What the Hell is Lucia, Anyway?

So every year, I have to explain to Americans that Lucia is "that holiday where girls put candles in their hair."  Here is a slightly more comprehensive description.  

And remember:  "The 'why' is less important than the 'how.'"

Tom Friedman Gets One Right!

File under:  "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day"

Of all the people who have weighed in on the shutdown meltdown, pathological centrist Thomas Friedman has summed up the reality better than anybody else.  I couldn't say it better:

President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.

Listen to Hardcore History!!

Does anybody else listen to the "Hardcore History" podcast?  If you're the kind of person who likes audio books or talk radio, then I highly suggest it.


I recently finished the 5-part series on the Mongols, cheekily entitled "Wrath of the Khans."  To begin it, the host, Dan Carlin asks the question:  what if someone wrote a revisionist history of the Nazis, extolling all of the "good" things they did for society?

The question is raised as a starting point to discuss how as time grows distant between the present and the past, historians tend to white wash and downplay the horrible genocidal acts and other atrocities carried out by history's "great men" like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and of course the topic of the show, Genghis Khan.

While the Mongol conquests established permanent communications between Europe and Asia, and may have been a catalyst for the Renaissance, it's estimated that Genghis Khan and his successors may have murdered up to 50 million people.  Carlin does what he can in five parts to keep us from forgetting that.  As he describes it:  "In one of the most violent outbursts in history a little-known tribe of Eurasian nomads breaks upon the great societies of the Old World like a human tsunami. It may have ushered in the modern era, but at what cost?"