Dispatches from Vilnius

With over 300 mass shootings this year, it is not surprising that one quickly supplants the other in terms of media attention, especially when Muslim terrorists are suspected.  A mass shooting is defined by shooting tracker  as any attack where there are at least 4 wounded or killed.   The San Bernardino shooting managed to achieve the biggest body count of the year, but is it anymore heinous than the mass shooting in Colorado Springs by Robert Lewis Dear the week before, who similarly had a "religious agenda?" Where it took GOP candidates 48 hours to formulate opinions on Dear, they were quick to respond to Farook and his wife, claiming it as an act of terror before the FBI had made that determination itself.  This of course led to Benghazi-like chants against Obama for waiting to hear the official police report before declaring it an act of terror.  Like it does anything to alleviate the pain and suffering taking place in San Bernardino.  However...

The "ugly sweater" seems to be the "it" item this Christmas season with the Presidential candidates hoping to cash in on the fad .  Ted Cruz once again has beaten his opponents to the punch by coming up with the ugliest sweater of them all.  You probably won't find Ted wearing his own sweater, but for 65 bucks you can make Ted a part of your Christmas.  The Carson campaign offers the best price .  All of them cheaped out by making them sweatshirts. There's quite a bit of symbolism in Ted's shirt from the "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes, an obvious Tea Party reference, to his flame logo and the ultimate prize of this presidential campaign -- the White House -- which he lords over with a Santa cap as if the spirit of Christmas himself.  Given his religious proclivities, it seems odd there are no explicit Christian reference unless one considers his flame the "burning bush." After all, the Republicans are so adamant about ...

Sears appears to be on its last legs .  It managed to survive Wal-Mart, although suffering a greatly reduced stature in the process.  Now it seems unable to keep up with the fast-changing world of Internet sales that has undermined the whole concept of "The Big Store," with cheap deals and fast deliveries. The Internet replaced the big catalog, which in Sears' case was the size of a phone book.  One used to look forward to this catalog being delivered to the doorstep decades ago, as it offered a veritable cornucopia of shopping delights from scantily clad lingerie models to the latest in automotive repair tools.  It gave way to mass mailings in the 90s, opting for smaller specialty catalogs like its Craftsman catalog and Christmas Wish Book. It's no great loss when you think about it.  The Big Store has become a dinosaur.  Macy's is similarly limping along .  It's Thanksgiving Day Parade about the only thing that continues to give the New York...

Leave it to Don Wildman to seamlessly weave history and fantasy together in the form of Champ, the lake monster , that presumably still resides in Lake Champlain.  Even Jeremy Wade got curious and took his search for "river monsters" to the shores of the Vermont lake.  Turns out he was more interested in reports of  sea lampreys attacking humans the same way they attack fish, by boring a hole through the skin and sucking out the blood.  Wildman didn't reference his cable channel pal in his segment.  Instead, he made his connection to the man who discovered the long lake that straddles the New York-Vermont border -- Samuel de Champlain . Wildman uses a photograph taken by Sandra Mansi in 1977 as his starting point to tell us about Champ.   Mansi's photograph really doesn't say much.  In Wildman's recreation of the event, bubbles first appear on the lake surface, not far away from where her two kids are playing in the water, before a long tr...

Each election cycle you think it couldn't get any worse, and somehow it does.  Donald Trump is now toying with the idea of a $5 million appearance fee , or "ransom" as he calls it, to appear in the next CNN debate.  He said he would give the money to Wounded Warrior or some other veterans' organization in an attempt to downplay what sounds more like extortion.  Of course, the news media jumped all over it. Donald Trump is the "megaphone guy" in George Saunders'  The Brain-dead Megaphone .  He managed to shout over everyone else and end up controlling everyone's conversations during this election cycle.  As Saunders writes, "His main characteristic is his dominance.  He crowds the other voices out.  His rhetoric becomes the central rhetoric because of its unavoidability." Saunders was referring to the re-shaping of the new media as the result of sensational trials like that of O.J. Simpson and sordid events like Monica Lewinsky's d...

It's been a while since we had a reading group discussion.  Rick and I thought it would be fun to read Alan Taylor's  American Colonies given the renewed interest by National Geographic in the Pilgrims' story .  Taylor offers a broad history of colonization in America from the early Spanish consequences to the settlements along the West Coast in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  The arrival of the Pilgrims is told in Chapter 9:  Puritans and Natives.   Here's a review of the book from the New York Times.  We welcome all readers and look forward to an engaging discussion.

