First, lets just get this out of the way. Hillary Clinton won the election. She got more than TWO MILLION more votes than Donald Trump. Clearly, voters rejected neither her not her message. Liberals who were disenchanted with her moderate-right policies and who had backed Bernie Sanders clearly turned out in droves to vote for… Read more The Conundrum of the Battleground States
Radicalization is always political, and any religion can serve as a metaphorical base camp for terrorism. Thanks to both public amnesia and sociopolitical eliding of some forms of terrorism once the terrorists are rebranded “freedom fighters”, people don’t seem to know much about historically recent occurring in Europe. For example, the 20th century Fight for… Read more Sunday, Bloody Sunday
I remember sitting in Mrs. Gorin’s history class in 1988 hearing about the time a POTUS won in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote. I remember DISTINCTLY thinking, with the smugness only a Reagan-loving American teenager durring the Cold War achieve, that I was glad that wouldn’t happen again. It was… Read more Why the Electoral College Needs an Overhaul
Happy Halloween! We are now only a couple of weeks away from the US Presidential Election, which the whole world is watching with genuine terror lest Donald Trump become POTUS and get access to the nuclear codes. Since little is more horrifying than monsters and politicians, today is an excellent day to discuss the zeitgeist… Read more Monstrous Politics
Edward of Westminster, the disputed Prince of Wales, was called by that name because he born at the Palace of Westminster on 13 October 1453. He was the only child of King Henry VI of England and Margaret of Anjou, and his birth infuriated Richard, 3rd Duke of York and plunged England into a civil… Read more The Short Life of Edward of Westminster
Netflix has released a new documentary entitled Audrie and Daisy that is an “unflinching account of high-school sexual assault and trial by social media”. This documentary was important to me for several reasons, including because I have written about these young rape victims in my book The Jezebel Effect. In the book I explained that:… Read more Audrie and Daisy and Slut Shaming
Whenever anyone makes the argument that “science” is some sort of untainted, unbiased, monolith of “truth” I want to raise my eyebrow like Spock and say, “Fascinating.” Why? Because while data can be factual, anything interpreted or analyzed by humans is subject to errors or distortions or outright lies … including science. For example, the… Read more Sweet Poison
On 16 September 1400 Owain Glyndwr reclaimed his hereditary title of Prince of Powys Fadog and within four years he would be crowned the last Tywysog Cymru – the Prince of Wales – and would lead the Welsh in a final uprising against the English in a bid for national independence. The Welsh were never… Read more The Last Tywysog Cymru
Roald Dahl is one of the most famous authors of children’s stories in the world, and since he was born in Cardiff on 13 September 1916 he is considered a native son of Wales, which the Welsh are justifiably proud of. However, this is cheating a bit; he was the son of two Norwegian… Read more One Century of Roald Dahl
Today is the first day of school and my kids are not going (at least for now) to the schools I had thought they would be attending when I first planted my tuchus in South Wales. This has moved my cheese, and I am trying to adjust … with limited success I must confess. The… Read more School Daze