Category: Personal Blog

  • Star Trek: First Contact at 30: A Teacher’s Journey Through Time, Memory, and the Borg

    Thirty years ago this year, Star Trek: First Contact premiered in theaters and fundamentally changed what Star Trek could be. Released on November 22, 1996, Jonathan Frakes’ directorial debut took the optimistic crew of the Enterprise-D into darker territory than the franchise had dared to explore on television; it gave us a Star Trek film…

  • Courage, Conscience, and Community: April 2026

    The content highlights themes of hope, Arab American heritage, significant historical anniversaries in April, and notable birthdays of influential figures throughout history.

  • The Long Ledger: Part 3

    Free Markets as Foreign Policy Trade Agreements, Capitalist Hegemony, and the Limits of Economic Freedom, 1991–2008 When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, something unusual happened in Western intellectual life: a significant number of serious people decided that history had ended. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that the great contest of…

  • The Long Ledger: Part 2

    The Shell Game Cold War Geopolitics and the Redistribution of Colonial Wealth, 1945–1991 The Cold War is usually taught as a clash of ideologies, and the ideologies were real. Liberal democracy and Soviet communism were genuinely incompatible visions of how human society should be organized, and both superpowers believed, at least partly, in what they…

  • The Long Ledger: Part 1

    The economic motivations behind conflicts from 1914 to 1945 shaped wartime decisions, international relations, and postwar policies, revealing deeper motivations beyond ideological narratives.

  • The Long Ledger, Addendum

    The Realignment Has Already Begun The Iran Conflict, the Petrodollar, and the Economic Pivot Nobody Voted For A caveat before anything else: this post was written in late March 2026, while the conflict is still active and the full picture is still forming. Some of what is documented here will look different in six months;…