Much has happened in the last 24 hours regarding the Coronavirus (Covid-19) which is expanding throughout the United States and Europe. Here’s what we know. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.), a specialized agency of the United Nations concerned with public health throughout the world, declared the Coronavirus a pandemic, a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region. In...

“No amount of money is worth having to sing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ like you mean it, night after night, after night, after night….” – Robert Plant, co-author, Stairway to Heaven, on refusing to reunite with rock band Led Zeppelin for a world tour. While the lyrics (largely obscure) are magical and mystical, (especially if you’re having an enhanced reality experience),...

Why can’t politicians just admit when their wrong? One answer is that such an admission is perceived as a sign of weakness that the other side will exploit. Growing up in Catholic schools on the east coast, the brothers were tough, but the nuns were tougher. If you even whispered the wrong thing, the penalty was immediate. It’s sad to...

Two points about leadership. Leadership is not a CEO, Admiral, Manager, Pope or President. Those are titles, not leadership. The second point, rather points, come from General Hal Moore: “We need leaders of principle, courage, character, wisdom, and discipline; and yet we seem trapped by a system of choosing our presidents that pushes those who possess those traits aside in...

Seventy former U.S. senators – Democrats and Republicans – wrote an open letter to their current colleagues in the Senate about the abdication of their Constitutional duties. Background – As reported by The Hill (Dec. 2019), “This is the pile of House-passed bills, 90% bipartisan, dead on [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s desk in the Senate #LegislativeGraveyard,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse...

Under a cloud of simmering fear, Senator Joseph McCarthy, absent any real evidence, announced to the American public that communists were working inside the federal government. During 1954’s Senate hearings investigating the Wisconsin Senator’s blatant character assassinations, one exchange was particularly noteworthy. Following McCarthy’s accusation that counsel for the committee, Joseph Welch, placed a member and communist from his own...

Bernie Madoff conned friends and strangers out of billions using a scheme that out-Ponzied Charles Ponzi, the now former emperor of elite schemers. However, after serving almost 11 years of a 150-year sentence, Madoff is now asking for an early release from prison due to a terminal illness. In 1998, “Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 criminal counts… At the time...

In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann “…argued that modern mass communication created ‘pseudo-environments’ that thwarted the ability of the average citizen to make political judgments based on facts.” To say Lippmann was ahead of his time is a master understatement, but even the keenly perceptive Lippmann could never have foreseen a tweetaholic in the...

Last Thursday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down her sentence to President Trump’s long time friend and campaign associate, Roger Stone. However, before that sentence was read, Stone, his defense team and Justice prosecutors listened to words not only directed to those in the courtroom, but the American people… ALL Americans. Key passages are worth repeating. ”The defendant isn’t public...

With the 75th Anniversary of “the liberation of Auschwitz [on January 27, the occasion was] marked by events around the world, culminating in a solemn ceremony at the former death camp [that included] dozens of aging Holocaust survivors,” The New York Times reports (Jan. 25). “Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is worried. “ ‘More and more...