We’ve all seen it happening for eight years now and I think we’ve all been either ignoring it or thinking it’s just a schtick. If you had told anyone in the country that an old crass, bigoted billionaire who cried a victimization river would get a following of 47% of the voting population, we would have laughed at you and told you that your imagination was very weird. Everything we have all been taught over…
I had a conservation this morning with one of my red friends who I text with daily as a member of a motorcycle group. There are four of us and two of us are decidedly blue and two are just as red. But the truth is that as convenient as the clarity of red and blue might seem, reality is never that neat and tidy. The truth is that the four of us are all…
Humility is considered the foundation of all virtues in the Christian religion. It is equally valued in Judaism and Islam. I have wrestled with humility on many occasions in my life, but have generally found that it has far greater value than most any virtue that I can invoke. It is often hard-won through failure and the more success you have the more prone to setting it aside you can become. Being wrong is a…
I went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis today. I felt I had to go see it even though it is being met with very mixed reviews and getting characterized much like Kevin Costner’s Horizon fiasco as a vanity play by an aging great one of film. Great filmmakers don’t seem to be able to fade away, they have to go out with a bang…and it’s usually one on the noggin. But then again, Megalopolis…
Last night, while Iran was planning its second flight of ballistic missiles aimed at Israel (luckily mostly blunted by Iron Dome) and Benjamin Netanyahu was being the ultimate Middle East Hawk by orchestrating ground incursions into Lebanon to root out the bits of Hezbollah that they have not decimated over the last month and simultaneously threatening Iran with brisk retaliation for their direct missile assaults, we had the Vice Presidential debate. The contrast of the…
Recently, a report was released by the Commission on National Defense Strategy. This was a panel of eight Washington defense and intelligence experts, what me might call senior staffers, assigned by the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and its senior Republican (Mike Rogers and Joe Wilson) and Democratic (Adam Smith and Joe Courtney) members. This group made an exhaustive review of public and confidential documentation and conducted extensive interviews across government and non-government sectors…
Nova Scotia is a large sausage-shaped island that runs diagonally from the southwest to the northeast. Off the northeast coast by several hundred miles is Sable Island, a largely uninhabited sand bar (six people live there year round), that is mostly made famous in movies like The Perfect Storm, where it is referenced as the furthest most point of land before you go out to brave the Grand Banks on your way towards the bleak…
A Bright New Day Today is the first real post heat wave day on the hilltop. It is 63 degrees outside and should reach up to about 80 during the day. I just spoke to Joventino the gardener (in Spanish as usual) and he seemed genuinely happy for the heat to have passed. You see Joventino works at least six days a week for at least 10 hours a day in the outdoors. I’m sure…
The Year of the Debate For the second time in three months and for the first time in my life, I am anxiously awaiting another presidential debate. I guess for people who have followed politics for many years, this may not seem so very different form other election years. But for me, this is a strange feeling to be on tenterhooks over a debate. This has caused me to look up the work tenterhooks and…
The Reagan Legacy Today we are going to see the new Dennis Quaid movie called Reagan. It chronicles the life and times of the 40th president of the United States. After the difficult transitional years with Jimmy Carter in the presidency, when so very little got done in what was, admittedly, a difficult moment in American history, it was not at all surprising that America wanted something different. It always does. I remember those times…