A heroine died the other day. Traute Lafrenz, a member of the White Rose resistance to Germany’s Nazis, passed away at 103 years old. She was the last known living member of the doomed group of idealistic students. The Soviet…
One of the advantages of being an oldster who still subscribes to a newspaper — four of them, actually! — is having the opportunity to scan obituaries. It’s a bit morbid. On the sad side, I’ve discovered long-ago friends among…
We are approaching one of the horrible milestones in human history — the birth of the Gulag a century ago. Sometime during the autumn of 1922, Soviet officials decided to establish a system of forced labor camps for both political…
On Thursday, President Joe Biden went all the way to Rockville, Maryland, an entire 13.83 miles from the White House, to mingle with “average Americans” at a high school. And in the speech he gave to the assembled multitudes, almost…
Over the past 50 years, the United States has been moving from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, a trend with really bad effects on social cohesion. The federal government’s actions are a major cause of that decline. So…
Nearly three weeks ago, I wrote of the saddest period in the annual Jewish calendar. This Saturday night and Sunday will mark the apex of tragedy. It is the Ninth Day of the Hebrew month of Av — better known…
Shakespeare’s King Lear shows the subversion of the most fundamental of all relationships, that of parent and child, by the corrupt and unbounded lust for power. It is a painful and horrifying play to read. We follow first how the…
Russian armies are on the road to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, even as the United States and its European allies provide and pledge to provide more military equipment to Ukraine’s military. At the other end of Eurasia, China publicly…
Valery Gergiev is famous for two things. First, according to music critics who supposedly know about such things, he’s a world-class symphony conductor. Second, he’s a close buddy (for some three decades now) of Vladimir Putin, whose 2014 annexation of…
Among the most shocking claims by Vladimir Putin in justifying his Ukraine invasion is his assertion that he’s seeking a “de-Nazification of Ukraine.” His surreal assertion has angered and bewildered observers worldwide, with everyone knowing it has utterly no basis….
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