“…we discovered that JFK and his brother had a never-before-revealed plan to stage a coup against Castro on December 1, 1963…The Mafia dons used parts of the secret coup plan to try and assassinate JFK first in Chicago, then in Tampa, and finally in Dallas. By planting evidence implicating Castro, the mob bosses prevented Robert Kennedy and other key officials from conducting a thorough investigation…”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“I found out, greatly to my surprise, that almost all of the conventional wisdom that I had read and heard about Ronald Reagan was not true at all. Beginning with the fact that he was always talked of as being passive. The man ran for president three times. Won on his third try. And in 1976 he committed the most aggressive act that an American politician can make, and that is that he ran against a sitting president of his own party. He ran against Gerald Ford and damn near beat him.”

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“Part of the richness of the home culture I come from and what makes it fascinating to work in Iran as a journalist is that I wasn’t an observer. I am culturally of Iran. At the end of the day I’m not going back to a hotel room. I’m going to my aunt’s house or best friend’s house. I’m waking up in the morning to my aunt cooking pancakes.”

This article is filed under History, Iran, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“I was in Baghdad as a volunteer surgeon, but operating was difficult. The city’s hospitals had treated many wounded during the bombing, depleting emergency stores. Following the arrival of the Americans, much of the remainder had been looted, the pillage continuing even as staff tried to deal with arriving casualties. Operating rooms resembled charnel-houses, with discarded surgeons’ gloves, crusted dressings and bloody clothes caked underfoot.”

This article is filed under Africa, History, Medicine, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“The book takes a strongly antistatist position, and advances views that used to be common among conservatives but that today you simply don’t hear anymore.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“I am against all organizations with the word “World” in their names. As for free trade, it is a strategy of deracinated corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of discrete nations and their peoples.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“The formula ‘Day X’ in our documents meant the beginning of a large-scale war against the West. Our Department 12…had to participate in this through so-called ‘direct actions,’ which were clandestine acts of biological sabotage and terrorism against ‘potential strike targets’ on the enemy’s territory.”

This article is filed under History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Russia.

The urban African Americans and Hispanics, the Jewish community, the gays and lesbians, the professionals, the academics, the union members, all the tens of millions of metros who trend reliably progressive, will be stripped of 10–20 percent of their voting power.

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

With President George W. Bush’s recent victory the Democratic Party-referred to in prior times as the “Democracy”-finds itself in disarray and denial, though the source of the myriad of weaknesses that afflict that political entity are really quite obvious.

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During the Apollo 15 mission, an anonymous viewer phoned his local TV station to suggest that a large rock discovered by the astronauts should be named in honor of “a taxpayer selected at random from the computers of the Internal Revenue Service.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Science.

[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Adam Robert's new book The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa.] Africa, overall, has a handy supply of oil. Its known reserves are small compared with the Middle East: it may have 100 billion barrels of [...]

This article is filed under Africa, History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

What’s intriguing about the dreadful psychology of Muslim, particularly Shiite [read Hizbollah] fundamentalism, is that aspect of terrible fixity, that manifests itself as a kind of violent sleepwalking in its adherents.

This article is filed under History, Iran, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Sociology.