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Brightest aren’t found in central casting

On the night of Sept. 21, 1788, Austrian hussars scouting for the Ottoman Army stumbled upon gypsies who offered them schnapps. The Austrians got drunk, encountered part of their infantry, refused to share the alcohol and a fight broke out. One soldier fired his gun; the rest of the army presumed the Ottomans were attacking and the Austrian General of Artillery thought the Ottoman cavalry was upon them. He ordered the artillery to fire. The Battle of Karansabas would go down in history as the world's worst friendly fire incident. Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, so demoralized from ...

Is free speech really highest value?

On Wednesday evening, I attended the third annual RealClearMedia Samizdat Prize Gala in Palm Beach, Florida. RealClear, whose brands include its flagship RealClearPolitics website, is best known as a content and polling aggregator, and as an advocate of political and ideological diversity. Pursuant to that mission, the Samizdat Prize recognizes and honors leading champions of free speech from across the ideological spectrum. This year, the prize was given to longtime Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Irish-born comedy writer Graham Linehan and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. ...

Kentucky park tells story we can’t forget

Chickasaw Park is special. It was designed by the Olmsted firm in 1923 for Louisville, Kentucky, and is believed to be the only Olmsted-designed park created specifically for a Black community during segregation. Olmsted Park Conservancy recently received a $5 million anonymous donation to completely restore the park. Bettye Foster Baker, who is 88 years old and holds a doctorate in educational administration from Columbia University, lived across the street from the park in the 1950s. She lives between Pennsylvania and Martha's Vineyard these days, but when she learned of the ...

Inflation will hold Congress accountable.

When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24% cut to Social Security checks and an 11% cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won't let that happen. The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won't have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won't become clear until much later, after voters ...

USA is indeed ‘America’

It might be the first time that Bad Bunny has been suspected of cribbing from Irving Berlin. Near the end of his Super Bowl halftime show, the Puerto Rican rapper said, "God bless, America." For many Americans, they were the only words that they could understand and ones that they, presumably, appreciated. We've come a long way, though, from Irving Berlin's World War I-era song that asks for God's blessings on America and invokes the geographic majesty of our vast nation "from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam." Bad Bunny didn't mean America the country, ...

Chance meeting had lasting impression

Every career begins with a defining moment, an instant when preparation meets courage and the future quietly changes course. For me, that moment came in 1983, when, at just 21 years old, I brought Richard Pryor to speak before more than 1,500 employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. I was young, untested and responsible for selecting a keynote speaker. Instead of choosing the safe or expected option, I took a risk and set my sights on Pryor -- not the comedian the world knew but the thinker, the truth-teller behind the myth. It was his first-ever ...