Losing a Lime I just read in the Wall Street Journal that researchers have been working to understand why the average human brain has been shrinking in the last millennia or so. There is an old joke about the dinosaur speaking at a convention of other dinosaurs. He says to the group, “The outlook is not good gentlemen, meteors have been striking the earth, the climate is changing for the worse, vegetation is disappearing…and we…
Ought v. Naught The Founding Documents The United States Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land and represents a refinement in the Founding Fathers’ thinking over a dozen or so years. It was published in 1789 and replaces the Articles of Confederation published in 1777. Those articles represented the first, loosely defined combination of what had been thirteen disparate colonies, and it was a stepping stone for this…
Ought v. Naught The Founding Documents The Declaration of Independence On July 4th, 1776, we all know that the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to sign this declaration from the thirteen founding colonies of what would become known as the United States. They had actually signed the Resolution of Independence two days prior as their assertion of independence and then went on to publish the formal declaration to announce and explain their basis for…
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…
The Big Disconnect The world is spinning off in two different directions at the same time. What I can’t really figure out is whether or not this is what always happens, if it is a short-lived quirk, or if this is a new phenomenon that sets the tone for what we have to live with going forward. We have all heard about and experienced the divisiveness in our society these days. In the extreme, the…
The Dance Card Gets Filled The notion of a dance card started in the Eighteenth Century, but it really came into vogue in Nineteenth Century Vienna. I always thought of it in regard to Gone With The Wind with the young Scarlett O’Hara with a small booklet looped to her wrist where the evening ballroom dances were listed and next to which she could write the names of the many beaus and potential suitors that…
The Dark Triad The psychology of leadership is an important issue generally, but it seems especially so today. Leadership in good times is challenging, but leadership in difficult times is imperative. We are in some of the most difficult times the world may ever have seen. I know we are all prone to a degree of hyperbole in thinking that our problems are greater than all others, but the truth is that as cyclical as…
The 4% Do the math. I have finally done it and it makes me more curious rather than satisfy my curiosity. The latest Times/Siena poll says very clearly that the Trump MAGA base represents 37% of the Republican Party. That is the core that gives Trump his dominant lead in the Republican Primary discussions (it’s barely an official campaign yet since there hasn’t even been a debate yet…not that he will likely partake of such…
The Political Spectrum When we were growing up, did the spectrum exist? I think if you had asked middle-school me that question I would have said, “Sure, there’s VIBYGOR, the spectrum of white light, right?” But now, I can’t seem to go a day without hearing about, talking about, reading about or extrapolating about the other spectrum. That would be the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that I recently wrote about. It is not so much…