There was a gang shooting a couple blocks from our home in Steubenville the other night. [We live near the border of a pretty hardscrabble Rust Belt area here. Let’s just say it isn’t Mar-a-Lago.] A teenage boy was killed … Continue reading →
I am painting a new third floor addition to a house just up the street. A young couple has added this rather large addition for the wife’s parents when they visit — with their nine adopted children! The daughter told … Continue reading →
In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book The Bully Pulpit, she notes that one of Theodore Roosevelt’s biggest challenges was confronting the “malignancy” of big money in politics. In a scathing NY Times editorial about this at the time, the paper suggested that … Continue reading →
With the heightened focus on Russia of late, I picked up an old book in the Bluffton University Library titled: The Soviet Cultural Offensive. Author Frederick Barghoorn writes that when your average Russian citizen is asked a political question: “Feigned … Continue reading →
With Betsy DeVos now in as Education Secretary, all eyes are on charter schools. (Or at least most eyes.) With Curtis Bowers, however, not so much. Mr. Bowers is a former principal of a high school in Clarkston, Washington. During … Continue reading →
Some notes from my research the past few weeks: China has recently allocated some $360 billion dollars for the development of more green energy. Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt — who apparently has close ties to the fossil fuels industry — has … Continue reading →
President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday. Trump, obviously, is not the first president to try and tackle the Israeli/Palestinian issue. In the book: Off the Record (The Private papers of Harry S. Truman), I was reading … Continue reading →
I recently went to a talk at Franciscan University by a priest who had done missions work in Siberia for 20 years. He said sound spirituality is putting the other person’s needs before your own. That would seem to fly … Continue reading →
I interviewed a financial planner in Findlay, Ohio, for an article for my wife’s magazines. During the interview, we talked about the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, contemporary issues affecting both the stock and bond markets, and several dynamics around international … Continue reading →
The book Cambodia (A Shattered Society) notes that under the Khmer Rouge regime, there were “mobile brigades” of youth, and adults, who worked exhaustively each day in the fields of agriculture, industry and fishing. What’s more, they were rationed merely … Continue reading →