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Kissinger and Nixon went to Peking like barbarians approaching the Manchu emperors. They set a pattern of deference bordering on obsequiousness which has run through Western approaches to China ever since. ~William F. Buckley, Jr. As William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.

The war raised the price of gasoline; the president said it would last a few weeks; it has lasted seven months and,  per YouGov , a majority of Americans now expect it to outlast the year. Even  Fox News  found  71 percent of voters — including 43 percent of Republicans — concluding he has no plan to end it . Seventy-eight percent, in CNN’s poll, say he is not doing enough to end it. The president’s own resolution of this difficulty, offered earlier this month, was to pledge that the war will end “immediately after” the election, which is the closest an American president has come to putting a bomb on layaway. ~Mike Brock

When American historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the rise of our off-brand fascism.   When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months.   ~Bill McKibben

A manuscript under review in a refereed journal and a new book together provided new evidence that at least two children of Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings were fathered by Jefferson. “After a covert and exhaustive 15-year effort led by the Smithsonian Institution, a team of geneticists, genealogists, historians, and anthropologists believe it has found proof that Jefferson fathered at least two of Hemings’s six children. On Tuesday, Richard Kurin, a Smithsonian cultural anthropologist, who led the multidisciplinary research effort, will publish a   book   detailing the team’s findings. A scientific paper is currently under review for publication in   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences   ( PNAS ). The researchers, who agreed to speak with me about their results before publication, relied on the latest genetic techniques to reassemble Jefferson’s genome from the Founder’s hair. They then matched that sequence with DNA from descendants of two of He...

No, it’s not the Internet’s fault. It’s not the YAF’s fault. It’s not even entirely the Republican party’s fault. It’s the fault of modern American political conservatism, which encouraged vandalism and savagery and now finds itself a road company of   Lord of the Flies.   My sympathy is really quite limited. ~Charles P. Pierce

Blogger Duncan Black coined the “Freidman Unit” to refer to NYT columnist Tom   Friedman's frequent predictions during the Iraq War that "the next six months" would be the decisive turning point, a phrase he used repeatedly over several years without the decisive moment ever arriving.  Now, Sen. Kennedy reaches into the prophecy vault to revive the F.U. “ U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told a crowd of Iowa conservatives Saturday he believes current high inflation is being caused by the U.S.-Iran war — but said he sees an end to the conflict within six months.”   https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2026/09/19/us-sen-john-kennedy-in-iowa-predicts-end-of-iran-war-in-6-months/