Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
I was surprised to discover a Northern Rebel from my mother’s family. Almost all of my mother’s family either refused to fight in the Civil War or fought on the Union side. However, one Confederate soldier departed from the Showalter fold. Despite arriving in America as Mennonites in 1750, one of the descendants of the…
This man reported for duty as a US Navy recruit in 1944. When the officer asked his name, he thought he was joking. He told the officer that his name was William Patrick Hitler. William was Adolph Hitler’s half-nephew. William attempted to ingratiate himself with his famous uncle, but that failed. He later immigrated to…
Note: This post was written in September 2024. As the political divide and divergent versions of reality in American politics have increased, I became increasingly curious. What was the cause? As someone who studied social psychology, psychology, and sociology, I thought there was more to it than simple explanations such as red state vs. blue…
Warren Buffett is an old-school, Middle American kind of guy. Many young people regard him as a fossil despite his obvious financial success. One current replacement for Buffett’s obsolete approach seems to be to invest in Bitcoin. Here is what Buffett says about Bitcoin: Over the past decade, it’s been clear that the crypto craze…
A quote from a Texas medical doctor: The doctor did not mince words. “When nobody wants to train in Texas, as the physicians get older and retire, there will be no ob-gyns in the state,” she told me. “And that’s when you’ll really see maternal mortality go up.” At the time, I was reporting on…
This post was written on December 6, 2024 Why is our Country in Chaos? Long before the 2024 election, I wondered why the American psyche was experiencing a dumpster fire. Friends and relatives stopped talking to each other. Some Americans seemed so foreign to me that I thought either they or I had entered an…
This article is about the relationships between children and their parents. Human parents typically spend years raising their offspring, unlike shark parents, who do not care for their young after birth. Sharks have different procreation and parenting practices. Male sharks impregnate females quite aggressively, and the females have the scars to prove it as the…
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were among PayPal’s founders who injected their DNA into the company’s operating procedures. Many of us may have used PayPal while doing business with eBay or other companies that have PayPal as an option. I used PayPal once to buy a used golf driver on eBay. I used them only…
I told many of my friends and relatives about a new AI research tool called Perplexity. It does not get the press or billionaire coverage of the more famous AIs such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, Boomi, OpenAI, or China’s Deep Seek. However, I have been using it and just got word that a new version is…
I noticed that Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, was becoming popular, so I decided to ask it a “softball” question and compare its responses with those of other AIs. Having studied my distant cousin’s genealogy, I knew the answer to the “softball” question, “Which member of Elon Musk’s family was Elon named after?” You would assume…