When our astronauts landed on the moon in July, 1969, I was a 22 year old graduate student at London School of Economics on a one month language study in Leningrad, USSR. While our student group was there, we saw all the deprivations of the Soviet command economy, and we also saw young people beaten up by the KGB simply for talking with our group. Twenty-five years later the commercial real estate industry launched in Russia, and I participated. Fast forward to the early 2000’s, when Russia...
There’s a new short-hand term sweeping through the nation’s elite HR Departments, universities, Boards of Education, media, boardrooms and even the military: Kamalafication. The term is the Progressive code-name for someone who should be chosen for an important position based primarily on skin color, gender(s), or Woke awareness. That person should be highly Kamalafied to fill the vacancy because she, he or they will first and foremost push the Progressive Agenda as it applies to that...
As addressed in last month’s post, there are many good reasons to dislike Critical Race Theory (CRT), and to work quickly to end its poisoning impact on leadership in our nation’s corporate, education and military's highest circles. One of the least discussed reasons to end CRT is its teaching that Oppressors—Whites, Males, Heterosexuals, and Christians—will never change and will always oppress. CRT’s answer to this “fact” of unrelenting oppression is that governments must step in to solve the...
How does a nation prosper, or even survive, when its leaders are delusional, seeming to believe things that are clearly not true, and then basing policies and actions on these delusions? Merriam-Webster defines delusion as “a belief that is not true: a false idea.” In other words, a lie. Believing in and acting as if lies are true will always lead to disaster. Truths are what we need. Simple truths, which, as Albert Barnes pointed out, make their own way without needing extra fanfare or fancy...
We are living through an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan. We created it, and we should all be repulsed and ashamed. And by “we”, I mean all of us. The disaster is worth examining on at least three levels. At the lowest level, on the ground in Central Asia, can anyone imagine a more incompetent, ill-planned, stupid, deadly withdrawal than ordered and presided over by President Biden and his entire senior team, both civilian and military? Everything about it was backwards and defies common...
The current “Cancel Culture” is one terrible result of the Oppressor/Oppressed Critical Theory tsunami that is sweeping our nation today after decades of preparation, primarily in all levels of our nation’s education system. We were recently told by a friend who is a senior academic at a prestigious Ivy League university about a first year student who was being hounded and “cancelled” by fellow students, professors and administrators for something she wrote when she was fourteen. This woman...
I am very concerned about finding and acting on the Truth, as any reader of my recent posts will attest. As a student of Russian History who made my first visit to Leningrad in 1969 at the age of 22, I have always been aware of how the Soviet State bent “truth” to suit its needs. From big lies, like portraying their one-party, top-down, controlled elections as “democracy”, to the small lie that prices in their economy had anything to do with real costs or demand—all were fabrications to help...
I wrote the original version of the following story almost twenty years ago, as the second chapter in an anthology of short stories, Ten Lies and Ten Truths. I have rewritten parts of the story this week, to capture the new realities of History 2021 A Story Harrison Gillies sat alone in the teacher's lounge of a prestigious New England private high school grading English essays. Paintings donated by the Art Department, an oriental rug, and a couple of decades' accumulation of furniture lifted...
One of my favorite sayings about Truth is: “Truth is simple, and delights in simple statements. It expects to make its way by its own intrinsic force, and is willing to pass for what it is worth. Error is noisy and declamatory, and hopes to succeed by substituting sound for sense, and by such tones and arts as shall induce men to believe that what is said is true, when it is known by the speaker to be false.” Albert Barnes‘ New Testament Notes Pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia...
As most of you know, I’m a Conservative-Libertarian Christian who happens to live in the current national-focus state of Georgia. I dislike the way the Democratic Party, the Progressive Elite, The FBI/DOJ, and the Main Stream Media (MSM) hounded President Trump from before his 2016 election all the way through his Presidency and finally into these elections. It was despicable behavior, and I hope that we get to the bottom of it through Senate hearings and internal DOJ investigations. We must...
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