Ought v. Naught Reimagining America George Pratt Shultz lived 100 years and for 35 of those years was a leading force in the forging of America’s foreign and domestic policies. He held four different cabinet-level positions under two Republican presidents, holding a seat at the cabinet table for a dozen years from 1969 to 1989. He was on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors for Eisenhower, Secretary of Labor, Director of the Office of Management…
Talking to Old Friends None of us ever do a good enough job of staying in touch with old friends. Some try harder than others, but for the most part we all accept that life moves on and some people just drift away and disappear from your screen. We all segment our lives to some degree, but I suspect I do it more than most since I grew up as part of my mother’s traveling…
Giggity Gig One of the oldest nursery rhymes is To Market, To Market, which first appeared in print in 1805, but can trace its origins back to the “Old Countries” of Europe (in this case Italy and England), where it was heard repeated as early as 1611 and was partially recorded in 1598. Like all nursery rhymes, they are meant as songs to soothe children, so they are simple ditties that describe everyday events, in…
To Infinity and Beyond! Who doesn’t love Buzz Lightyear? The guys at Pixar created him for the original Toy Story movie in 1995. Actually, Buzz comes from a movie within a movie and is the toy character that comes from that inner movie. He was modeled after G.I. Joe, which I sort of understand, but never really caught on to even though I was a big G.I. Joe kid. His voice is from Tim Allen,…
The Conundrum of Education On MSNBC this morning, the topic of the inequity of education, especially in regard to the admission standards to Ivy League universities, was on full display. To begin with, they showed data from public universities (think University of Michigan or UCLA), what they call “Second Tier” universities (Oh, say like Vanderbilt or Washington University) and Ivy League or Elite universities (the obvious 8 plus a few extras like Stanford, Duke, University…
The Fringes of Fall We turned an important page yesterday. We wrapped up a whirlwind weekend actualizing and celebrating my youngest son Tom’s wedding to his new bride, Jenna. The wedding itself was on Sunday, which the cognoscenti will recognize as indicative that it was a Jewish ceremony held under a chuppah, a Jewish bridal canopy. Tom is not Jewish, but Jenna is. Tom was raised in a very open and embracing manner in Manhattan,…
R* R* is something that I don’t recall seeing before today, which is probably an indicator that I’m not as fully tuned into the world of global finance, as I like to think I am. R* was mentioned in the Financial Times headlines this morning with the title of “the most important chart in the world”. R* is defined by the Federal Reserve as the natural rate of interest, a rather theoretical concept that gets…
Being Rude Modern life is all about managing through an 8 billion person world. It can be misleading as we travel around from here to there. Whether in the West or the East, the North or the South, there are great swaths of wide open spaces. I watched a movie the other day called Survive. It was about a woman who is suicidal who survives a plane crash and then has to find her way…
Hot & Cold Water We are in Beacon, New York this Labor Day weekend for my son Tom’s wedding, which will take place on Sunday. He is marrying Jenna, who we have known for ten years, and Kim and I could not be happier about it. Tom and Jenna got engaged two years ago when he proposed to her under the Manhattan Bridge on the Brooklyn side of the East River. As we were coming…
The Not-So-Dead Sea Scrolls I enjoy drilling down on articles in the National Geographic, and this week NG is highlighting an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls and what they tell us about the thinking at the time of the life of Jesus Christ, and thus how that thinking impacted the development of early Christianity. This piqued my interest for two reasons. First, my general interest in antiquity and specifically the history of such an…