Abraham's Journey
By Charlie Johnston From the time of my mid-teens, whenever my circle of friends was wildly but enthusiastically wrong in their assessment of how a particular course of actions and choices would play out, if I saw I could not persuade them, I adopted a technique I called “playing the prophet.” I would tell them […]
Read More On Our Own, But Not AloneBy Charlie Johnston If you lost your job, but had $250,000 in the bank, you could live normally for quite some time if you are middle class, by drawing down on your capital. Every week you did that, though, you would be headed towards a precipitous cliff. Do it long enough and you would plunge […]
Read More What We Have DoneBy Charlie Johnston I have been struggling to get a handle on this business, writing a long, fairly complex piece. It finally dawned on me this morning that I would do well to divide it into at least three small pieces, covering different aspects. Also, I have been overwhelmed with email traffic and ‘messenger’ requests. […]
Read More Notes From the Plague Journal – What is Truth?By Charlie Johnston Late in the colorful baseball career of pitcher Dizzy Dean, a reporter remarked that he wasn’t throwing as hard as he did when he was younger. Dean indignantly responded that he was throwing as hard as he ever did; it just wasn’t getting there as fast. In normal times, I’m pretty good […]
Read More Dizzying DevelopmentsBy Charlie Johnston Appeasement is provocative to dictators. It merely encourages them to push harder and intimidate more. Ronald Reagan insisted that we would attain “peace through strength.” When he did so, the left and the media all accused him of being a warmonger – and shrieked that we were “all going to die.” Any […]
Read More Opening SkirmishesBy Charlie Johnston “Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this son of York” -Richard III, William Shakespeare This Advent Season is pregnant both with expectation of the birth of Christ and with the fearful expectation of great dysfunctions to come. In almost every major area, we have had greater and […]
Read More The Season BeginsBy Charlie Johnston When something unexpected comes out of left field that utterly confounds conventional analysis, it is called a “Black Swan Event.” In unstable times of great tumult, black swan events become more frequent. Our last two election cycles were marked by significant black swan events. In 2016, for the first time in American […]
Read More A Bevy of Black SwansBy Charlie Johnston Elite sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in jail over the weekend, reportedly of suicide. That it was possible for him to commit suicide at all strains credulity, given the prominence of his case and the supposed close watch he was supposed to be under. Since the unsealing last week of previous court […]
Read More Out of the Pot and Into the…(I first published this post two years ago today. While some of the details are dated, it seems as fresh to me as when I first wrote it. It is well worth a re-read, I think. I am in the heart of New England right now, in a spot in New Hampshire that you can’t […]
Read More The Big PictureBy Charlie Johnston I have been working on an important, but complicated piece. Between wrestling with a virus and an increasingly spotty internet…there you go. The modem started getting hinky last Friday and finally just died. I think it was a Catholic modem. The news of the last week so mortified it, it just gave […]
Read More How Long, O Lord, How Long? – Short Takes
