Not Birds Of A Feather

It was funny, you have to admit. 

No sooner had Pope Francis prayed for peace in the Ukraine, and released two white doves from his Vatican window, than a crow and a seagull swooped in for the kill.  Feathers flew, the thousands in St. Peter’s Square gasped, and the suggestion that God was saying something must have entered even the most skeptical of minds.

But, saying what? 

The Society of Fallen Men

Occasionally, something not directly related to the topic of the book I’m reading grabs my attention.  It happened the other day while reading Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (2011, p. 10), by Barry Eichengreen.

The topic was money, or, more accurately, currency.

Adventures in Fatherhood

“What did I tell you about that yesterday, sweetie?”

My eight-year-old Jopa (short for Johanna Paulina) stared at me blankly with her big blue eyes.  “I don’t know.”   She was cutting up an entire avocado, throwing it into a bowl to mix with a full can of tuna and a mountainous blob of mayonnaise.  Breakfast.

Whither the Consumer?

“Did anyone fill Mr. Torres’s prescriptions?”

The pharmacist looked with a slightly bothered mien behind the wall of separation to her two colleagues and the cashiers gathered in the back.  They ruffled through some bags and shrugged.

The pharmacist I’d asked checked through the drawer of filled prescriptions as if to upturn the final stone.  Lo and behold!  There they were.

Sport As Moral Teacher

San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh has taken to repeating Malcolm X’s slogan, “by any means necessary.” The other day his star linebacker, Patrick Willis, echoed it in a press conference, so the motto has obviously taken hold in the locker room. I imagine that if I still lived in San Francisco, I’d be hearing it from my friends.

That’s because sport is pedagogical as well as entertaining, even for onlookers. It teaches as it entertains us.

Catholics and Wealth

“How do people get rich?”

It was an innocent enough question coming from a young boy overhearing the conversation I was having with his grandfather.  We’d talked about the Fed, banks, quantitative easing, cronyism and more.  The boy was naturally curious.

What happened next is what prompts this post.