Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
No one is quite sure of the motivation for Trump’s preemptive attack on India. Was he punishing India for unfair trade practices, India’s purchases of Russian oil, or for some other reason? The tariff on India’s products was 25% and it was raised to 50% effective August 27, 2025. The net effect of Trump’s “get…
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…
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…
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…
I have visited the Rust Belt many times. I drove through Youngstown, Ohio, in 1970 and 2005. I have seen whole neighborhoods bulldozed. The same thing happened in Michigan and other Rust Belt states. I understand the pain and the loss. So, what happened? America still produces lots of mechanical and industrial engineers. We still…
Beliefs about Artificial Intelligence How does everyone feel about artificial intelligence (AI)? AI has been around since the mid-1950s. I asked my tech guru in the 1970s to define AI, and he responded, “It’s using a computer to do things we haven’t done before.” In the beginning, one of the goals of AI was to…
The Ultimate Fighting Championship will host an event on the White House lawn on July 4, 2026, to honor the sacrifices of founding fathers like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Madison. The fights will be conducted inside an octagon-shaped metal chain-link fence. The cage will be about thirty feet in diameter and…