One of my friends read “Should We Talk About Secession,” an article just posted on the ‘net. He’s from the wild and wooly Montana-Idaho-Wyoming school of thought and commented, “I’ve been talking about it for two years.” Woohoo...some of us have been talking about it since 1840. I haven’t read the piece ...read more

I staked out my position on the Doom & Gloom side back in 1992 when I was shocked by the problem I discuss first. What should you be concerned about? Start with the basics: what do you think you might have to survive? No point in making plans if you ...read more

The other night, as I sat in my living room watching the local news I saw a story that really made me shake my head. The news reported that officials in Howard County, Maryland, had banned people under the age of 18 from using tanning beds. Huh. Why? It’s because health officials ...read more

If this isn’t a BO-HICA moment, I don’t know what is. (Bend-over; here it comes again). Friday, October 30, nine (9!) banks failed and were taken-over by the FDIC. That brought the total bank failures to 115 so far in 2009. This number of failures hasn’t been exceeded since 1992 AND ...read more

With this article I wrap up my review of Lemay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay by Warren Kozak. "Cometh the hour, cometh the man," I've said many times during this narrative of the life and wars of General Curtis Lemay (1906-1990). And when the hour has passed? Well, ...read more

I went to a park the other day where a ranger was “on patrol”. I saw a sign that said, “Please do not feed the animals.” I thought it strange. Why, I wondered, should we allow the animals to go hungry when we have a tremendous abundance of food with ...read more

Detroit must be feeling like a streetwalker far past her prime. Some 9,000 homes and lots went up for tax foreclosure auction in the American symbol of industrial urban failure…yet 80% of them remain unsold despite a minimum bid of $500. How the world turns. Once Detroit was a dynamic city, the urban ...read more

Agora Financial's Founding Father Bill Bonner, writing in his Daily Reckoning, says there are approximately 131 M jobs in the USA. Justice Little, Editor of Taipan Daily, also out of the AF stable, says that 26 M jobs have been lost. The Federal Government says that the unemployment rate is 9.8%.  Traditional ...read more

From what deep wells of events flow the rivers of our time? By what path did the muse of history arrive here, at our front door? Where are the roots, for example, of monetary inflation? What pushed the U.S. into its modern de-industrialization? Along what road did the world travel ...read more

Reading Linda Brady Traynham's article about education and the state of our current primary and secondary institutions struck a nerve with me, particularly the following phrase: "Colleges have forgotten that their primary tasks are to give students a framework to organize and correlate data on, and to teach them how to ...read more