To be a good man in a bad time: the hope of many and the achievement of a few.

Some old words from Rudyard Kipling on this difficult task:

“If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;

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Religion’s the thing.

Embrace it and doors open.

But, it has to be the right kind of religion.

“Religiously correct.”

Is your heart in it?

Doesn’t matter.

Wear it on your sleeve.

The show’s the thing.

Only the good-at-heart will have trouble with this, which is something that Mark Twain, that chronicler of post-Civil War America, understood.

Here’s an illustration, with Twain, speaking through the voice of Huckleberry Finn, a good-hearted boy in an evil, racist society who, try as he might, just can’t fit in.

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Soviet nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov’s break with his government began when the Soviets detonated “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful nuclear weapon in history, in 1961.

He was then forty years old and had been at the forefront of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program for thirteen years.

It was Sakharov who had developed the model for controlled nuclear fusion which had made the Soviet hydrogen bomb work.

And he had believed in this effort.

“If the Soviet Union could achieve nuclear parity with the US, then a peaceful international equilibrium would be created,” he said.

But, over time, Sakharov’s illusions fell away.

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British tanks and aircraft attacked Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya yesterday, hoping to block his combined Italian-German force from advancing further east towards Tobruk, the deep-water Mediterranean port in Tunisia now under British control.

The battle between the German and Soviet armies for Kharkov [Kharkiv], an industrial city in northeastern Ukraine, has ended with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.

While the Germans succeeded in holding the city, the Soviets claim success in forestalling a German drive further east towards Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus oil fields.

After a lull forced by bad weather, the air war between Germany and Britain has resumed.

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It is 1887.

Gustave Eiffel’s plans for his tower have been published and the foundations have been laid.

And the artists of Paris are up in arms.

With the flair and certainty that only self-anointed experts can muster, they protest to the Paris minister of public works:

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Early American history can seem like a rush of events.

The Pilgrims, the Thirteen Colonies, the Revolutionary War, and then — BAM — the Civil War.

It’s easy to overlook the long stretches of time which separated these events.

Case in point: 241 years passed between William Bradford’s stepping onto Plymouth Rock and South Carolina Lieutenant Henry S. Farley firing on Fort Sumter!

It wasn’t only Einstein who noted the relativity of time.

One’s perspective on time is a function of his own lived experience.

The New York Civil War diarist George Templeton Strong illustrates the point with this story from 1864.

“Curious story from George Gibbs, who spent the ten years preceding 1861 in California and Oregon.

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The worst fears had come true.

All that remained was the telling of the story.

A search party has reached the crash site of a TWA plane in the mountains near Las Vegas.

All twenty-two people aboard were killed in the crash, including the actress, Carole Lombard, age 33, and her mother.

Also killed were fifteen Army ferry pilots who were returning to Long Beach after delivering new aircraft to US air bases.

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Embrace failure.

Revel in its richness.

It will teach you more about yourself than success could ever do.

And, sometimes, failure will be the springboard to magnificent success.

Oh, really?

Just ask these guys:

Lewis and Clark

Their mission was to find the mythical Northwest Passage, the long-sought “direct water communication from sea to sea.”

But there was no direct link between Atlantic and Pacific to be found.

Instead, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery charted a continent more vast and varied than could then have been imagined, forging a path for America’s westward migration during the 19th century.

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Dick Dashiell’s Marine division landed on Iwo Jima on February 21, 1945, the third day of the five-week battle for the island.

Later, he wrote this letter to his parents.

“Dear Mother and Dad,

As you know, the scrap continues.

The japs are resisting here at Iwo Jima just as frantically as they did first day.

What a horrible, horrible thing it all is.

Death, filth, torn bodies, mortars, rockets, snipers, caves, pillboxes, tunnels, everything.

The mental tension is terrific.

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Germany has launched an air attack, spearheaded by paratroopers, on the forty thousand British, Commonwealth and Greek forces on Crete.

Most had withdrawn there following the fall of Greece in April.

Fighting is centered on the airbase at Maleme, the sole German foothold on Crete, where hand-to-hand combat is reported.

Offshore, a naval battle continues between German troop transport ships and British naval vessels attempting to thwart a German amphibious landing.

Heavy losses are reported on both sides.

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