[March 19, 2020] For my birthday in 2001, my dad sent me a new book by Tom Brokaw titled, The Greatest Generation. It covered many of the extraordinary stories of a generation that gave new meaning to courage, sacrifice, and honor during WW2. This generation gave so much and asked so little. Today, our young men and women,… Read More »
[March 18, 2020] For those not living off the grid (by definition you are not reading this), you’ve been following the up-and-coming great isolation. The infectious and deadly Coronavirus – origins in China – has been spreading like wildfire on dry canyon grass, causing us to isolate ourselves from one another. At least that is what medical experts… Read More »
[March 17, 2020] Looking through the “free new movies” section of Netflix last night, I ran upon the movie All Hands on Deck (1961) starring Pat Boone, Buddy Hackett, et al. Decades ago, when it first came out, my dad gathered up our entire family to see it at a drive-in on a hot and humid evening in… Read More »
[March 14, 2020] I’m a little late to the party with this post. Several of my readers have pointed out that I have not written a comment on avoiding the Coronavirus. I would not want to disappoint. Besides, government public health officials have been full of advice about how we can minimize the risk of catching the virus. … Read More »
[March 13, 2020] One thing the U.S. Army Infantry School taught me back in 1983 was that you had better be aware of your operational environment. This requirement meant that each of us Second Lieutenants had to understand and deliberately plan for the conditions, circumstances, and influences that will affect our military unit’s mission. In this article, I… Read More »
[March 10, 2020] It has said that leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. But some ideas work and some don’t work. There is a long-standing controversy about whether the views of Robert Owen, one of the founders of Socialism, actually work. Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer and social reformer,… Read More »
[March 9, 2020] Lessons from the past are frequently overlooked or consciously discarded for a variety of valid-sounding reasons. The Spanish Flu of 1918, however, can give us some clues on how to survive the Coronavirus (COVID-19). While I am about to layout those very lessons, one of them stands out above all the others. The first lesson… Read More »
[March 8, 2020] The Company Commander at my first unit in the U.S. Army was a jerk. The story is common; the world revolved around him, he was smarter, more reliable, better looking than the rest of us (at least he thought so), and he was “going places” in the Army. When the boss is a jerk, our… Read More »
[March 6, 2020] With the U.S. Presidential election scheduled for later this year, many of our politicians are doing their best to prepare themselves to get votes. Everything tends be politicized, and so the spread of the Coronavirus has become a topic of volatile political partisanship. World leaders have jumped into the political fray faster than a one-legged… Read More »
[March 5, 2020] Much has been written about the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world. Coming on the heels of a concerted effort throughout the world to expand the reach of Communist ideology, some may have thought this fall not possible. Cuba is one country that adopted it when Fidel Castro took… Read More »