Civil Horizon
Free Thoughts, Adequately Expressed

Last night while the Beloved Spouse was off at a holiday-themed meeting of her book club, I was glued to the Sky News coverage of the British election. As you are no doubt aware, the Conservative party won big – bigger than it had since Thatcher’s day. That result was clear from the moment that polls closed – 5:00 PM our time – though, so it wasn’t curiosity about who won that held my attention. Rather, I was fascinated by the emergence in the constituency-by-constituency results of two facts that seem highly relevant to our own politics.

The first of these relates to a profound change in traditional party loyalties. Regions that had been the heart of Labour’s support – old mining and industrial towns – went for the Tories, many for the first time since the 1930s or before...

In a banner headline to what is nominally a news column on the front page of this morning’s New York Times, the paper falsely asserts that “REPORT DEBUNKS ANTI-TRUMP PLOT IN RUSSIA INQUIRY.”

The Horowitz report does no such thing. The Inspector General’s conclusion that he “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence” for such a plot is not even close to being proof that it didn’t happen.

The Inspector General was in no position to disprove the possibility that senior Obama-era officials at the FBI and other ‘intelligence’ agencies conspired to kick-start an investigation into the Trump campaign, then Administration, based on illegal political and/or self-serving motivations – he lacked the authority to conduct a wide-ranging investigation, to subpoena witnesses, to com...

Dear Readers:

This extended post is a compilation of stories about business the great majority of which were originally written as separate posts between November 25, 2018 and January 2, 2019. I have reordered those posts chronologically to make the meta story easier to follow. These stories focus almost exclusively on my business life, with few references to my other interests; even so, they tell the story of a very personal journey.

The big picture: I was employed by what was then one of the largest US banks from 1980-1990, then by a British merchant bank until mid-1993, at which time I left to co-found a tiny investment banking firm. In 1998 I sold my interest in that business and became the junior partner to a man to whom I had been the financial adviser since the mid-eighties...

The Idea – 1/11/16

Three months from today, I am going to set out from Los Angeles by bicycle, hoping to ride to Old Lyme, CT. I have dreamed of doing this for thirty years; it’s now or never.

Over the next three months, I’ll give a lot of thought to the logistics, and try to get fit enough so that I’ll make it.

Just now, though, I have to tell the Beloved Spouse about the plan. I’m not sure she’ll be thrilled.

Day Zero – 4/10/16

This is the first in a series of daily posts that I intend to write over the next six or seven weeks about the attempt I am about to make at riding my bicycle across the country.

I sent three bikes – my two beautiful new steel Mariposas, pictured below at home just after their arrival a month ago, and my much older carbon fiber Parlee – on ahead to Los Angeles w...