Civil Horizon
Free Thoughts, Adequately Expressed

Apparently, it isn’t true that federal agencies are able to terminate any or all of their presently furloughed nonessential employees because they have been out for thirty days – they can only do that in the case of administratively planned furloughs, not as a result of “emergency furloughs” based – as at present – on lapses in Congressionally-approved funding. Even so, the Administration could use its ability to engage in such administratively-planned-furloughs-leading to-terminations to dramatically turn up the heat on House Democrats to fund the president’s plans for a wall.  

In spite of the fact that I am broadly pro-immigration in cases where people want to come here to become Americans – i.e...

Two weeks ago, the Beloved Spouse and I rewarded ourselves for the considerable effort of having hosted a large family gathering over Christmas by slipping away for a week of relaxation and recreation in a much warmer place. Five of the seven days of our vacation were spent as part of a professionally managed group adventure featuring daily cycling, hiking, kayaking, snorkeling and/or paddle-boarding. Beside us, there were eight other paying participants, mostly couples or parent/adult child pairs; in addition to the sporting adventures, we all stayed at the same two resorts and ate meals together. Everybody got along well and as far as I could tell, had a marvelous time.

Among the other participants were a retired bond trader of roughly my age and one of his adult sons, a graduate stu...

Dear Readers: This extended post is a compilation of stories about business that were written as separate posts between November 25, 2018 and January 2, 2019. It is presented in the order in which the original posts were written, but I have added dates to the titles for those who wish to piece together the chronology of the meta story.

1. A Story – 2012 (This story has been permanently taken down).

2. Another Story – 1995

We already had signed a contract to buy the company – or maybe it was a letter of intent, I can’t remember. No great difference – it’s almost always possible to get out of a deal until the money changes hands.

A young salesman who worked for the company we intended to buy had asked to meet with the CEO with whom I, then a banker, was working; he sa...

Sometimes our inventions change us.

Last night, the Beloved Spouse told me about a talk she had heard in which a neuroscientist said that she believes that gathering news and following social media on the internet, and even reading books on electronic devices, all have meaningfully different effects on our brains than reading old-fashioned newspapers and books. As we process information in new ways, our brains develop new muscles, if you will, and don’t develop other muscles.

This all sounded right to me: it is perfectly consistent with ideas about neuroplasticity that I had heard before – including the colorful example of a study of London cab drivers’ brains that showed that in the laborious and challenging act of memorizing the street map of London for their licenses, they had changed...

Here’s hoping that Jair Bolsonaro’s first official act as president of Brazil is to invade Venezuela.

As a result of twenty years of Chavismo (a word that, like Juche in North Korea, signifies a locally-flavored brand of militant socialism) Venezuela’s economy is in a state of total collapse. As with North Korea in bad years, starvation and disease are rampant. Venezuela has been less adept at making itself a prison than North Korea, though: over 2 million Venezuelans – roughly 8% of its former population – have fled to neighboring countries. Presently, about 3,000 malnourished people, many of whom are also diseased, are making it out each day – and straining social services in neighboring countries.

While the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela grows ever worse, senior members of...

I recently had the great pleasure of spending a couple of hours with an old friend who is one of our nation’s foremost mandarins. It was no kind of official meeting, of course – I have no expertise or standing that is particularly relevant to his professional world – so most of our time was spent catching up on personal news. Even so, the policy matters that we touched on – not within his official purview, but about which he is infinitely better informed than most – were weighty, and provided much food for thought.

In the context of a brief reference to America’s budgetary problems – with trillion dollar deficits now routine and inevitable changes in our demographics making it certain that without drastic and painful changes to entitlement programs our fiscal challenges will only grow wo...

One of the many ways in which I am fortunate is that I am often surrounded by people who disagree with the political ideas that I cherish most. When many of your closest relatives, friends and colleagues are on the other side on important issues, you learn to see people who disagree with you as merely misguided rather than, as is too often the case where such differences arise among strangers, as ignorant, stupid or flat-out evil.

I know that some of the people who are dearest to me feel just as strongly as I do about political issues, but have managed to arrive at the opposite conclusions to mine...

Rather than engage in civil debate, Democrats increasingly make ad hominem arguments against those with whom they disagree. They have become the party of personal destruction.

Every Republican president is portrayed in popular culture and most media outlets as not just wrong on the issues – that much is assumed – but evil. Each one is literally Hitler, until he is out of office. Then they are ignored until they die or criticize another Republican, at which time their images are magically accorded some semblance of dignity. Also, most Republican presidents are stupid; that’s a given, too.

Republican Supreme Court nominees? They must be stopped – or, at a minimum, deprived of their dignity...

In 1675, a Swedish ancestor of mine named Catharina Bure, the wife of a prominent man who was feuding with Uppsala’s mayor, was convicted of witchcraft along with several of her friends; they were all sentenced to be burned at the stake. The court accepted the testimony of a woman who historians believe had been bribed by the mayor and some children who claimed that the alleged witches had transported them to Hell so that they – the witches – could be watched having sex with the devil.

Catharina was ultimately saved by a last-minute pardon from the king – thankfully for my family and me, since she and her husband had their children thereafter – but her friends had already been burned to death...

The rot in our schools is far worse than we want to admit. To get a sense of how bad it is, a quick read of this post https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/how-colleges-are-ripping-generation-ill-prepared-students will give you an overview. The author’s (unimpeachable) data is drawn from the recently-released 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/), which should be a source of grief to one and all. Quoting the linked post: “Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.”

Amazingly, most of these manifestly unprepared high school gra...