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…
Hanging By a Thread I am sitting here doing what we have all done so much in the past seven or so years, I am watching a “Breaking News” chiron on MSNBC. I understand that many people think that MSNBC is a strongly liberal-biased cable news channel in the same way that they think that Fox News is a strongly conservatively-biased cable news channel. The viewership numbers favor Fox News based on Nielsen data with…
Disclaimer I am waiting for the arrival of a long-since seen old Bankers Trust buddy and his wife, who are coming to stay for a night. August is proving to be a busy visitor month for us out here on the hilltop. That’s wonderful for us. We had my daughter and her family with us for the bulk of July and will end up hosting four different sets of guests in August with the guest…
American Racist I just heard on the news that there was a shark attack on Rockaway Beach in New York City. My daughter and granddaughters go to my ex-wife’s beach club on Atlantic Beach at this time of year for some fun in the sun and at the beach. Atlantic Beach is a beautiful stretch of Long Island sandbar that happens to look right across the inlet to Rockaway Beach. Naturally, I couldn’t help myself…
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…
And the Hits Just Keep On Coming It was shaping up like a bit of a horse race between Jack Smith and Fani Willis as to who was going to criminally indict Donald Trump first for his purported attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. In the past few days there has been a lot of speculation about Willis, the District Attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, and just how ready she was to bring her…
The Framers’ View I just saw Eric Holder, the ex-Attorney General under Barack Obama, responding to a question about all of the Donald Trump indictments and pending legal actions. That is the sort of question that is being asked of many many people these days, whether they are ex-government officials or just cable news pundits. One of the things that we have all been thinking about for the past six or seven years is the…