On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin! That is the beginning of the University of Wisconsin fight song. It carries on with “fight on for your fame”. I lived in Wisconsin from 1961 to 1965 and pretty much spent my grade school years at the Spring Harbor Elementary School on the southern shore of Lake Mendota, which, along with Lake Monona, bound the capital city of Madison, where the central University of Wisconsin campus sits. This state took…
Traveling to the Middle East Over my working years, I travelled extensively in the Middle East. It began in the late 80s, thirty-five years ago, when I went through the region to work on disposing of my bank’s $4B of Latin American sovereign debt. In some ways, it was the petrodollar surge of OPIC and the Middle East that had created the Latin American debt crisis of that age since those petrodollars, which morphed into…
Mens Rea We have now watched seven of the presumed eight public hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital. These hearings have been startling to most of us. I would like to think they were required watching for every voting-age citizen of the United States, but America doesn’t do that sort of thing. We prize our individual liberty too dearly to ever mandate something so specific.…
Heading Out to the Rogue’s Harbor This has been the first day of of the grandkids here in Ithaca. While I spent my day getting the carriage house finished from my purge of memorabilia and ready for son Thomas’ arrival tomorrow night, Kim did what Kim loves to do, which is go out and shop for miscellaneous things we need for the weekend. We will have sixteen for the bulk of the holiday weekend, so…
Character Witness Today we got treated with a special witness in the January 6th Special Subcommittee Hearing. It was Cassidy Hutchinson, a staunch Republican Washington DC staffer who has worked on the Hill for Representative Steve Scalise, Senator Ted Cruz and, most recently, worked in the West Wing of the White House as Special Aide to the President and top staffer for Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff on January 6th, 2021. By…
Forbidden Fruit There are certain topics that we all want to avoid. It is not about polite company, it is about a thorny ethical conundrum that has no easy answers. We all like certainty whenever we can get it, and what that means is that where there is no certainty there is angst. Very few topics I can think of are as fraught with uncertainty as much as the topic of abortion is. We hang…
The Ethicist Don’t you just hate holy rollers? Those people who decry wrongdoers and say they should be locked up? They stand on their moral high horses and suggest that others have sinned in unforgivable ways. They point their fingers and say, “‘J’accuse…!” Well, I am no Emile Zola and am unlikely to win one, much less two, Nobel prizes for my written commentary on why Donald J. Trump is guilty of crimes against the…
Slowly, Slowly… Since last Thursday when the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack had its first, introductory session and laid out their plan to prosecute their case against those who conspired to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power after the last presidential election. At the center of that conspiracy, according to the Committee, is none other than ex-President Donald J. Trump, who they believe they can prove both took decisive action and…
Worlds Colliding Writing is something I find very soothing to do. I was recently so upset about an incident involving gun laws and some people I know who are involved at the most sordid end of the gun manufacturing business, that I wrote a story denouncing the whole affair and sent it to a subgroup of related friends for consideration. The reaction I got back was difficult for me. I spent a moment wearing a…
Governance Provenance Where does the concept of governance come from? I have read the anthropological books like Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond that delineate the history of governance from the tribal to today’s democracy in all of the areas of the world. What Diamond suggests is that none of the development of civilization are really due to any inherent superiority of one race or culture of mankind, but is rather much more attributable…