Benjamin’s Franklin’s contributions to his times, and our country, are too numerous to restate. His greatest gift, however, may have been his philosophical approach to living a ‘useful’ life right until the very end. And while the self-help movement of our day has its own exemplars, going back and revisiting his 13 virtues and …
Our guest, Peter Schwartzstein, is a journalist on the climate security beat. He’s immersed himself in some of the hot spots of the world, like Syria, for years during its civil war to unpack the story of how global warming is adding to, if not a key precipitant of, conflicts in many parts of the …
How polarized are we, really? While the extremes in both ideological camps may be smaller in numbers than mainstream opinions their effect on our political dialogue and the conveyor belt of lies and distortions on social media amplify and accelerate those differences. Thus, it feels like we are in a pitched battle for the soul …
Longtime Defense researcher Luis Elizondo has become associated with reporting on the existence of UFOs(unidentified flying objects), now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena(UAPs). He made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a Pentagon program investigating these objects in the sky and alerted the public to the fact that the …
What kind of question is that, you may ask? We’ve always had grades. How would we evaluate performance without them? Is this just another ‘woke’ idea, like participation trophies for playing the game? How will they learn to compete in this dog eat dog world awaiting our students? Joshua Eyler, director of the Center for …
While the rankings for U.S. News & World Report seem to get most of the attention, perhaps there’s another lens we should put on the ranking process. Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly, once worked there and sensed that there is a better scoring system to reflect the needs of more students across the country, …
Listening to this podcast, you can discern that I am not a fan of Donald Trump. His approach to ethics, decency, business practices and bruising politics is an anathema to me. So, to the extent that I can keep up with his subterfuge, I attempt to do so. I’ll admit that it is a …
Why do politicians lie so often? There must be a reason for it. And why do we not demand better of them and ask the media to do a better job of holding them to account? One could argue that, really, the incentive structure in politics rewards those who lie and the penalties are too …
Many presidents have attempted to influence the actions of the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI for political means. I am old enough to remember the Saturday Night Massacre, as it was called, in Richard Nixon’s presidency during the Watergate scandal. And the FBI had its own political agenda on the remarkably long, and dubious, …
Usually we define vigilantes as the barbarians at the gate who want to disrupt the order of things. What if the state itself becomes that disruptor bringing the chaos not protecting us from it? Two law professors, Jon Michaels, of UCLA, and David Noll, of Rutgers University, make a compelling case in “Vigilante Nation: How …