Freedom!!! In 1941 Franklin, Delano Roosevelt believed that the United States should end its isolationist policies that came about as a result of World War I. Europe was in turmoil. Germany had taken over the continent of Europe along with Italy while Japan ravaged the Far East. The only countries left to fight the Axis powers were England and the Commonwealth. In the United States, the Neutrality Act prevented the United States from assisting them…
Butter and Markets I am just finishing reading 48 essays on Free Markets for my ethics class. The assignment I gave was to discuss the pros and cons of free markets in the context of being a asylum-seeking immigrant from Central America. It has proven to be a fascinating exercise (at least for me, but I also think for the students) because it has forced them to consider the libertarian value of free market capitalism…
The Gatemaster Gozer the Gozerian is the evil Sumerian God who is also known as The Destructor and is equally worshipped by the Hittites and Mesopotamians. He or she (Gozer was gender-nonspecific way before it became popular) is served by an array of minions and demigods including Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster. Vinz is some form of half-dog and half-bear in his incarnation during Gozer’s first attempt to destroy the world in 1984. Gozer, who is…
The Final Lie There is something so symbolic about Tucker Carlson’s final send-off to his Fox News audience of some 4.1 million loyal sycophants. He ends by saying something stupid about how he will be telling them about how they are being forced to eat bugs and then quickly reminds them that he promises to see them all on Monday. That was last Friday and, of course, as we all know now, Monday morning he…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…
The Big Picture When you travel on vacation with a group, as we have done many times in the past with our motorcycle group, you end up spending time here and there with people who you might not otherwise go deep with. This happens at unusual times and places and under circumstances that perhaps even influence the nature of the conversation. Six years ago we did a flurry of travel in the fall of 2017.…
Return to the Mist For some reason I am back on the get-up-early program. The good news is that I’m sleeping a bit longer at a stretch, but the bad news is that I’m waking up on East Coast time for some reason. One of the best parts about that is that I get a jump on the day and I get to sit at my desk and enjoy the view to the north. That’s…
Cold Sunshine The pig is in the poke and the poke is currently a split-screen on MSNBC with a bunch of law enforcement folks (presumably federal, state and City) hanging around the exit to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan with the other side of the screen a still shot of Donald Trump sitting tentatively and with cowed anticipation at a defendant’s table in the courtroom flanked by two high-paid attorneys on each side, waiting for…
Never Wrestle With A Pig You know the old adage. Never wrestle with a pig because you’ll get dirty…and the pig likes it. This is what we are hearing today as Trump left Mar-a-Lago and flew off to New York (LaGuardia Airport) to spend the night at his 33,000 square foot, $327 million condo on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street at Trump Tower. Oh, wait a minute, my mistake, I was defining the Trump Tower…
The Tailor of Escondido I stumbled on the twenty-year-old movie with Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis, The Tailor of Panama. The movie is a strange blend of international spy thriller and comedy, with Rush playing a well-connected Saville Row tailor doing business in Panama City, and Brosnan playing a disgraced MI-6 secret agent who goes around fabricating a Canal Zone fantasy to revitalize his flagging career. I have had three encounters with…