In his new book, “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” columnist Mark Steyn posits that if a man from the 1890s entered a time machine and traveled to the 1950s he would be astonished at the changes in America.  Imagine! A “refrigerator” that keeps food cold!  Look, a contraption is washing people’s clothes — no human hands involved!  And how about that shiny machine carrying people really quickly down the street?!

Then Steyn posits that this man jumps back in the time machine and fast forwards to today, another 60 years later, only to be disappointed that little has changed from 1950.  True, the machines are sleeker, faster, more mobile, but other than that, not much is different.

The one exception being the personal computer (and its ramifications), which — as Steyn points out — got its start when two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed a company called Apple in their garage.

What’s Steyn’s point?  That the bureaucratic regulatory state that is now America is stifling entrepreneurialism and free enterprise — and, as a result, innovation.  Case in point:  Today, merely complying with federal (not state or local) regulations costs around $1.5 trillion a year.

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The Six-Day War, fought between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, ended this week (June 10) in 1967.  In its wake the Middle East was changed forever.

It was one of the shortest wars in history — it took just 133 hours for Israel to annihilate its Arab enemies.  Casualty figures were more than 20 – 1 in Israel’s favor, and the prisoner ratio was even greater.

As was the damage.  Because of a preemptive attack on the war’s first day by the Israeli air force against Egypt’s air forces, 85 percent of Egypt’s combat aircraft and all of its bombers were destroyed.   That knockout blow against Egypt’s air power was the chief contributor to Israel’s victory.

To the victor belong the spoils, and Israel’s were mind-boggling.  At war’s end, Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem — thereby uniting the city of Jerusalem under Jewish hegemony for the first time in eons.  On June 11, 1967, Israel was more than three times its size at birth in 1948, and rather than being vulnerable to Arab attacks, as it was before the war, geographically Israel was a threat to attack its Arab neighbors.

Demographically things also changed.  At the war’s start approximately 200,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank and settled in Jordan, where, in miserable refugee camps, they exacerbated an international refugee problem that continues to this day — a problem that many Arabs blame on Israel despite the fact that Israel had little to do with this mass emigration.  Most Palestinians fled because of the expected fighting, and because they were encouraged to leave by Arab military personnel expecting a quick victory over Israel, at which time the refugees would return in triumph.

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There was a time — how innocent those days seem — when hijacking an airplane could earn the perpetrator cult status, which is exactly what happened in the hijacking that occurred this week (Nov. 24) in 1971 when, on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle, a man named Dan “D.B.” Cooper handed a flight attendant a note saying he possessed a bomb.  After allowing the attendant a quick glance into a briefcase, where she saw something resembling a bomb, Cooper demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.

On his orders the plane then landed in Seattle, where authorities met his demands.  In return, Cooper allowed the other passengers to exit the plane, and then ordered the plane back into the air, instructing the pilot to fly at a low altitude toward Mexico.  Next, Cooper ordered all crew members into the cockpit and moments later — somewhere over the Lewis River in southwest Washington — he jumped out of the plane and into a violent thunderstorm.  The plane’s altitude was about 10,000 feet, the outside temperatures were estimated at below zero, and winds swirled at more than 125 miles-per-hour. Cooper was wearing a suit, a raincoat and sunglasses.

He was never seen again.  Although most people believe the weather conditions killed him, the terrible storm actually delayed a search for him, and when an extensive manhunt was finally conducted, it turned up nothing.

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