exception. Bringing democracy to Iraq will, in the long term, bring peace and prosperity to those people and make us a lot safer. We are a lot safer having Saddam removed than leaving him there for the inevitable day when sanctions were lifted and ...

I've been having a fairly heated email discussion with regards to whether different races of humans have significant intelligence differences. On one side there are people who believe that natural selection over the past 50,000 years has shaped humans in different regions of the world to adapt to local environmental factors. The net result is that Europeans and Asians had environmental factors that called for higher intelligence.  I don't happen to agree with that. I do not think enough tim...

This is making the rounds on the net. At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior. "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to ex...

What if you found a time machine in which you could go back 10 years in time? What business, political, and humanitarian things would you do or prevent? Or more to the point, that you could send a note to yourself 10 years in the past? What would you do? What if you only had a few minutes to decide? So you couldn't do research, you just had to go off the top of your head? Here's what I would do if I were limited to things I could think of in 3 minutes. 1) Buy as much Microsoft stock as pos...

Sgt. Striker makes a pretty good case showing just how much the Germans have changed since 1939. He also mentions that Poland, rather than Germany, is now the center of martial prowess in continental Europe these days.   Here's Europe just before World War I (1914). The militaristic part of Germany was called Prussia.  Prussia is on the far east side of Germany there. But after two world wars, Germany was split in two: Now, if you look closely, you can see that ...

Imagine if World War II were covered like Iraq is being covered. Most people today seem to think that after D-Day the Americans just stormed into Germany and the war was over.  Far from it. Instead, for the first couple of months the Americans and British got stuck in "Hedgerow" country in northern France. A stalemate was largely the result as it took considerable time for the Americans to break out. But imagine if CNN were covering that. You'd have interviews with nominal A...