Normal Wins Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was a strong candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President for many months and through several multi-participant debates. She did not stand out much as a candidate but always comported herself well and with aplomb. Her strongest attribute was her moderate posture on many of the more controversial issues of the election. In a word, where others were flamboyant or charismatic, still others were fiery and strong-minded,…
Passing Through Portland At the end of next week, Kim and I and our friends Frank and Lydia, will be passing through Portland, Oregon as we escape the confines of the Coronavirus for a road-trip holiday up through the Northern Coast of California, where the Redwoods proliferate and into Oregon. After Goos Bay, we are going to the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark ended their transcontinental journey. That expedition started in…
The River of Dreams Some of the best song lyrics out there were written by Billy Joel, who, God knows, doesn’t seem like a spiritual man (to paraphrase his own lyrics), and yet they are hauntingly universal the way things like rivers and fruits are universal. When I was in Guatemala and we were trying to connect with the indigenous, mostly Indian, people, the common point of connection was favorite fruits. The Africans, the Bedouin,…
As Goes Trump, So Goes the Nation I recently found a website that objectively lists all published presidential polls done by day and graded in terms of the quality of the statistical analysis represented by the poll. The better the poll, the higher the grade, but most importantly, all the polls published are listed whether they are done by CNN, the Wall Street Journal or Quinnipiac University. I have several observations from reviewing the list.…
Playing God Capital punishment as a topic ranks right up there with abortion and euthanasia as the big three to throw any social gathering into disarray if they are thrown into polite conversation. People can joke about pornography (perhaps not snuff films, but certainly most sexual varieties of the art form). But I find that people are simply too invested in the underlying ethics of life and death. As I contemplate this, there is certainly…
What Doesn’t Kill You… You know the rest of that expression. I suggest that we are living in a bimodal world right now where some things that don’t kill you do, indeed, make you stronger, and others that don’t kill you, make you weaker. After 650 blog stories in eighteen months, representing approximately 800,000 words or about nine books worth, I know a few things about my writing, which I now do every single day.…
Educating Myself My daughter called me today very concerned about Mayor DeBlasio’s announcement that he intends on opening NYC public schools in the Fall, but only for two or three days per week, so more or less half time. The idea is to use existing facilities and using them to the maximum social distancing capacity and filling in with online learning of the sort used this Spring around the world. She was both concerned about…
Tik-Tok Hong Kong Some places in the world just can’t ever seem to avoid being on a schedule and always racing against the clock. Hong Kong seems to have caught this disease in extremis. The Nineteenth Century was a time of great fascination by the world in China. Since the days of Marco Polo in the late Thirteenth Century, Europe has been drawn to China and its exotic goods. The tales brought back by Marco…
The End of Empire In the Fourth Century A.D. what had one day been the glory of the Republic of Rome and had become the Holy Roman Empire and would further become the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire (run from Constantinople) before it finally passed into history under the sword of the Ottoman Empire, was overrun by Goths and Huns. The general historical consensus is that the Roman Empire we all know from our Western…
Of Rocks & Trees and Citrus & Quail The world is in a funny place right now. I spoke to a friend of mine who lives in Vancouver. He reads my blog so I expect he will recognize himself. I recently called him. I spent four years on his board of directors. The company was a small public company traded on the LondonStock Exchange. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how…