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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

December 2022

American Populism

Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite" or "the establishment."---Wikipedia. This defines the alienation of "ordinary" people who feel neglected and scorned by the educated "elites" who rule them.

People who feel displaced (jobs and industries lost), resent their government. But even college educated people who find that their educations are not producing careers for them feel alien more...

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November 2021

Vladimir Putin Again

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended with the United States the winner. Pundits worried about the world with just one superpower, but for a time our model of representative government and free market economics inspired much of the world to give it a try.

Russia emerged naked from its collapse, most of its former captive empire declaring independence. But it didn?t take long for the Russians to re-take its Central Asian colonies by placing Soviet-trained authoritaria more...

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Panic in Party?s Demise

We have a model of a party?s death throes in history, when during the 1850s, the Whig Party floundered to find its footing. Whatever issues had been important to the Whigs from its inception: limited government, fiscal responsibility, and aristocratic values (John Quincy Adams was the last of such), by 1850, slavery divided the party and the desperation was visible.

One of the worst decisions made by the Whig-dominated Supreme Court was to sustain the Fugitive Slave act: that any more...

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August 2021

Intelligence Divide


A number of times during my many years of writing columns, I have noticed the great gulf in human intelligence. It does not seem genetic, but it does seem cultural. Culture is formed by conscious decisions among groups of people and is subject to change as people have new experiences.

Watching Richard Branson last month, floating in the weightlessness of space on his own spacecraft reminded me of all the intelligence required to perform such a feat. This 70-year-old billi more...

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Pandemic Aftermath (2)

A cataclysmic pandemic does not end with everything going back to the world as it was. The Bubonic Plague in Europe led to changes in religion (distrust in Catholicism opening protesting sects, Protestantism); changes in work, serfdom giving way to free labor; urbanization and the rise of a middle class challenged monarchy; and older superstitions giving way to the birth of modern science.

Successive epidemics compelled crowded cities to clean up. Scientific improvements permitted more...

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Pandemics in History, Part 1


The history of pandemics, going back to the first documented event, the Bubonic Plague, fascinates historians. We Americans have a pretty short attention span, in accord with our short history as a country (short when we compare ours with China?s, for example). We have revisited the strange history of the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed World War I, a deadly plague that killed millions of people worldwide, yet vanished in memory almost immediately afterwards. We have paid much more at more...

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August 2020

The Glass Half Full


We have had an ugly year, one in which we suffered a dreadful pandemic, a wobbling economy, and the daily offence of watching our president, a man we should be able to trust, do nothing but lie, falsify history, and pander to our worst behaviors.

If we do not put all of these spectacles in historic perspective, we could well be depressed. But history in perspective can save us from despair. Just consider the two-part final exam question I once asked my college students: a more...

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That Which You Sow?


Actions have consequences. We all know this, something that good parentis teach children. In a recent column of mine, I referred to Darwin Awards: a mocking catalog of actions that have disastrous consequences, mainly removing the perpetrator from the gene pool.

Donald Trump has a serious problem: he wants to win reelection from a voter pool that has shrunk from its high of 49 percent. Polling, even that done by his propaganda organ, Fox News, is showing numbers well under more...

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"Incredible," and "Unbelievable," Indeed.

Words are a funny thing; they sometimes morph from one meaning to its opposite over time, as we can see today. President Trump?s limited vocabulary favors "incredible" and "unbelievable" every time he means "wonderful." Knowing how untrue most of his utterances are, I always take his "unbelievable" and "Incredible" literally: "not believable" and "not credible."

Among things not believable and not credible are his promotion of conspiracy theories: that the Coronavirus was created more...

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Pandemic Playbook for Dictators


From the early 20th century until now, leaders of democracies have been confronted with deadly epidemics. The US had Yellow Fever, Cholera, and the 1918 great Spanish Flu. (This is the one that President Trump stubbornly miscalls the 1917 flu.)

Every president took these epidemics seriously, and followed the best advice of health services to mitigate the damage. They cared about human life. That is what leaders do, don?t they?
Today?s pandemic is giving us a differe more...

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"Believing" Can Be Deadly


Human beings, unlike most lower species, are not governed much by instinct. The birds that return to Capistrano each year do not have travel choices. Monarch butterflies are programmed with two destinations: winter and summer groves, thousands of miles apart.

Religious systems fall into the category of "beliefs," that is: accepting by tradition certain ideas that cannot be confirmed by reason alone. But even religions hold each believer capable of rational thought: doing r more...

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The Real Pandemic: Lies

A new virus, the coronavirus, is sweeping the world. When our hunter-gatherer ancestors began settling in villages, towns, and later cities, and when they began livestock agriculture, diseases have spread from animal hosts to human beings, with no immunity at first. Throughout history, China, India, and Africa have been the incubators of disease outbreaks that then became worldwide.

In China, the problem was crossovers from animals kept for food use, starting with flu from swine, more...

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