I should have known this: today is the 70th anniversary of the attack by Germany on Norway and Denmark, in 1940.

Mitch Berg (who, I’m embarrassed to admit, knows the subject far better than I) tells the story here.

Norway thus became the only country conquered by Hitler to never surrender to the Nazis. Haakon, leading Norway’s legitimate government (no country ever recognized, even by the dubious standards of world diplomacy, Vidkun Quisling’s puppet regime) at the head of over 20,000 troops in exile, 50,000 troops in the underground, and the 22,000 men and hundreds of ships of Norway’s merchant marine.

Bill O’Reilly gives us his favorite obscure words, so you can call someone a nebbish pettifogger, if you like. Isn’t pecksniffian a Dickens’ word?

Credit ROFLRAZZI.COM Thanks to Loren Eaton for the link.



Steve Bradford, who I credited with yesterday’s link, had this link today. It’s a review of How To Train Your Dragon by Nathan D. Wilson, that draws a very, very different conclusion from mine:

But that’s not what was served up. Instead, dragons were bad. They raided the village stealing sheep. They burned it down constantly. They killed people. Lots of people. And here’s one of a few things that stunned me. Why did they do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process.

That message never even crossed my mind while I saw the movie. And frankly, I don’t think many other viewers took it that way either. But still, if that’s what Cressida Cowell, the author of the books the movie was based on, intended, I probably owe her an apology or something.

I often get things wrong. Continue reading Dragons, and Pythons →

Patrick J. Deneen, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, argues that teaching the Great Books is essentially worthless if the teacher treats them all as equally true.

contemporary arguments on behalf of the Great Books are often as pernicious, and even indistinguishable from, the forms of value relativism that they purport to combat. Many conservative academics have become lazy in the defense of the Great Books, content to let the phrase stand in for a deeper and potentially more contentious examination of the various arguments within those books and the West itself, and of the need for university faculties to provide some kind of organized and well-formed guidance to students on how best to approach these texts.

In short, teachers must have a bias for the truth in order to guide students through these great works. Reality must be recognized in the classroom. Because if an interest in ideas, no matter how ridiculous, is the highest virtue for a teacher, it barely matters what he is teaching. The outcome will be similar. Students will believe their own opinions are the only ones that matter, regardless their merits.