Hunting for Hunter This title will probably do more to raise the readership of my blog among my red friends than anything other than one denouncing Hillary for something obscure and yet serious, like the mishandling of top secret government document. But while the story has nothing to do with Hunter Biden and why right wing deflectors need a bane of their existence to distract them from all the very real, growing and harsh criticism…
Contrite Is as Contrite Does The concept of contrition is often thought to be associated with Catholicism. We think of sitting in a confessional and leaving with the seemingly trivial penance of saying so many Hail Mary’s or Novenas to absolve ourselves of our sins. But contrition is a far more general and important concept for modern life than these old, somewhat antiquated memories or images. We all need to start from a common basis…
Laughing It Up While I was just in NYC (actually more in Connecticut than NYC), I had the opportunity to have breakfast with my old friend Roger Baumann. Roger is just about the sweetest guy I know. It’s not just me that feels this way, Kim says the same thing about him all the time too. The only person as sweet as Roger is his lovely wife Julie, but I don’t get to see her…
The Game of Law This week has been a news cycle of one thing after another focused on who and what falls within the boundaries of the rule of law. The rule of law is more than a collection of four words, it is a political philosophy that lies at the center of the modern world, whether you believe in it as a guiding principle of governance or as something that is irrelevant and bears…
Cooling Off Sometimes things are easy. Two days ago, our northern air conditioner went on the fritz. That is the older half of our AC system in the house and if measured in BTU strength, it is also the smaller half of the system. I’m not sure that is a wise configuration, given the importance of AC to comfortable sleeping, but I inherited and retrofitted the HVAC and Hot Water systems in this house and…
On Capitalism I am once again finding myself at Capitalism’s front doorstep as it seems to be assaulting my senses as I prepare the next term’s syllabus for my business ethics course. Technically the course is titled Law, Policy and Ethics and I am being sure to add more connective tissue between the three subjects rather than have this be a philosophy course on the etymology of ethics in business. When I launch my thinking…
The Shot Heard Round the World This title is intended to harken us back to our pre-Revolutionary days in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts when the very first militia of American patriots engaged British troops in 1775 and exchanged a volley of musket balls with the red-suited “lobsters” of England and thereby marked the start of the Revolutionary War. There are plenty of conservatives in the country who like to think that their actions on January…
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.…