Just Another Monday Morning Labor Day 2019 has little labor in store for me. I am up early, as usual, only a bit earlier since I was exceedingly tired last night and hit the hay by 9:30pm since I had Nyquiled myself into a stupor. It takes a lot of tired to cause me to be unable to write and I had a sufficient dose to do the trick. I still can’t tell if I’m…
Every Picture Tells a Story There are two ways in which we acquire art. The less obvious way is that when I have bought a house (primary or secondary or, even tertiary) I am usually quite rabid about getting the place set up to be immediately useable. To me, usable means with art on the walls. That approach requires me to be a devotee of art.com, where I shop for and buy relatively inexpensive artwork…
Looking Shrewd One of the things I have learned in doing business in the Middle East is that shrewdness is a highly prized attribute. I have worked for and with Israelis. I have worked with and for Saudis. I have worked for (decidedly not with) a big-time Uzbek. I heard it said by one of these groups and maybe all of them that the greatest praise you can give a man is to tell him…
Summer’s End No matter who you are, in the United States we all know summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And the July 4th holiday is more or less mid-summer. That’s how we roll in the good old US of A. It doesn’t matter that colleges end in early May, and public schools end in late June. Most colleges start in late August, but at least most public schools start…
Cogito, Ergo Sum This morning my head is swirling with thoughts after watching a Broadway rendition of Hadestown. The show is a revival of a Greek mythological story, like so many other great tales. The details of the myth and the story are somewhat irrelevant, but suffice to say that it does what it is supposed to do, which is to ignite thought. I imagine that the Golden Age of Greece certainly raised the…
Cracking Up It’s falling apart for Trump…again. How many lives can this cat have? Is this a dead cat bounce or is he likely to rise again from the ashes and regain lost momentum? He was getting pummeled about his handling of El Paso and Dayton (while his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden was getting slammed for his thoughts on Houston and Michigan…ouch!) and then the markets started to gyrate. Out of desperation, he came…
Loving New York In 1964 I made my first trip to New York City. I may have been here before that but at age ten I can remember the visit with my mother and sisters on a visit from our home in Middleton, Wisconsin. We drove there in our white Chrysler New Yorker, strangely enough. We went to see the World’s Fair, which proved to be especially significant to my view of the future…
The Empty Chair We now have the iconic symbol of the Trump presidency. As we have all seen, Trump chose to absent himself from the G-7 meeting on Global Climate Change. He literally was a no-show, leaving an empty chair at the roundtable of world leaders. There are several ways to interpret this phenomenon. To begin with, there are a series of empty chair metaphors. I suppose it is possible that as a student…
The Eisenhower Cohort General Dwight David Eisenhower (a.k.a. Ike) was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces throughout its existence. That is when we all know he guided the efforts of Operation Overlord 75 years ago and pushed for the reclamation of continental Europe from the clutches of the fascist Nazi war machine. The books and stories that recount those daring days are plentiful and we have almost all seen some version of the…
Pavlov’s Dilemma In high school, a friend of mine wrote a paper titled Rascal Rasputin Rampages Russia about the end of the Romanov Empire and the lead-up to the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most impactful populist overthrows in human history, and a mere 100 years ago. When I was in college, I was a dual major in Economics and Government with a focus on development economics. I spent some considerable time studying comparative…