This post has two parts: The Big Picture, and then Application. I’m a slow learner. I finally had an epiphany about what specifically bothers me so much about DEI—Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I’m a huge fan of Diversity. It’s one of our nation’s greatest strengths, and we all benefit from interactions with diverse people-types, backgrounds, characters and arguments. The main reason I like Diversity is because we don’t create it—God does. From the color of our skin and our gender to our...
Several months ago this post began as research for what I hope will be a fifth novel. The action in that story will take place in the near future, when the negative effects of a National Debt “death spiral” begin to impact everyday families and businesses. I wish the following were also fiction, but unfortunately it will be quite real. “The current levels of National Debt and of Budget Deficits are unsustainable.” We read that sentence a lot, but what does it actually mean? This may be the...
This post has two audiences. For those who’ve known my writing for a while, I’m simply adding my mostly-monthly blog posts to a new platform: Substack, which has enhanced capabilities for organizing and communicating. If you don’t know me, I very much enjoy writing novels, because truth wrapped in a good story can be transformative; but I’m a slow writer and need a way to express my thoughts on current issues while slugging away on a novel’s intricacies. Hence, these posts, which began in 2010...
Let me stipulate up front that this post contains several generalizations which I know do not apply to everyone in every case described. But focus with me on the larger picture, and I hope you will find the generalizations to be useful, as well as the many embedded reference links. Given my history in Russia and Ukraine in the early days of commercial real estate, friends often ask me why the Russian people don’t stand up more to the obvious lies and terrible consequences of Putin’s war on...
We are collectively dealing with too many unnecessary social disasters. Henry Hazlitt called these disasters the inevitable result of focusing on the immediate and the isolated, rather than on the long term and the whole. Others call them unintended consequences. Parents warn about them by saying to their children, “From my experience, you should be more careful, because here’s what’s going to happen…” In Hazlitt’s short book, Economics in One Lesson, he wrote in Chapter 15: “In studying the...
At a recent Ken Boa Bible Study, we discussed Ezra 5-7 and Nehemiah, which detail the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, along with the city itself, at the end of the Babylonian Exile from 521 to 435 BC. There are many interesting truths in these passages, but what I want to focus on here, given the terrible events in the Middle East since Hamas launched its brutal attacks against Israel on October 7th, is that Israel’s return to the Promised Land from Babylon and the rebuilding of the...
I’m glad to be back after a six-month pause. During the break I finished and published my fourth novel, Nation On The Edge, which I hope you’ll read. And I released the audio version of On The Edge, read remarkably well by a computer! Old dog, new tricks. Pause or not, the fabric of our nation continues to be torn apart by deep division on a broad range of issues, and I want to suggest a way to pick up a needle and start sewing at least some of us back together, one stitch at a time. While...
A recent email to me from a frequent correspondent right after the SVB/Signature bank failures criticized some conservative news sources for blaming the banks’ problems on being “woke.” And he asked what does being woke even mean? He wrote: “Being ‘woke’ doesn’t mean anything except to right wingers and boomers. And no bank fails because of being ‘woke.’ They failed because of basic poor asset-liability management due to no supervision and being able to borrow billions from short-term...
I want to share my thoughts on the two ends of a conceptual telescope I will call “Character." Not character like someone in a novel, but as with: The aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing. Qualities of honesty, courage, or the like; integrity. Reputation. Good repute. (Character Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com) At the larger end of the Character telescope is the big picture view of our nation's Virtue that everyone can see. For...
In the space of just four hours last week two different friends mentioned to me the article “Complications of the Ukraine War” by Christopher Caldwell in Hillsdale College’s monthly newsletter, Imprimis. Complications of the Ukraine War | Imprimis (hillsdale.edu). I perk up at those kinds of coincidences, and I’d already read the article, which lays out several reasons why Mr. Caldwell believes the United States is significantly responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, due to our past...
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