Blithering On

So, I guess I just haven't been keeping up. I saw a movie the other evening for the first time in my life. I hadn't even heard of it, but I was sort of eavesdropping on the Turner Classic Movies station as the host - I think it was Robert Osborne - introduced the next feature saying that it was his favorite movie of all time. That got my interest up, so I paid some attention. The movie was A Place in the Sun and I checked the description of the movie to see if it had a chance of being interesting to me, and it did. I don’t want to ruin the movie for you, but the thing’s been out since 1951 so it’s not like you haven’t had a chance to see it already… Anyway, Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman who is an uneducated directionless young guy who hitchhikes to his Uncle Charles’ place. Uncle Charles owns a swim suit factory (that turns out to be ironic) and puts George to work. The company has a “don’t date the other employees” policy, but George ends up secretly making tim...

Only 400 years ago, Galileo turned the religious and scientific worlds on their heads when he publicly asserted the heliocentric theory—the idea that the Sun was at the center of the universe—as a scientific certainty. Up to that point, the generally accepted view was that the Earth was at the center of the universe. The Church held that God would not have positioned His most important creation anywhere other than at the center of everything else He created. The Church’s frame of reference included a group of Biblical passages that seemed to lend weight to geocentrism. Joshua 10:12 recounts Joshua commanding the Sun to stand still (thus reinforcing the belief that the Sun moved). Then there are Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30—“…the world is firmly established; it cannot be moved”; Psalm 104:5—“…the Lord set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved”; and Ecclesiastes 1:5—“…the Sun rises and the Sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” Until Galileo—and c...

"History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done."  —Sydney J. Harris Inflation, the U.S. dollar’s volatility, unemployment, and an increase in the U.S. money supply... In spite of the concerns we have when we watch the morning news, we Americans tend to believe that our long-term outlook is good because, as we interpret our relatively brief history, we're Americans and we always come out on top. But the history of the world has many examples of great empires and nations whose leaders felt the same way, but turned out to be wrong. We can look, for instance, to the Roman Empire which enjoyed 200 years of prosperity until it collapsed over the course of the next 300 years.  But the machinery of the collapse didn’t begin during the final 300 years of the Empire. It started long before with sometimes short-sighted economic and monetary policies and practices. Then, incrementally, th eir excesses, the border in...

Hurry Up and Wait... I grew up in a small community in southern Illinois–Newton, Illinois–where people generally knew each other or at least knew   of   each other. It was–and still is–a nice town. It’s the kind of town that still holds a fall parade where tractors and marching bands own the streets. People sit along the curb in their chairs while the kids play along the street. The people there cherish the tempo and lifestyle, quietly aware that if everyone lived that way, it would be a much better world. I wasn’t exactly setting any academic records in high school, so I needed a change of pace and some way to transition to a successful track somewhere, somehow. I had thought about the military, but I hesitated to follow through. I wasn’t sure I would be cut out for the military life, and I didn’t know which branch of the service to enter. I was very certain that if I did join the military service, it wouldn’t be the Marines because I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it there....