Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
I spent the summer of 1973 doing two things: listening to the Watergate hearings while draughting for my family business, and listening to Jethro Tull's new, controversial, "concept" album, A Passion Play. The combination of the two doubtless contributed to the malaise that overshadowed me as I started college (Watergate itself was something of a …
The left is so predictable about things like this. From the Washington Post: At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working …
Continue reading "Bob McDonnell: The Predictable Media Assault Begins"
Orignally posted 13 July 2005. The recent bombings in London bring back a lot of memories of all the trips I have taken to this great city. London's underground and rail transport system are always a source of fascination. One reason is that people spend a lot of time in the Tube and on the …
Took him long enough to figure it out: In August our ubiquitous president became the nation's elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that …
Continue reading "Now George Will Knows the Barack Obama is “an Ivy League Huey Long”"
Originally posted July 2005. Since that time we've had a war in Gaza, so my optimism about relinquishing that may have been premature. But the whole system of settlements and how the State of Israel administers the West Bank continues to be a source of difficulty in its own right. Back in the late 1970's, …
Continue reading "If You’re Going to Take the Land, Take It"
One of the most complicated transactions I have ever been involved in was the purchase of the rights for a Russian concrete pile cutter (shown at left.) The patent had around a dozen inventors and two research institutes, spread out from Moscow to Vladivostok. The sheer logistics of getting everyone to agree to this, to …
Working for a church which is undergoing budgetary contraction, I cannot be triumphalistic about this, even though the agenda is frequently distasteful: Recently, the church's Office of Government Relations (OGR) announced that Washington, D.C.-based Episcopal lobbyist Maureen Shea will retire at the end of the month. Similarly, New York-based Director of Advocacy Rev. Canon Brian …
Continue reading "The Episcopal Church Cuts Their Budget, Too. Well, Most of It."
In early 1994 I went to Russia for the purpose of visiting a factory in Bryansk, which is located at the meeting point of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. This was not a factory producing high tech military hardware, but something more prosaic but important for our modern world: diesel pile driving equipment, used in the …
Steven Malanga is certainly right about this change in our culture: The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as …
Outpouring (Community Of The Cross) 1979 When I was first introduced to "Jesus Music" in the 1970's, one of the first frustrations I encountered is that too much of it sounded alike. (The fact that some of it had a C&W sound didn't help either!) It took some time but I found that there was …
Positive Infinity 