Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
The Chinese are proud of this: The national flag of the People's Republic of China (PRC) will be hoisted at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 20, media reported Sunday. Chinese associations in the United States had applied to hold a ceremony in front of the US President’s residence to …
Continue reading "Hoisting China’s Flag Over the White House: Hard to Avoid"
The town of Palm Beach is millimetring towards a facelift on what it, IMHO, this country's premier shopping street: Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. This is what it looks like now, looking towards the intersection of Worth Avenue and County Road. This is the graphic rendition of what is to come, with the widened "faux …
Continue reading "A New Look For Worth Avenue–And Some Reflections"
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 …
Positive Infinity 