April 12: Hungary is back in Europe

Victor Orban was trounced today by a guy name Magyar, which is kind of neat because "magyar" means -- Hungarian. Not only that, but his party, founded just a couple years ago, seems to have won two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Since Hungary is still a democracy, despite 16 years of Orban's rule and his sly changes to the government, Prime Minister Magyar should be able to do just about anything he wants. Let's hope that means distancing himself and his country from Moscow, warming up to Ukraine next door, and quit taking advantage of the EU's and NATO's effective veto, which Orban has been using on Putin's behalf.

Read my earlier blog posts

Book of the Month

What a great book! Everyone interested in Russia (and that should be everyone, since the modern country is more of a danger to Europe than the Soviet Union ever was) should read The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes. Here are the tsars and the serfs from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin, forever pushing Russia's borders deeper into Europe and Asia and Africa. (In the early years, a conscript's service was not for two years but for life. About the time serfdom was abolished -- more or coincidental with the US Civil War -- the commitment was shortened to seven years.) Mr Figes related the history with an absolute minimum of professorial jargon, so that it actually does read like a story. See the full review in the Warbird's Book Club

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: