Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
Make America Like Yesterday (MALY) This article focuses on the MAGA-led march into a potential economic disaster. Ignore Trump’s tariffs, immigration, and deficit spending. A longer-term danger lies in how America acquires and distributes energy. Over the last year or so, I’ve read several articles about the energy policies in various countries. As much as…
Cookies can represent and fulfill many functions. Among them are to make people happy and to be used in hypothetical exercises. The President’s wife wrote Putin a letter about the children stolen during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so we can imagine that a few Russian soldiers have compassion for these Ukrainian orphans. Cookies can…
The stationing of military troops in Blue States to “fight crime” is a questionable practice. The Trump Administration has proposed sending military forces to Illinois. However, the violent crime rate in Louisiana, the state of the Speaker of the House, is 628 crimes per 100,000, while in Illinois, it is 287. Wouldn’t military forces be…
American culture has a blind spot or a fatal flaw in its response to unproductive, sensational, or cancerous behavior. Today, many Americans celebrate and implicitly support people who act stupidly, immorally, and even criminally. They gravitate towards celebrities who promote chaos and away from those who are boringly competent. Our social media algorithms are aware…
This is another confirmation that the Trump regime is marching the USA toward a Chinese-style form of state capitalism. Trump’s economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, confirmed the possibility that the federal government was beginning to act like a sovereign wealth fund that interjects political leaders into corporate financing and decision-making. Hassett deflected the slippery slope fear…
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024. His book describes what he calls the transition from the “play-based” childhood to the “phone-based” childhood. He discusses the reengineering of the brains of America’s children by Silicon Valley’s social media. He asserts that the dopamine-reward systems of social…
Sociologists and anthropologists call it cultural lag. As a rule of thumb, it takes 20 years for a new technology or transformative policy to be embraced by a society. Some early adopters embrace the change almost immediately. For some strange reason, the early adopters are younger than the older laggards. Americans are facing so many…
Artificial Intelligence is the new gold rush in the world economy. Investors and governments are salivating and promising all sorts of benefits and riches coming from AI. AI is a significant technology, but before we become intoxicated by all the hype, let’s take a breath and think about our collective actions. Virtually everyone will be…
Mike Johnson, the smooth-talking Congressman from Louisiana, is our nation’s 56th Speaker of the House. He entered Congress on January 3, 2017. Before then, he served in the Louisiana legislature and worked for a conservative Christian group called the Alliance Defending Freedom. The four most vulnerable states due to the Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act,…
President Trump recently called in the cavalry to rescue Washington, DC. A member of his DOGE squad (aka, Big Balls…that’s what Trump calls him) was mugged, and Trump had an excuse to call in the National Guard to make Washington safe again. He claimed he has a mandate to reduce the violent crimes in this…