The Soul of America: Book Review
Jon Meacham: The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018). Meacham reviews American history for periods where "the...
War on Peace: Book Review
War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Ronan Farrow (2018), focusing on the collapse of diplomacy in...
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers: A Book Review
Secrets is Daniel Ellsberg's account of a cold warrior's slow metamorphosis to dissident, then releasing the Pentagon Papers to the media...
Fascism: A Warning (Book Review)
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fled Czechoslovakia twice, when Hitler was effectively given the country in 1938 and when it...
Con Men
The best con men don't know they're con men. Michael Lewis Lewis made this observation on a BBC interview when he was talking about his...
Directorate S
I recently finished Steve Coll's Directorate S: The CIA and Americas's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, how the attack on...
General Electric and Big Capitalism
GE dropped below 15 bucks a share and I bought some. This is a broken company, but now sells for a fraction of what it did in earlier...
Pharma Bro Gets Slammer Time
Martin Shkreli (aka, Pharma Bro, smirking boy sleaze bag, a poster child for greed according to Bernie Sanders), a former hedge fund...
Hacksaw Bob Capitalism
Stakeholder capitalism proponent Robert Reich assumed the role of Hacksaw Bob (presumably a shout out to "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap of Sunbeam...
Capitalism and Donald Trump
Capitalism has been extraordinarily successful. Combined with the Industrial Revolution and wealth has exploded (granted, over hundreds...
Behavioral Economics/Psychology and the Election of Donald Trump
The election of Trump was unexpected for most of us, until it happened--then dozens of explanations emerged. Following up on his The...
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff
Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff made all the news shows (plus late night) as required political reading. I downloaded a sample and...
The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds: Book Review
Another Michael Lewis bestseller, The Undoing Project, is about the collaboration of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos...
Dark Charisma 2: More Bad Guys
Hitler is the obvious example and the topic of the fist Dark Charisma post. But other examples are seemingly everywhere, including...
Fairness/Justice
The concept of justice has multiple meanings, which can be in conflict. Alternative perspectives run from the ancient world to today,...