Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans. The previous instalment is here. Most students of European history, especially those who focus on the nineteenth century, know the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe". People today don't get the impact of that moniker: then what it meant was that the …
Continue reading "The Ottoman Tales VII: Sick Man of Europe, Sick Man of North America"
The infamous ISIS video star is on the run: British terrorist Mohammed Emwazi – known as Jihadi John – has fled the IS terror network and gone on the run in Syria, according to sources... Emwazi is also believed to fear his unmasking had diminished his value as an IS killer and also that jealous …
Continue reading "Jihadi John, Your Services Are No Longer Required"
This post is inspired by a friend of ours who told a very interesting story from her growing up in a neighbouring Southern state. (And when you live in Tennessee, that doesn't mean much, because most of the Southern states and some of the border ones too are neighbours.) She grew up in the 1980's, …
Continue reading "What Discrimination Gets Punished Depends Upon Who's Doing the Punishing"
This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans. The previous instalment is here. The question of the massacres of the Armenians during the Ottoman Empire is one of those poisonous issues that never seems to go away. But what can we learn from it? To find that out, we need to go …
Continue reading "The Ottoman Tales V: Facing Reality on the Armenians"
This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans. The previous instalment is here. It should be obvious from this post that the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state. In fact, in its day it was the Islamic state in the Middle East and anywhere else. Yet it's different in many ways from …
Continue reading "The Ottoman Tales IV: Islamic States, Then and Now"
This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans. The previous instalment is here. Ottoman culture has seeped into ours in ways we're not aware of. When we hear words such as divan, caftan and ottoman itself, we're hearing about things that came from that culture. Like most people, I like to take …
With--what else?--a lawsuit, with complaints to the Federal government to boot: Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida …
Continue reading "The Country Where Merit is Run Down, Part III: The Asians Strike Back"
In the March/April 2013 issue of GeoStrata, the official publication of the Geo-Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the following was noted in its review of geotechnical (soil mechanics and foundations) education: The national trend of falling credit requirements for the attainment of a bachelor's degree was cited by many as a challenge facing geotechnical …
Continue reading "The Country Where Merit is Run Down, Part II: The STEM Curriculum Dilemma"
It's that time of the year again when we hear what used to be non-controversial but is now explosive: graduation speeches. As I have said before, I don't expect to get invited to give one of these, not unless the institution has more guts--and I more fame--than is presently evident. So I stick to writing …
Back in 2006, before the accession of the current Occupant, I began to write a little novel entitled The Ten Weeks. It describes, among other things, the result of a democratically elected left-wing government and how it, using the sexual revolution as one of its weapons (and mob action as another), took progressive power in …
Continue reading "The Assault on Christians Wasn't Supposed to Happen This Fast"
Positive Infinity 