The budget pamphlet in my mailbox was titled “Financial Realities.”  I laughed.  As a person once responsible for a  $200 million budget, I know financial realities are imaginary.  Budgets are guestimates of the future based on the unlikely assumption that history will repeat

To read the news is to wonder if the world has gone mad. Autocracy is on the rise, while democracies seem to be stumbling. To be honest, some democracies no longer look like democracies. India and Turkey come to mind.  Russia holds elections, but no one would describe Vladimir Putin

To talk about fashion while the Russian invasion of Ukraine rages may seem insensitive, but I have a reason for doing so. As a prognosticator of the future, fashion beats astrology.  For example, one persistent theory in the stock market says that when dress hemlines go up, the econo

Even in a time of war, there can be moments of laughter. Late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert had a field day with a report about a Ukrainian grandmother who knocked down a Russian drone from her apartment balcony with a jar of tomatoes.  Equally low tech but less funny was a re

As I trawl the internet in search of information for this blog, I recently came across Thomas Friedman’s question in his New York Times column. (11-10-21). If people won’t wear masks during a pandemic, how will they endure the discomforts attendant with fighting climate c

This New Year, the world stage leaves us with so much worry, there’s little incentive to get out of bed each morning. Adding to the malaise is a fresh, looming disaster. Not long ago, I mentioned that good topsoil around the globe is eroding at the rate of 1% a year. Without it, we

In the opening scene of the film, The Graduate, the operative word was “plastics.”  Today, Dustin Hoffman is all grown up, though that scene remains a movie classic.  For billionaire Jeremy Grantham the new word for this era is “topsoil.”  Necessary to feed a burgeoning glo

  September 11  is a day when our nation remembers one of the worst foreign attacks on its soil, a day that ushered in a never-ending war against terrorism.  But there are other ways to threaten our democracy besides bombing our structures.  In fact, one political threat goes

Having strong objections to the notion that human activities are influencing climate change doesn’t alter the facts.  A recent review of scientific opinion on the subject reveals that people need to limit their contribution to global warming by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. (“Climate C

Milk is not good for us. Meat is not good for us. Cigarettes are not good for us. Sugar is not good for us. Still, like a huge ship in a storm tossed sea, getting human nature to change its course, isn’t easy. In evolution, it may take thousands of years. The question is, do we huma