In honor of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, I blogged the diary of my ancestor Pvt. Orrin Brown, Co. E, 14th Michigan Infantry, who marched through Georgia and the Carolinas with General Sherman. It remains some of the most popular material on this blog, now five years later. As best we know, […]
Strategic Doing—Putting Good Plans to Work
We all hove done strategic planning. Now it’s time to try strategic doing. Ed Morrison is founder of the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab. A one-time economic development consultant, like many of us one day Ed found himself in a public policy strategic planning exercise thinking There’s Gotta Be A Better Way. He talked to a […]
The Martyr Richard Woodman
Martyr: 1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion. 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle. It is difficult in this day and age and place to wrap our heads around the idea that […]
The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month
At the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the year of our Lord 1918, an Armistice came into effect ending open hostilities in the War to End all Wars. The peace took more time, until the Treaty of Versailles signed 28 June 1919, but OUR boys were […]
A Love Story for the Animas River
I remember the Orange Tang of the Animas River running through Durango, Colorado, and on down to Farmington, New Mexico, in August 2015. Where normally kayakers and fly fishermen joust with tubers, the river coursed with the mineral runoff of Silverton’s shuttered Gold King Mine, zinc, cadmium, aluminum arsenic, and iron hydroxides let loose by […]
Spring 1918 on the Western Front
In March 1918, Bolshevik Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers ending the Great War on the Eastern Front. This freed up Germany for Operation Michael and a last great Spring Offensive on the Western Front. The German Empire began their Kaiserschlacht on 21 March 1918, with the first of four offensive operations. […]
Winter 1918 on the Eastern Front
While the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the October Revolution in early November 1917, their revolution continued to sport contradictions between the Old Style and the New through the Winter of 1918. On 1 Feb 1919 Old Style, Russia jumped forward to 14 February 1918 New Style, adopting the Gregorian calendar introduced in Roman […]
The Disease that Afflicts all Modern Institutions
Repatrimonialization Modern state institutions, which are supposed to be impersonal even if not necessarily democratic, are particularly vulnerable to insider-capture in a process that I labeled “repatrimonialization.” As we have seen, natural human sociability is built around the twin principles of kin selection and reciprocal altruism—the favoring of family or of friends with whom one […]
Declaring That a State of War Exists: 6 April 1917
On this date, 6 April 1917, in response to a request by President Wilson on 2 April, the United States Congress approved America’s entry into the Great War, which came to be known as World War I. Joint Resolution Passed by the United States Senate and House of Representatives Effective April 6, 1917, at 1:18 p.m. […]
Political Order and Political Decay in the Time of Trump
Political Order and Political Decay is the second part of Francis Fukuyama’s epic tome of political economy begun in 2011 with The Origins of Political Order. The 2014 follow-up fills out the 2011 tome’s theory of politics as biology with consideration of Democracy and The Western State, Colonialism, and ultimately Political Decay—the question of whether all ordered […]