Mon, June 21

2006—Fox News, citing Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), reports that WMD have been found in Iraq. 2005—Edgar Ray Killen, 80, is found guilty of manslaughter in the case of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. 2004—SpaceShipOne reaches an altitude of 100 kilometers; Mike Melvill becomes the first civilian astronaut. 1989—The U.S. Supreme Court rules that it’s legal to burn the U.S. flag. 1964—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are murdered in Mississippi by the KKK. 1942—A Japanese sub shells Fort Stevens, Ore., damaging a phone cable. 1935—The top cop busts a cap at a Eureka, Calif. sawmill; chaos ensues but a jammed machine gun keeps the death …

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Sun, June 20

2005—Veep Dick “Dick” Cheney explains to Larry King that the insurgency in Iraq is “in the last throes.” 1970—Off Kamchatka, the Soviet sub K-108 loses a screw to the pursuing U.S.S. Tautog, the sail of which picks up a permanent 2-degree bend. 1965—Navy Lts. Clinton B. Johnson and Charles Hartman, flying prop-driven Douglas A-1 Skyraiders, down a MiG jet fighter over Vietnam. 1963—The White House-Kremlin “Hot Line” is installed. 1953—Lt. Gen. John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel arrives in Saigon to confer with French General Henri Navarre on how to bring peace to Vietnam. 1947—Standing up for labor, President Harry S Truman vetoes the anti-union Taft-Hartley …

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Keeping Up With the Loonies

We do our best to keep up. In theory, that’s most of the job: try to keep up, and write about the stuff that really matters. These days that boils down to tracking dangerous outbreaks of authoritarian lunacy. This can be unnerving—especially in the context of a formerly-natural environment whose expiration date seems to be getting a fortnight closer every dang week. In a perfect world we’d be maintaining a sophisticated database for this purpose. Cross-tabulation analysis would no doubt be useful in sorting out the misleaders from the misled, the grifters from the true believers, and the charlatans from the congenitally bewildered. Having a …

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Want Socialism? Try the U.S. Military.

by Mike Lofgren America’s love affair with lunacy continues undimmed. Along with flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and fans of perpetual motion, according to a May 21 Ipsos poll, 53 percent of Republicans now assert that Donald Trump is the current President of the United States. There is a tendency in the reality-based community to regard these folks as obscure lunatics who yell at their TVs in trailer parks when they’re not ruining a relative’s Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, this epidemic of delusional belief embraces a more exalted layer of the social spectrum, a group on which the maintenance of our democracy—deeply flawed as it is—may hinge. This May, …

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Does systemic racism exist in New Hampshire?

By Dan and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks According to Republican leaders in Concord, systemic racism does not exist in New Hampshire and talk of it should be banned in our schools, state agencies, and private entities that contract with the state. Even Governor Chris Sununu, who has pledged to veto the so-called “divisive concepts” language now in the state budget, recently denounced the term “systemic racism” as having “a lot of implicit biases in itself.” He added that he does not want to see it taught to N.H. students because “some of those ideas can get very controversial, very divisive within the schools themselves.” We agree …

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