Racist still? In “To See Humans’ Progress, Zoom Out” (The New York Times, 26 February 2012), Professor Steven Pinker asserts that for all their faults, educated people today are getting better:
Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.
Fair enough, but to contrast what educated people were like in the bad old days, Prof.…
The Churchill Society of Israel serves Israelis with an interest in Sir Winston Churchill, according to Russell Rothstein, quoted in the January 9th Daily Telegraph: “Churchill’s long-standing support of Zionism and friendship with the Jewish people make it particularly appropriate that the modern state of Israel have a local organisation devoted to his memory and to preserving his thoughts, words and deeds for future generations.”
Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, added: “Churchill was very familiar with the Old Testament. He wrote about the Children of Israel who “understood and adopted ideas which even ancient Greece and Rome, for all their power, failed to comprehend.…
The 15-meter sloop Winston Churchill is one of several Churchill namesake vessels to have carried an heroic crew. The venerable sailboat, the oldest vessel named for Sir Winston, sank during the challenging Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in 1998, and three of her crew, James Lawler, Michael Bannister and John Dean, drowned. The heroism of her crew matches that of the USS Winston S. Churchill, the most famous bearer of the name afloat.
The story of their survival, writes Paul Kalina in the Sydney Morning Herald, is part of a new film by Graham McNeice on Australians who defied narrow brushes with death.…