With homegrown terrorists like Robert Lewis Dear , who needs ISIS?  We have our own Christian State right here.  Of course, none of the GOP candidates want to take any blame for Dear's actions, but it is their fiery rhetoric on the campaign trail that inspire rogues like him to take action.  It took 48 hours for any one of them to respond.  All condemned the actions, but Ted Cruz artfully tried to lay the culpability at the liberal doorstep by calling Dear a " transgendered leftist activist! " I doubt the incident will stop these GOP candidates and their cohorts in Congress from hurling abuse at Planned Parenthood, which has become vilified on the campaign trail for " selling baby parts for profit ."  The candidates have also been throwing around absurd figures like 90 per cent of what PP does are abortions, which dates back to Sen. John Kyl's off-the-cuff comment during a Senate floor harangue against any further federal funding for the organization...

In one of the more surprising moves of the early presidential nomination season, Ben Carson decided to go to Jordan to see what's really up with all these Syrian refugees.  It was a whirlwind trip, taking advantage of frequent flier miles, to try to give his sagging campaign some kind of Foreign Policy heft, as he has been roundly criticized for being woefully deficient in this regard. The good doctor returned this weekend to tell us that the refugees just want to go home.  They don't want to come to America.  They are content to bide their time in Jordan, where they number approximately 600,000 at this point.  An additional 3.2 million Syrians currently reside in Turkey and Lebanon, but the busy doctor didn't have time to visit them too and further add to his first hand account of refugee camp life. His comments are vacuous at best and only serve to further show how hopelessly out of touch he is with current affairs.  However, the two guys leading th...

As has become all too commonplace, there are conflicting narratives when it comes to Thanksgiving.  You have copious memes presenting the Pilgrims as the first refugees to arrive on American shores.   Then there is Rush Limbaugh recycling his Thanksgiving story about how the Pilgrims ditched their socialist ideals to become free-market capitalists.  There is even a movie this year, Saints and Strangers , depicting a much harsher version of the Thanksgiving story, which is not for the politically squeamish at heart.  I guess you can take your pick like one does at the holiday dinner table.  Or, you can just watch football. It's pretty hard to have a serious dialogue, much less nuanced conservation about Thanksgiving, if no one is willing to agree on the particulars.  I remember spending the holiday one year with my cousins in North Carolina and we ended up getting into a nasty argument over how Indians abused the welfare system.  They saw the ...

If the Republicans wanted a lesson in why we shouldn't get anymore involved in Syria than we already are, they have one in Russia and Turkey.  Syria is a hornets' nest of hostilities with a deeply entrenched authoritarian government and a myriad of resistance forces, supported by different countries. This particular case had Russian jets targeting Turkmen opposition forces along the Syrian-Turkish border, which Turkey supports.  President Erdogan had repeatedly warned President Putin to lay off, as the jets had been encroaching on Turkish airspace, but Vlad being Vlad decided to call Erdogan's bluff and down went one of his SU-24 jets, courtesy of an American-made F-16.  Both Russian pilots ejected onto Syrian soil.  One was shot from the sky, the other lived to tell the tale, claiming his plane hadn't crossed the border. Tensions were already at a breaking point between Russia and Turkey, primarily over Putin's active support of Syria's President Assa...

For decades the first televised inter-racial kiss was thought to be between Capt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura during the third season of Star Trek .  The 1968 episode was  Plato's Stepchildren , where a group of Platonians have fun with the captain and crew, forcing them to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do.  In this sense, Kirk and Uhura were literally powerless to resist the temptation, no matter how great it was.  It seemed both got into the role. Well, it turns out BBC beat NBC to the punch with a more friendly kiss  between a black man and a white woman in a play that focused on an inter-racial relationship called You in Your Small Corner (1962).   Guess Who's Coming to Dinner  (1967) dealt with a similar theme, but didn't go so far as to bring Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton to lock lips.  Too bad as they would have at least pre-dated the notorious Star Trek episode. Miscegenation laws made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner a r...

