Congress often passes laws that have unintended consequences. The sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a paper about the subject as early as 1936. Some of unintended consequences are serendipitous, but others are negative or perverse. It seems that Congress has a way of introducing negative or perverse consequences.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was designed [...]
Anybody can write a book. Producing a book is very hard. It is right up there with producing a new product for a large company such as General Electric. I have done both and I am not sure which is more difficult.
A new appliance starts with the drawings and specifications. From these you have tools [...]
I hate being spied on . . .
Tagged California History, CIA, Cold Cases, Hamburgers and Spies, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Nathaniel Pryor, Plymouth Rock, Sepulveda(This is an edited post of May 31, as corrected by Kent Pryor, to whom I am very grateful.)
I just call it the Fiske curve because I don’t have any other name for it. Others may have found it and named it something else. In any case the curve sets out principles worth remembering about [...]
As I was writing yesterday’s post to this blog, I wondered who would be upset when my book, The Insider comes out. This is the actual story of NASA’s man who spent nine years flying into and out of the USSR during the Space Race and the Cold War. He was a space medicine scientist [...]
Tagged CIA, Cold War, John Kennedy, Khrushchev, Lend Lease, Lyndon Johnson, NASA, NSA, Richard Nixon, Russian, Space RaceIt’s over. My ninth book is on the market and I can turn to more important things, such as my tenth book. And Ham radio. And maybe, politics.
My ninth book, Ploughshares into Swords, is about WWII—how civilians and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) helped win the war. A friend of mine was also a [...]
Tagged anti-matter, Baikonur, Caltech, Carl Anderson, China Lake, CIA, FDR, Ham Radio, Khrushchev, NASA, NSA, Pasadena, Ploughshares, Swords, WWIIIn my forthcoming book, Ploughshares into Swords, I tell how a Colonel in the US Army visited Belgium at the end of WWII. At an inn an old Belgian man wanted permission to kiss the colonel because the American Army had save Belgium not once but twice from the German horde. “American chickens had [...]
Tagged Barack Obama, Belgium, Black Church, Chickens, Cold War, Election 2008, Jeremiah Wright, WWIIThere are a few accurate historians who noticed that Franklin D. Roosevelt brought with him the seeds of the Nation’s economic destruction in 1932. That is, businessmen and investors distrusted him, and rightly so. He had decidedly socialist leanings in a time of world socialism. Thus, his policies continued the breadth and depth of [...]
Tagged Economics, Election, Great Depression, History, Investment, Keynes, Obama, RooseveltOne of the interesting writers I have read recently, writes about murders in history with a keen insight and great sense of humor. Immediately, I was jealous of Keven McQueen (www.kevenmcqueen.com), who teaches English at a Kentucky university. His students are just plain lucky.
It was my brother who told me one of Keven’s [...]
Tagged Civil War, Eastern Kentucky University, John Hunt Morgan, Keven McQueen, Wendell Berry, William S. PryorIf I asked most people who General John Hunt Morgan was, they would say, “General who?”
But there are a few others who would say, “What have you found out about him?”
I found out quite a bit about the General, during the period when he escaped from an Ohio Union prison in 1863 and fled to [...]