Politics – Page 2 – The Old Lone Ranger

Unbound Wealth

By Rich Marin | July 5, 2026 by Rich Marin

In my recent meanderings through anthropology and human development, I stumbled on a book titled Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink by anthropologist Richard L. Currier. Currier’s thesis is that over roughly five million years, eight key technologies (broadly defined) gradually freed humans from the limitations of our animal origins. Those eight he defines as tools, fire, clothing/shelter, symbolic communication, agriculture, technologies of interaction (wheels, ships, travel),…

Love Politics

Losing Our Way

By Rich Marin | June 26, 2026 by Rich Marin

I have been assaulted this morning by a wave of Supreme Court decisions which have flexed the muscles of the conservative majority with 6-3 votes which have strongly favored gun rights in America and supported the Trump anti-immigration policies that are all about restricting asylum seekers from our shores and deporting specific immigrants like Haitians and Syrians who we are generically deeming undesirable by some. Given that SCOTUS is anxious to go on their summer…

Memoir Politics

Swimming With Sharks

By Rich Marin | June 24, 2026June 23, 2026 by Rich Marin

I have a friend, Kevin, who likes to swim with sharks…for real. Kevin is a manly man. He hunts, he fishes, he dives, he motorcycles (on road, but especially the hardscrabble off-road type). He keeps horses and rides in fox hunts (is that even legal?) and owns several farms where he likes to drive his heavy equipment around and move earth and shit from one place to another. On one farm he owns in northwestern…

Memoir Politics

Defenestration

By Rich Marin | June 14, 2026 by Rich Marin

As I read about the court-ordered removal of the Donald J.Trump name from the Kennedy Center in Washington, the word defenestration naturally comes to mind. The word means throwing someone or something out of a window. It comes, as so many great words do, from the Latin fenestra (window). Historically and politically, the word is most famously associated with the Defenestrations of Prague, two historic incidents in Bohemia (1419 and 1618) where officials were thrown…

Business Advice Memoir Politics

NIMBY – JOMO

By Rich Marin | June 13, 2026 by Rich Marin

It’s hard not to think about SpaceX and AI every minute of every day these days. I remember in the late 1990s., we were all abuzz about the Internet. We thought it would change everything. The comparison of the Internet and AI is valid in that the buzz is similar in feel, but AI may be more fundamental. The hype was genuinely euphoric and widespread with every business needing a “.com” strategy overnight, just as…

Business Advice Memoir Politics

The Pillage of Rome

By Rich Marin | June 12, 2026 by Rich Marin

How many times has it been analogized that America is the Roman Empire of the 21st Century? The rise and the fall. Few subjects in history are richer or have been more studied as a cautionary tale. The Kingdom of Rome began as a small Latin village on the Tiber, legendarily founded by Romulus. Seven kings ruled before the last, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was overthrown in a patrician revolt. The Republic that resulted…

Politics

War News

By Rich Marin | May 27, 2026 by Rich Marin

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…

Fiction/Humor Politics

Kleptoanarchy

By Rich Marin | May 25, 2026 by Rich Marin

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…

Fiction/Humor Love Politics

Can’t Live Without Them

By Rich Marin | May 24, 2026 by Rich Marin

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.…

Business Advice Politics

What Made This Country Great

By Rich Marin | May 22, 2026 by Rich Marin

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…

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Category: Politics