by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. “Moral virtue belongs to all of them; but the temperance of a woman and that of a man are not the same, nor their courage and justice, as Socrates thought.” (Aristotle, Politics, 1260a 21-2) Decades ago, when I was an undergrad and the world was different, what with society being more attentive to one sex over the other, many students set aside a day to skip classes and protest the Viet…

TO ENSURE THAT YOU GET a copy of the winter journal, please click here. An individual membership is $50 and a corporate membership is $120. The Eco-Devo Promises: Let’s Unwrap Them Unelected redevelopment commissions should not have the power to take away money from other parts of government for a Tax Increment Financing project, especially ones that never come to reality like the charades in my city. “It’s a Ponzi scheme” our county auditor said of the way TIF is used. One project would…

by Leo Morris I think there are two Americas. But the two I see are not the two a lot of people seem to be obsessing about these days. I experience one America through the fevered rantings of politicians and their media co-conspirators, and it seems so vivid I sometimes forget it is the fake one. I live in the other one, the real America, and sometimes I forget that, too. I recently put an…

by Leo Morris My reading habits have taken a strange turn lately, but it’s not really my fault. My Kindle has been bossing me around. It started when I discovered and downloaded a mystery novel about a small- college librarian named Charlie who solves murders when not walking his Maine Coon cat around town on a leash. Then there was a whole series of books about Charlie and his cat. The Kindle algorithm, armed with…

Eric Schansberg November 11th (11/11) at 11:00 a.m. is the 100th anniversary of the armistice with Germany that ended World War I. At the time, it was considered “the war to end all wars.. It was soon replaced in the public imagination by an even larger war. Still, World War I was important both for what happened in the war and what came from it. Like most people, I know little about it. But I have…

Listening to the acceptance speeches after a harrowing midterm election, was it clear what the winners thought had been won? Some seemed to have counted the votes in their heads and concluded that the number represented fellow citizens who had astutely assessed character, intelligence and experience and had chosen him or her specifically to be their “leader,” whatever they imagine that to mean in a democracy-driven constitutional republic. The political economist Jude Wanniski deflated such…

by Mark Franke I’m not a veteran, and therein lies a story. I was in college during the height of the Vietnam War and all the protests that were de rigueur on college campuses in those days. I was getting sick of going to school and since I was a a card-carrying member of Young Americans for Freedom, I decided it was my duty to do something more constructive than just debating left-wingers in the…

by Leo Morris This is a quiet, unassuming little state, isn’t it? While scandals from Washington bubble and froth in the social media septic tank, accusations of sexual malpractice against two of the most powerful Indiana GOP politicians drip like slow leaks too inconsequential to bother with. We can only conclude that our journalists are too lazy to go out and dig up the juicy rumors with which to flesh out the tantalizing innuendos or…

by Mark Franke One of the strengths of American representative democracy is the requirement in most states for the voters to approve amendments to their state constitutions. This election cycle alone can boast of 37 states with 167 amendments and other initiatives, those in Florida and North Carolina getting the most press coverage and producing the most political fireworks. A lot of money is being spent for and against these initiatives, with California (of course…

by Leo Morris We’ve all heard that if we can’t remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it. But the truth is that even when we remember it, we repeat it anyway. We can’t help ourselves. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a 1930 letter: “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another — it’s one damn thing over and over.” Like many other weary voters, I can’t wait for…