Jay Manifold

A Chicago Boy has passed. Author of The Americans (The Colonial Experience; The National Experience; The Democratic Experience), The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers, among others; Professor in History, 1944-64, and Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor, 1964-69; and Librarian of Congress from 1975-1987. WaPo obit here; USAToday obit here. Requiescat in pace.

Browsing Chicago BoyzU.S. Air Force Plans for Future War in Space, we find:
The U.S. Air Force’s proposed Long Range Strike Aircraft (LRSA) will use technologies enabling a rapid global delivery of force from bases located in the continental United States.
and of course
Hypervelocity Rod Bundles: Provides the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space.
A related item, Small Rockets Hold Big Potential, says:
Hopes are growing for smaller rockets, which could lift satellites or bombs with a few minutes’ notice, instead of in days or weeks.
The Air Force is studying how it might use such rockets, which could be ready and, on demand, deliver bombs halfway around the world …
In other news, genomics is about to get incredibly cheap. Our army of hypervelocity rod bundle-wielding, B-3 bomber-flying (“a transatmospheric vehicle operating at up to Mach 14”) Genghis Khan clones will CONQUER THE WORLD! BuwahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Note to Jonathan: Please add “World Conquest” to the Primary Category list.

For Valentine’s Day, surely I can do no better than to direct our attention to Genes of history’s greatest lover found?, which, as a bonus, points the Chicago Boyz to a new weapon in our arsenal for total planetary domination:

“The really interesting find, however, would be Genghis Khan’s DNA,” [Gregory M.] Cochran[, a physicist turned evolutionary theorist,] continued. He suggested that among Inner Mongolians and the Hazaras, on whom Genghis Khan left such a genetic imprint that his Y-chromosome is found in at least a quarter of the men, there must have been a lot of inbreeding among his descendants. Yet, judging from their Darwinian success at surviving and reproducing in large numbers, that might imply that Genghis Khan had very few bad recessive genes of the kind that often damage the health of the offspring of close relations.
“Between that and the fact that he conquered most of the world, it’s fair to wonder if he was a little genetically unusual,” mused Cochran. “Of course, if you found his corpse and could extract his DNA, eventually, at some point in the future, you’d be able to clone ‘the Perfect Warrior.’ Do you think the Department of Defense would want an army of Genghis Khans?”

In fact, the U of C’s John Woods may have already found the tomb. Our genetically-engineered caste of Temujin-class warriors will CONQUER THE WORLD! BWAHAHAHAHA!

You could spend hours over on Rhetorica.net reading about the canons of classical rhetoric and structural biases in the media.
Or you could just graze on over to Something Awful and see how today’s media might have covered famous events in history. I think the SA “goons” have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the “master narrative” concept, in particular …

Via InstaPundit, a typically excellent Fred Turner piece (2,800 words; reading time 7-14 minutes) that views American politics through, as it were, a polarizing filter rotated by 90° relative to the usual liberal/conservative one.
While this model is familiar to libertarians, it is not without its difficulties:

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