Our thoughts and prayers are with the Gard family tonight, as they mourn the loss of their baby boy.  We sorrow alongside of them. The Gard family’s grief compels us to ask a difficult question that lies at the heart of recent debates over healthcare in America.  Who should determine and provide healthcare needs for […]

Dick Armey, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives during the 90s, used to say something to the effect of “Republicans are always afraid you won’t understand the issue; Democrats are always afraid you will”  Democrats seemingly could care less about reams of data, but live and die by the anecdote–they just need […]

How has US culture become so coarse, so quickly? I subscribe to an email list from the White House “1600 Daily”. I periodically receive news alerts and “what is going on” messages from the Administration. At 9:01 am eastern on 7/20/17 I received an email that said: Yesterday, I met with Republican Senators at the White House […]

And it must be compulsory, through taxation, as government is “what we do together.”  So this past week we saw Seattle pass an income tax (which may be unconstitutional), amid the cry of its citizens to be allowed to pay their fair share. …backers of the measure rallied supporters, including software developer Carissa Knipe, who […]

Along with Utah Senator Mike Lee, the Republican Senator from Kansas, Jerry Moran, said Monday he would be unable to support the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017. The Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 is the Senate’s attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. As I write this post there are reports that Republicans […]

I realized only this week that last year was the centennial of the birth of Jane Jacobs, who was born in 1916 and died in 2006.  Now some or all of my readers might not recognize the name, but among city planners, architectural scholars, urban historians, urban economists and political scientists of an urban bent, […]

Baby Driver, written and directed by Edgar Wright, is a cinematic marvel. Though ostensibly a heist film from the wheel man’s perspective, it is really a soundtrack with a movie layered on top. Gunshots punctuate the percussion. Disembarkations are done in musical time as precisely as a ballerina’s twirl. Music is not a background element, […]

I don’t pretend to know what is going on in the Russia/Trump imbroglio, but we ought to have a bit of discussion on this, since its all the media will cover in the headlines.  First, I will say that I think there is a lot of room for Christians to disagree on the seriousness of the […]

The Pew Research Center has released a study that shows Americans, especially more conservative Americans, are realizing that colleges and universities are, as the study states the most common answer, “have a negative effect on the country.” (see http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/)  While overall 55% of respondents still believe institutions are higher education are valuable, the percentage has […]

Henry Hazlitt said: The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists of tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. The drumbeat gets louder daily about Amazon crushing retailers, and it is […]