There is a La Mancha in Spain, but there is no real Man of La Mancha. This all began with Miguel de Cervantes. Was born in Spain in 1547  (?, maybe ) and passed away in 1616 at the age of 68. Considered to be the greatest Spanish writer, best known for what is said to be the first modern novel,  Don Quixote , perhaps even the best book of all time.  As translated by Edith Grossman, widely regarded as one of funniest and most tragic  books ever written. Cervantes spent most of his life in relative poverty and obscurity. At the age of 22, moved to Rome, where he worked for the household of a cardinal. Enlisted in the Spanish Navy infantry a year later, 1570, and got severely wounded, losing use of his left arm and hand. There are no portraits of him, but this one to the right is generally used. In 1575 was captured by Barbary pirates, and ransomed to Madrid five years later. First significant novel, published in 1585, was  La Galatea . Don Quixote  was publis...

During the past few weeks I have focused on the theme of War and Peace on this nostalgic Tuesday.  However, I previously only analyzed the War portion.  This all  began on August 5  with my first  Huffington Post  article:   Well, Barack, We have a Problem.. ., which was published on 29May2008.  That initial  HuffPo  was an article on peace. On 23March2009 my  HuffPo  was entitled  The 10% Solution .  This essay provided details to that first attempt:  an ultimate plan to attain World Peace. The timing was right, for the world had suffered through the  Great Recession  from December 2007, and would continue through the date of this article into June 2009. The U.S. stock market had dropped 35%, but Chinese and Russian stocks fell 70%. There was no serious enemy during this period, for Iran was losing money producing oil, there were ragtag bunches of terrorists in the Middle East and North Korea was ...

 A week ago, my posting was:       NOSTALGIA TUESDAY:  My First  Huffington Post  Article I talked about the beginning of the  Huffington Post  and my first contribution on 29May2008 to, in those early days, still a fledging web newspaper:       Well, Barack, We have a Problem ...  The problem, I thought, was the horrendous size of our national defense budget, but the opportunity Barrack Obama had to combat peak oil and remediate global warming by transferring funds into these programs.  Better to save humanity by taking care of these problems instead of escalating the potential of war and a nuclear winter. But he first had to beat Hillary for the Democratic nomination, then, as it later turned out, Republican John McCain for the presidency. Three months later on 10August2008, with the presidential election still about three months away, I followed up with: Why Do We Spend So Much On National Security? Let me see now,...

On Tuesdays, this blog site reaches back to the past and brings back an old posting to review and update.  I wrote more than a hundred articles for the  Huffington Post , so I won't be doing this for all of them.  Over the coming Tuesdays I'll pick the most relevant ones only. First of all, what is  The Huffington Post ? In May ,  celebrated  20 years of groundbreaking digital-first journalism . The  Huffington Post  was founded in May of 2005 by Arianna Huffington and others as a progressive alternative to conservative news websites, such as the  Drudge Report . In the early days, most of the news reports for the  Huffington Pos t came from unpaid bloggers like me.  I don't quite remember how I got recruited, but my contributions began in 2008.   SIMPLE SOLUTION ESSAYS  is a compilation of the first 75 papers. The company was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $313 million. Also in 2011,  Jonathan Tasini on behalf of b...