Megan McArdle just after the Brexit vote. This holds up very well, and includes a structural weakness of betting markets and why some Americans care about Brexit. It was behind Bloomberg's paywall, so I got another link. June 2016.
Hmm, the old links are getting newer.
A Federalist review of Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops. August 2016
Just an FBI table I use when people don't believe my claims about crime statistics. It covers 2012. I usually browse around for newer or slightly different things from this starting point.
When Netanyahu wasn't exaggerating after all. September 2016
Noel Field, Communist Quaker. An American elite Stalinist. I think of Pete Seeger when I read things like this. September 2016
Breitbart on Obama's Birth. Andrew believed, as do I, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But his own literary agent in 1991 claimed he was born in Kenya. Barack played a lot of 3-card Monte with is history, depending on current need. May 2012
Washington Post Archive. There Is No Possible Way Donald Trump's Team Actually Believes This Is Their Path To 270. Thetone is unmistakable. October 2016
John Tierney, who was the NYT science editor, describes The Real War on Science. Autumn 2016
Democrats three times more likely to unfriend people. Some of us know this from personal experience. However, as I am now off FB, I suppose I have unfriended everyone. I don't miss it, BTW. December 2016
Why Europe Rose. A longer article, popular academic, with footnotes. The illustration at the top must be by Peter Spier, though he is not credited. You can tell by all the pretty, clean mud in the village. December 2016.
I can't honestly say I have an opinion where the former president was born. The facts were too obscured by too many people with a motive to lie to me. Don't care that much, either way. No evidence on either side would particularly shock me; the most interesting thing would be who got caught in which lie and for what purpose.
ReplyDeleteNoel Field, Communist Quaker. An American elite Stalinist. I think of Pete Seeger when I read things like this. September 2016.
ReplyDeleteKati Marton, the author, was born in Hungary. Her family fled Hungary after the failed 1956 Revolution. As I knew three Argentines of Hungarian origin who were in Argentina because of the Iron Curtain, I read her memoir, Enemies of the People, with interest.
For an example of the 1930s,that down-and-dirty decade from which sprung Noel Field, consider the Open Letter of the 400. It was published in Soviet Russia Today, in its September 1939 issue. Today, one reads the Open Letter and cringes. For example, the Open Letter maintained that the Fascist countries were totalitarian, but the Soviet Union was not. Fascists bad, Soviets good. That's all we need to know.
Itro to the article:
To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace: The text of an Open Letter calling for greater unity of the anti-fascist forces and strengthening of the front against aggression through closer cooperation with the Soviet Union, released on August 14 by 400 leading Americans.
The timing was not good for the Open Letter.The irony of the letter is that the party line switched in late August 1939, with the signing of the Non-Agression Pact between Germany and the USSR.So, the Open Letter was out-of-date with the party line the minute- or very soon after- it was published. For nearly two years, until the June 22,1941 invasion of the USSR, criticism of the Nazis was verboten in the USSR and, of course, in Soviet publications. (La Pasionaria's denouncing Franco from a Moscow radio station was tolerated,because Franco hadn't signed a pact with the USSR.)
How many would have renounced their signing the Open Letter after they became aware of the Non-Aggression Pact? Quite a few, I suspect, because the party line had switched. Pete Seeger, for example, switched his songs in accordance with the many party line switches from 1939-1941.As did Dalton Trump switch his writings. (Decades later, Pete Seeger said that as his father left the party over the Non-Aggression Pact, it isn't as if Pete crowned himself in glory by continuing to support the party line.)
In looking at all the prominent "intellectuals" who signed that Open Letter, and thus showed themselves to be utter fools, the lesson I take is to be extremely skeptical about "intellectuals" telling us what the virtuous political line is nowadays- or any day.
I think the case for Obama not being a 'natural born citizen' is tenuous at best and relies on some highly irregular definitions of what it means to be a citizen as well as a misapplication of the only tangentially relevant Wong Kim Ark decision. His mother is an American citizen which is all I feel is really needed, i.e., regardless of his place of birth he had no legal need to be naturalized, just like John McCain.
ReplyDeleteYour fast and loose description of how he presented his personal history is spot on. It doesn't surprise me that people might be shocked by and suspicious of evidence that he was born and grew up in Hawaii. He spent a lot of the campaign playing up a 'In the Geh-Tow' story of being born and raised by a single mother from Kansas which was not any more accurate to his real history that claiming he had been born in Kenya.