For 86 days now, 26 more than allowed for under the War Powers Act, we have been reading about and listening to war news from the Middle East. The War Powers Act (formally the War Powers Resolution) was passed by Congress in November 1973 over President Nixon’s veto in the aftermath of Vietnam. It is one of the most important and most consistently violated pieces of legislation in American constitutional history. The immediate context in…
I am listening to James Clavell’s well-known novel about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Whirlwind. You might think I did this purposefully because of our current situation in Iran, but that’s simply not the case. I was watching some old movie and the protagonist, a troubled young man, was reading Clavell’s King Rat, the story of a Japanese POW camp in Thailand in 1945, and I remembered how much I liked Clavell’s Asian series…
The phrase “Women: can’t live with them and can’t live without them” has a surprisingly deep lineage. The most ancient roots of the sentiment (perhaps not the exact wording), goes back to the Ancient Greek writer of comedy, Aristophanes, who expressed the core idea in Lysistrata in 411 B.C. Lysistrata is one of the most audacious comedies ever written and yet it was written during the brutal later years of the Peloponnesian War (Athens vs.…
Back when I was in college, I had a roommate named Gary who I still see every once in a blue moon. Gary is a very smart guy who always had a finger on the pulse of popular culture, perhaps more than most. For some reason, I always remember one of the things he said during freshman year, long before my mind had turned from dreams of being an engineer (like most boys, I had…
When big geopolitical summits take place it is sometimes hard to tell who has the power stroke and who is coming off as the groveler. Sometimes there’s a strong meeting of the minds and a palpable sense that great things were accomplished. Other times it appears that the two sides are talking at cross purposes and things only get more rather than less at odds at the end. And then there is a third type…
Ever since 2016 and especially since 2024, I, like many like-minded, liberally-inclined Americans that have worried about the political drift of out nation and its impact on the world have tried to find ways to do our part to move towards a solution to our concerns and our state of play. I start by declaring quite frankly that for most of my adult life I have lived in a benign neglect for the political machinations.…
The “China Syndrome” refers to a hypothetical nuclear reactor meltdown scenario where the reactor core melts through the containment vessel and, theoretically, continues melting downward through the Earth. The darkly humorous idea being that it would melt all the way to China (from the US perspective). I wonder if that was intended to be a reaction to the “Butterfly Effect”? The actual physics involve in the former is a reactor core losing cooling, causing fuel…
The typical discussion I have with millennials regarding AI usually involves some reference to the fact that they grew up with movies about AI domination run amok. The great films on that theme start with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when HAL 9000 locks the crew out. Of the spaceship to save the mission. It’s the first real machine over man movie moment. The classic is the whole.Terminator line-up starting with The Terminator (1984), then…
On Sunday, Kim and I went to go see The Devil Wears Prada 2. It has been 20 years since the original The Devil Wears Prada was aired and we have both always loved the movie and all its stars. The sequel just opened May 1st, several days ago, so this is hot off the presses. The plot follows Miranda Priestly (editor of Runway magazine) and her struggle against Emily Charlton, her former assistant, now…
Back in the day (I mean the 1990’s), I ran the Global Private Banking business of Bankers Trust Company. We were not the largest private banking business in the world, but we were a significant first tier player. What that meant was that I owned two tuxedos and they barely got a rest from all the black tie events I had to attend. One of our big initiatives was something we called Wealth With Responsibility,…