Curmudgeons Corner
Random thoughts on politics, current events, popular culture, and whatever else interests me.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Monday, December 29, 2025
Sunday, December 28, 2025
Just an hour or so after Jared Isaacman was at long last sworn in as NASA Administrator, President Trump published an executive order for a new space policy which, in part, constitutes the new space agency chief’s marching orders.
While part of the order concerns national security and commercial space issues, part concerns the Artemis return to the moon program. The document mandates U.S. boots on the lunar surface by 2028 — the last year of the Trump presidency. It also mandates that a nuclear-powered lunar outpost be started by 2030.
Saturday, December 27, 2025
Friday, December 26, 2025
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Monday, December 22, 2025
Tom Fischer thought he had seen every horror imaginable while covering the war in Europe. Embedded with British and Canadian troops, he had seen the effects of battle from Normandy to the abortive Operation Market-Garden to the final assault on Nazi Germany.
But when he entered the newly liberated Bergen Belsen concentration camp, Fischer knew that he had come to a new kind of man-made hell that was unimaginable in the history of the world. Thousands of people had been left to die of starvation and disease. Despite the best efforts of the allies, thousands more would die during the days after the liberation. A month later, Fischer decided to interview one of the survivors of Bergen Belsen, a young, teenage girl who had been found on the brink of death but was now on the road to recovery.
Her name was Anne Frank.
In this work of alternate history, the girl whose diary gave a voice to the Holocaust survives to put her mark on history from war-torn Europe to an ancient land convulsed in the birth pangs of a nation both ancient and modern called Israel.