This is a bit of an unusual post for me. As always, I want it to be informative and filled with truth. But this post begins with a dream. I dreamed that a year ago both of the self-centered old men finally got out of the Presidential race to become the Elder Statesmen of their respective parties. They were then able to share advice and to weigh in with opinions, while letting the next generation of potential leaders battle it out in the primaries to define the best ideas and the best talent to...
Articles
It’s The Policies
Can we agree that both parties are offering candidates with some less-than-perfect personality traits, and that both parties have lied on numerous occasions? If that’s the case, then how does one decide how to vote in November? I suggest by looking beyond the personalities and the accusations, and focusing instead on the policies that each party supports, which usually are written down, straight forward, and hard to lie about. Another reason to do so is that it is these policies, if and when...
DEI+
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...
Unsustainable National Debt
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...
Substack and Seeking Truth
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...
Jim Crow–Ukraine–DEI–Woke
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...
“You Should Be More Careful. Here’s What’s Going to Happen…”
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...
Iran’s Ancestors Rebuilt Israel
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...
Speaking Simple Truth to Obvious Lies
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...
What is Woke?
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...
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