Mysteries at the Museum covers a broad range of subjects from a plaster cast of a foot apparently belonging to the Honey Island Swamp Monster to a small water barrel used to help find the La Belle shipwreck,  La Salle's ill-fated voyage to discover the mouth of the Mississippi River.  There was even a segment on a silver cigar box (located in the Washington DC Spy Museum), which Sidney Reilly had given to Bruce Lockhart after WWI to commemorate their escapades in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.  The cigar box gained poignancy when Reilly returned to Russia only to get shot in the head.  Thanks to Lockhart's memoirs, Reilly served as one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond, presumably  To Russia with Love . Don Wildman leads viewers on some pretty wild rides.  He has become one of the constant faces on Travel Channel, having started out with a far more interesting program called Off Limits , where he took viewers into places you wo...

ISIS learned this week that it doesn't even have to attack the United States to create panic in the streets .  It is much easier to attack more vulnerable cities like Paris and watch the American reaction.  It has really been something to see.  I never would have imagined it could be so horrible.  Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse , Donald Trump comes out with yet another  outlandish statement .  The fear that has gripped the Republican Party is as great as that which gripped the nation following 911. It seems a lot of Democrats are also feeling the fear as 47 Congressional representatives joined Republicans in issuing a "veto-proof bill" that would place severe restrictions on the acceptance of Syrian refugees.  Screening procedures are already very tough, not that anyone bothered to read them, as it takes an average of 18-24 months for a refugee to be cleared for entry.   As it is , very few Syrian refugees have been grante...

There is almost as much anticipation for Bernie's speech on Democratic Socialism as there was for the first GOP debate.  It's pretty safe to say that more persons will be tuning into his speech on the Internet than Hillary's foreign policy speech scheduled for the same evening.  After all, we have heard so many bad things about socialism.  It has been compared to Soviet and Chinese communism and Nazi national socialism. It used to be that socialism was a good word.  NPR and other news outlets have been more favorably comparing Sanders to Eugene Debs.  From what I've heard so far, Bernie is closer to William Jennings Bryan who ran as a Democrat back in 1896.  His was a populist form of socialism that resonated with a greater number of persons, especially his Cross of Gold speech , which called for the federal government to back the dollar with silver so that it would have a far greater circulation. Bernie is not a socialist in the strict sense of ...

Within a week of the Paris bombings, virtually every GOP presidential candidate and Republican leader have called for a ban on Syrian refugees, unless of course they are Christian, as Jeb Bush was quick to distinguish .  He's since backtracked on that statement, but the sentiment is clear, no more Muslims in America.  They are seen as an existential threat to our Christian society, with many conservative leaders calling for the closure of mosques in this country.   Even the Trumpster believes "if the mosque is, you know, loaded for bear," it should be closed. Twenty-six Republican governors have issued bans on Syrian refugees, claiming security fears.  This despite no direct link having yet been made between a Syrian passport found at one of the bombing sites and the terrorists who pulled off these latest crimes against humanity.  Just the possibility that an ISIS member could be among the Syrian diaspora is enough to send governors scurrying into their...

Sadly, we are learning a very bitter lesson in terrorism.   The Death of Bin Laden , in 2011, was seen by many as the end of al Qaeda.  However, ISIS has emerged, which is every bit as well organized and deadly as was its predecessor.  It has quickly morphed into a major global threat, as witnessed this past Friday in Paris, and is planning more international strikes in its effort to bring its jihad to Europe.  At least, that is what many would like us to believe. I don't think for one moment that ISIS actually entertains the idea of a global jihad anymore than al Qaeda did when it coordinated attacks in the US in 2001.  What it wants is to drag the US and Europe into wars in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.  How it plans to do that isn't very clear, as it would be coming against a combined firepower the early Mohammedans (who they purportedly model themselves after) never had to face.  But, I guess they think they can win a war o...

I think anyone would be forgiven for not knowing there was a Democratic debate last night.  It's hard to compete with  the fallout of the fourth Republican debate and the Paris attacks.  Bernie Sanders' campaign was apoplectic over the format changing at the last minute to reflect the coordinated ISIS attacks on Paris.  This pretty much made foreign policy the center piece of the night, which isn't exactly Bernie's calling card.  Surprisingly, it was Martin O'Malley who had the quote of the night , "my son is not a pair of boots on the ground," which he took from a mother of a young man who served two tours during this neverending "War on Terror." It was a much more manageable event with Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee dropping their campaigns.  Lawrence Lessing also dropped his bid , but I don't think many persons noticed he was even running. This opened up the stage for former Maryland Governor O'Malley, allowing him to lock horn...