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Back to Kansas from the Land of Oz
OK ya’ll. I’m going to travel back in time and to another culture. The place is Kansas where Dorothy and Toto originally made their way to the magical Land of Oz via a tornado. Imagine that I am Dorothy, but I don’t have Toto the dog (I do have a cat, however, as my colleagues…
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HERO – The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance
Today the Houston Chronicle urged us to read the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which will be on the ballot in Houston this November. I have done so and find the ordinance to be an embarrassment. HERO takes a contentious social issue and does nothing but immerse it in an absurd brew of unintelligent definitions and unresolved tensions.…
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Top Ten Books that Aren’t on Most “Great Books” Lists
The philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler was perhaps the first to recognize the importance of preserving the integrity of what he called the “Great Books” of the Western tradition. Since then lists of great books from Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon” to The Greatest Books.org have attempted to capture the best and most significant works in…
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Intoxicated by Easy Money
A while ago, I wrote about the influx of Chinese money into Nicaragua to build a transcontinental canal. However, beyond infrastructure and construction concerns, people are beginning to have other worries: “The townspeople (in Nicaragua) haven’t seen any signs of canal workers in months. And the work that was done was marginal. A handful of…