Review: American Lion
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Personal Enthusiasm: It Was Okay
Since I’ve started reviewing books, I’ve been trying to force myself to review a book based on what it’s meant to be rather than on what I wish it was. After all, that’s the only way to be fair to the author. So it was with …
How Presidents Died: A 19th Century Perspective on Physician Adoption
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Over at HISTalk, Doctor Sam Bierstock gives a fascinating (and somewhat disgusting) history of how our presidents died in office.
Over the next two months, Garfield was subjected to repeated probing of the wound with unsterile fingers and instruments, non-aseptic incisions to drain abscesses, and other invasive procedures in an effort to locate the …
Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy
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Amity Shlaes on what sparked the job growth of the 1980′s.
The era didn’t start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before.
In …
The Top One Percent Includes You
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Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., has estimated that 106 billion humans have been born since Homo sapiens appeared about 50,000 years ago. That means that the richest one percent in history includes 1.06 billion people. There are currently 6.2 billion humans alive, leaving approximately 100 billion …
Paul Ryan: Restoring the Rule of Law
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Paul Ryan, with a very, very good speech on the importance of the Constitution and on the primacy of the rule of law, in our political and economic system.
Usually, our defense of the Constitution is presented as a defense of America’s founding principles and values, and rightfully so. But our constitutional system is …
Dubya and Me
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Walt Harrington’s reflections on how George W. Bush grew over the years that Harrington knew him. As many people have pointed out, President Bush was far smarter than people thought. (That doesn’t mean that he was always right, just that he wasn’t an idiot.)
And he began to talk—and talk and talk for what …
The Ghosts of World War II’s Past
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Taking old World War II photos, Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history …
Unions: A Good Solution for a Vanishing Problem
I think that unions are a good solution for a problem that no longer exists. One hundred years ago, many jobs were for factory work or mine work. The skill and quality of the individual employee didn’t matter. A person would spend an entire day tending a loom, welding rivets, or doing some other mindless, …
Review: A Journey: My Political Life
This book caught my eye because I knew very little about Tony Blair. I knew he was the Prime Minister in Britain. I knew he was the leader of the Labour Party and a big government, big spending progressive. I knew he was President Bush’s staunchest ally in the war on terror. And, that’s about it. I really didn’t know anything about what he actually tried to accomplish in Britain or why. I didn’t know anything about who he was or what he made him tick. And, after reading Decision Points, I was interested in his perspective on the events of the past decade.
How Medicare Killed the Family Doctor
Our doctors do not work for us, they work for the insurance companies. And that’s a big problem with third-party payment for medical care.