Limping to the Finish Line This morning, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin held his longest press conference of his three year tenure in the job. The position of Secretary of Defense is always an important cabinet position, usually the second or third most important among the cabinet. In fact, the official presidential line of succession flows from the Veep to the Speaker of the House, to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (strangely enough,…
Healing the Divide We all understand that we live in what seems to be an increasingly divided world. I doubt that many of us like that situation and I know most of us scratch our heads and wonder why it has to be that way. Today’s Washington Post had a lead article that seems to offer some explanation. The problem is thought to be rooted in the age old cultural phenomenon of tribalism. Tribalism is…
So God Made a Dictator The latest Lincoln Project advertisement is a real eye-opener. Its a play off of Donald Trump’s allusions to the notion that God made Trump and that this evangelically appealing narrative is that Trump is doing God’s work by standing up for issues like tighter abortion standards and tighter immigration standards. Of course, as one might expect, Trump is simply too much of a pragmatist and transactional operator to stand by…
Economic Optimism I watch so many movies about the wars of the 20th Century that I find myself wondering what it must be like to be facing the world with nothing in your pocket and no particular prospects for things getting better soon. The two movies I watched yesterday were of this sort. The first was a real D-list movie called Air Strike. This was a 2018 film that was made in China and represents…
SCOTUS v. POTUS There is a great deal of dust in the air right now around Donald Trump and his efforts to run for President for a third time. We all recognize how divided our country is at this moment in history. I wish I could understand why we are so galvanized in our respective positions because it is very hard to find an easy basis for the divide. Historically, I would argue that politics…
Labeling I just had one of my increasingly infrequent text sessions with my two deeply red Republican motorcycle buddies. It started as a circulation of a film clip about a young woman who complained about having to share a locker room with a 6’4” swimmer with full male genitalia who chose to identify as a woman and wasw therefore on her swim team. My reaction to it was “big deal”, which was to say that…
The Price for Being American As someone who grew up in my youth in Latin America, I always knew there was a price to being an American. We were the “Ugly Americans” in the region, which I took to mean that besides being crass and perhaps too uncaring, we were also more prosperous and not ashamed to display that. When I moved to Italy during my high school days, there was a lingering taint of…
The Ripple In The Pond This morning I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, which we believe is the best of the Sunday morning news magazine shows. They are interviewing Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, the guy who had to fill the very big shoes of Steve Jobs a dozen years ago. He has presided over a 9X growth of Apple to being a $3 Trillion company, the largest company in the world. That means…
Kennedy Gone Mad I just watched a YouTube video of a debunking of an interview by Joe Rogan of RFK Jr.. It was a great reminder of what I respect and don’t respect in human thinking. It has long been a head-scratcher for me when you hear MAGA people denigrate liberals for being over-educated elitists. I was raised to believe that education was not just a good thing, it was a necessary thing and a…
Babbitt Today we went to the La Jolla Playhouse to see another play on our season subscription. The Playhouse put the play on in its largest theater, presumably because the starring role was held by Matthew Broderick, the actor that brought us first War Games and then, his most famous role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Since his fame in the 80’s, Broderick has done some other notable work like in Mel Brooks’ The Producers,…