Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
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…
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,…
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…
This is another iteration in the use of short videos to address or comment on the craziness of our times. Please let me know if you enjoy these videos and if you prefer videos over longer posts with more detailed analysis and discussion.
The translation of the news flash in Spanish is “Dictatorships Do Not Function.” For anyone who believes that authoritarian regimes are good for anyone but the dictator and his family, there is a perfect example to bet against authoritarians. The BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and South Korea’s intelligence service—consistently cite an initial North Korean deployment…
Many of us, either continually or occasionally, regard the “strange” actions of others as being stupid, evil, or uninformed. There is no need to provide examples of “strange” actions since America is now so fractured that it would be harder to find examples of shared “solid” understandings. In light of the chaos in the public…
NOTE: I took the day off today. This blog post was generated almost entirely using artificial intelligence. Any errors, omissions, or political slights are not my fault. However, the AI included footnotes, which is more than I ever do. I used evato.com to generate the images. The landscape of U.S. immigration enforcement is undergoing a…
If a rabbit does not see, hear, smell, or feel a bobcat coming, the rabbit will be the bobcat’s next meal. I have no perception of the microbiome of subterranean ecosystems. Likewise, I am unfamiliar with the current pop song “Born to Die” by Lana Del Rey. These two facts do not mean that I…