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.…
2011— Writing for Business Insider on September 29th, Grace Wyler correctly reported a Churchill misquote by presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Defending himself from charges that he is a “flip-flopper,” Romney confused “the Brit every Republican loves with the Brit every Republican loves to hate.” Here according to NBC is what Governor Romney said:
In the private sector, if you don’t change your view when the facts change, well you’ll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, “When facts change, I change too, madam.”
Wyler accurately notes that this was said by John Maynard Keynes, “the British economist whose theories about government intervention in the economy [are] reviled by conservatives everywhere.”…
continued from part 2…
Jesse Jones, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, was a rugged Tennessean who was hard to meet and harder to know. Joseph Washington “Jeeps” Frazer was President of Willys-Overland, a scion of the Virginia Washingtons and Nashville Frazers; but this and more wouldn’t get him in to see Jesse Jones at Commerce. Seeing Jones required more powerful strategy.
On an urgent mission to Washington for his Jeep-building company, Joe Frazer had arrived one morning in 1943 and parked himself in Jones’s outer office, despite repeated warnings that the Secretary wasn’t likely to arrive until evening—if at all.…
continued from part 1…
Seeing an opportunity to run his own company, Frazer took control of moribund Graham-Paige in 1944, and two years later merged its automotive interests with a new corporation he and Henry Kaiser had formed, leasing and then buying the gigantic ex-bomber factory at Willow Run, Michigan. During Frazer’s 1946-48 presidency, Kaiser-Frazer was the fourth largest car producer in the world, and ranked eighth in production by make, ahead of all other independents. He stepped down as an active officer in 1949. The company never again recorded a profit.…
In 2011, Joseph Washington Frazer (1892-1971) was inducted, belatedly, into the Automotive Hall of Fame, with his erstwhile partner, Henry J. Kaiser, co-founders of the world’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer during 1946-48. This article is updated from the remembrance I wrote of JWF, creator of the Jeep. For more on Frazer, see my book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit.
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On August 7th, 1971, the auto industry lost a cherished son. Joe Frazer—mechanic, instructor, financier, salesman, president and board chairman in a half dozen companies, one of the few remaining giants of the classic era of American car-building, passed away from cancer at his home, “High Tide,” in Newport, Rhode Island, aged 79.…
The diaries of Churchill’s youngest and only living daughter, Mary Soames, are to be published on her 89th birthday, September 15th, by Doubleday UK, and is available for shipment worldwide from Amazon UK. An e-book will also be available. American publication will be in May 2012 by Random House in New York. The Amazon UK price is £16.50 ($26.50) and airmail shipment to the USA costs about £7 ($11).
Much younger than her siblings, Mary had an idyllic youth, growing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Kentish home, but always in the background was his preoccupation with the growing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dramatically altered.…
