Some thoughts on yesterday’s discussion of Livy, Zinn and the relationship of morality and power in human history.  The author is Jones Very, a minor but interesting nineteenth-century American poet and commentator.  The poem is taken from his collect of sonnets on Reconstruction; it was written in 1868.

Two things have me thinking about morality and historians this week.  First, I’ve been re-reading Livy’s Early History of Rome to prepare for this Monday’s class in Grand Strategy.  Second, Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States) died this week.  Livy and Zinn were both wildly popular historians, both wrote about […]

…or at least order in, because I’ll be (briefly) on Special Report with Bret Baier tonight, at 6 PM EST, to discuss Obama’s foreign policy challenges, stemming from my recent article in Foreign Policy on Obama’s dueling Jeffersonian and Wilsonian impulses.

This morning I was having my morning coffee in the Impressionist Wing of the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, and noticed that the butler had folded the restfully pink pages of the FT over to the latest story on the health care debacle now unwinding in Washington.“Any particular reason you want me to see […]

Here in the quiet precincts of the stately Mead manor in exclusive Queens, as the dew gently falls over the mist-shrouded lawns and the pigeons coo soothingly from the historic-landmarked eaves, it is sometimes hard to believe, but out there in the workaday world the long and graceful decay of the American social model is […]

The Great Meltdown continues; the London Times reports that British government official responsible for monitoring compliance with UK freedom of information law has found that the ‘climategate‘ scientists at East Anglia University violated the law.  Although neither the scientists nor the university can be prosecuted because the revelations about their behavior came after the time […]

John Tierney, science reporter at the New York Times, is one of the better reporters out there; in the past he’s attracted the wrath of the climate change true believers.  And he makes a lot of good points in his piece in today’s paper as he defends both IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore […]

Like a new car once it’s spent a few weeks ferrying the kids to school and soccer practice, 2010 no longer feels like such a fresh and shiny new year.  Our new year’s resolutions aren’t surviving that much better than the ones for 2009 or 2008 did, for that matter, and the holiday season feels […]

If the Democrats liked health care, they will love cap and trade.An expensive and divisive attempt to fix a problem that, if we trust the polls, most Americans don’t think exists, the cap and trade bill that is next on the Democratic agenda has all the hallmarks of a historic train wreck.  Right now, the […]

The credibility of the IPCC, the reputation and the job security of its chairman, the consensus among key (and rather skeptical) countries that global warming is man made and needs to be fixed:  it’s all melting away, to judge from the latest news from New Delhi.  The only thing that isn’t melting is the Himalayan […]