In last Tuesday’s presidential debates, moderator Tom Brokaw asked the candidates a difficult question: will the economy get worse before it gets better? Arguably, it is the President’s job to inspire confidence in our financial system, not to deliver candid investment advice. Unfortunately, such cheerleading amounts to a tax on the credulous buy-and-hold investor, favoring those who better understand the political game.

As I skimmed Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report yesterday, I was reminded of McCain and Obama’s earlier performances. Technorati’s investigation reveals that bloggers are “savvy and sophisticated,” and their daily output is “integral to the media ecosystem.”

Technorati, in case you didn’t know, is a blog aggregation service, whose business is built upon the free content we bloggers create. Like our presidential candidates, it is not necessarily in Technorati’s best interest to provide a frank assessment of our future. So let me provide my own frank assessment. [Read more →]

Can we talk about spirituality?

I do not refer to a politely equivocating spirituality, to the New Age patter so heartily embraced in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. No, I refer to a spirituality with sharp edges, one loathed by the pious and atheists alike. It is egalitarian, scientific, demonstrable and falsifiable—in other words, it is dangerous. Fundamentalists on all sides would prefer it did not exist.

Please take note: I am not asking you to believe this. Let’s just talk about it for a moment.

At a sufficiently high level, martial arts and spirituality are entwined. At the same time, spirituality is clearly a religious issue, and religion is a political issue. So…can we talk about politics too? [Read more →]