At age 72 I hope you don’t mind if I want to focus on what’s real and true, not on what’s false or BS. The BS is that we in the U.S. are suffering through a terrible time of oppression, inequality, dysfunction and major problems. Yes, problems exist in varying degrees, and always will. But read Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now to be reminded that this is a remarkably great age for the world in general, and for the U.S. in particular, with the one exception noted in my earlier post. A...
I began these posts almost ten years ago in August, 2010. For the first several months I offered one or two policy recommendations under the title of 2020 Vision: How To Fix The Next Ten Years in Ten Steps. With 2020 almost upon us, I thought it would be useful and even entertaining to revisit those ten thoughts. On re-reading them I conclude that they are certainly not perfect, but most still seem reasonable, largely not yet accomplished, and generally pointed in the right directions. Several...
Have you ever thought about how the most powerful and long lasting movements and institutions are each underpinned by a religious, secular or philosophical faith foundation, believed by many to be the Truth? In fact, without that faith foundation, these institutions would not survive. Virtually every such institution has been organized with power and authority flowing from the top down. The Divine Right of Kings and the Medieval Catholic Church were often at odds, but they were organized...
I’ve just finished Taylor Branch’s book The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with The President. Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the King Years Trilogy, finished the book in 2009. It contains 667 pages of intimate details taken from seventy-nine secret, mostly late night interviews in the White House with President Clinton from 1993 to 2000, and after. I wish I’d read it sooner. It’s an incredible labor of love for the sake of accurate history. After each interview, as Taylor...
Here are three quick updates to earlier posts, with several hyperlinks to excellent resources. Progressives: What Does Abortion Have To Do With Economic Policy? The movie Unplanned is now available on streaming video and on DVD. Whatever your thoughts on the subject, please watch it. Can Anyone See What China is Really Doing? Only If You Look. A good friend sent a link to an important unclassified paper on China by the U.S. Department of Defense: Assessment On U.S. Defense...
I don’t get it. If you are a Progressive and want to argue for higher taxes, Medicare for all, student debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, even socialism, though I probably won’t agree with you, let’s talk. But when you advocate for making it as easy as possible to kill babies in their mothers’ wombs, I don’t have anything to say. You’re just wrong. Period. It feels like someone 150 years ago, even a Supreme Court Justice, arguing that enslaving another human being because of the color of...
We seem to be headed for a repeat of 2016’s very difficult election choice in 2020, only with the contrasts even more sharply drawn. It’s no longer conjecture whether Donald Trump’s narcissism and petty treatment of others is just a passing anomaly—it’s really him. And every Democrat has moved so far to the left that any day now I expect to see late term abortion lauded as a way to save children from the depravities of Free Market Capitalism. Meanwhile, nothing gets done to address our real...
This post is not about any specific Chinese or American companies or entities, all of which I assume are filled with people of good will who genuinely wish the best for each other. Rather, it is about two completely different and possibly irreconcilable models for organizing and governing a society during a period when these models, like two huge tectonic plates, are colliding and chafing against each other across the globe. While America's leaders are mired in political name calling over...
If I’m a broken record on the War on Drugs, consider this post to be a 45, not a 33—it’s short, but not sweet. As I wrote last November in a detailed earlier post, the War on Drugs is pure insanity: Doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Let me stipulate once more that in a perfect world I wish there were no drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex outside marriage, smoking, pornography, or neglect of one’s family to work too many hours. And as a Believer I...
The Federal Government is way too big, it doesn’t always work well, it impacts us far too much, and yet it continues to grow and to get worse. Our Christian faith and our nation’s founding principles focus on individual freedoms and decisions—to choose Christ or not, to pursue a particular educational opportunity or not, to pursue a particular vocation or not, to succeed or to fail based on our own merits and decisions. But many federal laws, regulations, programs and taxes want to funnel us...
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