Ah, my friend, it is a pleasure to be back on the blog. I take being compared to Bluto as a compliment since I spent the first 30 years of my life emulating that great American scholar. Your modern Persian/Iranian history, however, if you pardon my saying so, may be slightly flawed and omits some very important details. This is the politically incorrect version that is not taught in the public schools or universities. Read at your own risk.

The 21st Century will prove the philosopher Plato right when he wrote 2400 years ago that only the dead have seen the end of war. For most of mankind, the march of human events will not be driven by democracy, diversity and tolerance, the seach for alternate energy, scientific advances, global warming or cooling or economic progress, but by the rising tides of ethno-nationalism and conflicting religious faiths, which are engulfing the world at this very moment.

I know that my attention has been focused of late on the political and cultural wars of the nation and dodging the progressive projectiles of the Wirtes blog and returning a few modest pithy comments of my own.

Dear President Reagan:

You may have heard from your old friend Bill Buckley that the Republican Party is in trouble. There are many in the media, among the Democrats, and even in our own party who are telling us that your economic philosophy, the one that gave us 25 years of unprecidented prosperity, is no longer relevant in this new liberal era. They are telling us that we should embrace big government, high taxes and a regulated, managed economy.

From the past and present the future is born as any futurist worth his salt will tell you. Nostradamus may have had his crystal ball and Merlin his owl intestines, but we run of the mill futurists have only the past and the present to work with and that means we are doing very well when we get things 60 percent correct. My country average may even be slightly better than that, but we shall see on the eve of the 2010 when my prognostications will be tested by the passing of time.

We live in an age of historical revisionism and there is nothing wrong with historical revisionism if it based on research and historical perspective. When that revisionism is based upon present-day accepted political and social truths and historical myopism, it is dangerous and unhealthy to the nation. That I am afraid is what has happened to those dauntless and hardy settlers in their quaint costumes who came ashore from the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in November of 1620, an altogether bad time of year to be visiting New England, but of course they were looking for Virginia.