I’m a little late with this tonight, but I ran across an exchange over on X that stuck in my head, and I want to work through it out loud.
A Jewish woman asked a simple question: what have Jews ever done to anybody, personally? Not governments. Not armies. Personally. One man answered her: the Jews bombed my country. And she came back with: well, they probably deserved it.
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Photo: FreCha, via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
A week ago it was Black Thursday — November 5, when unions and students shut down much of France, with some 260 demonstrations and 70,000 police deployed. Here is where it stands tonight: the movement is stalling, and the numbers now say so plainly. What looked like the start of a long autumn is, a week on, looking thinner by the day.
Outside the little town of Riley, in Oregon’s high desert, there’s a shallow rock overhang called Rimrock Draw Rockshelter. It doesn’t look like the kind of place that rewrites timelines. But the University of Oregon’s archaeological field school, working with the Bureau of Land Management under archaeologist Patrick O’Grady, has been digging there since 2011 — and what came out of the ground suggests people were sheltering there more than 18,000 years ago, thousands of years before the Clovis culture that textbooks used to call the first Americans.
Continue reading“This is the largest land war in Europe since World War II. And how much coverage does it get on the news? Almost none.”
“The name of this podcast is called the Conservative Skeptic. Well, I’m a skeptic.”
Episode 2 opens with Veterans Day — and with England’s version of it, Remembrance Day: the bugler playing the Last Post before the football matches, and the poppies on every player’s jersey, a recognition Jim says we don’t do here and probably should do more often. Continue reading
A week ago I wrote a post called The Collapse of Europe? Are We Next? It was 136 words long. I had been flipping through the news, the way I do on a weekend, and I kept catching fragments — protests, fires, police, governments in trouble — and I wrote down the impression the fragments gave me: Europe is coming apart, and it could happen here.
Here’s the problem with that post, and I’ll say it before anybody else does: it named no event, cited no figure, and kept no receipts. That’s not good enough, not for something that size. So I went back and found out what the fragments actually were. This is the first of two posts doing the job properly. This one is Europe. The second one is us.
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