During the last week it has become increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin’s effort to destroy Ukraine has become so obviously a failure that he is, in desperation, threatening the very people that he needs in order to continue in office. Referring to his domestic opposition as “Gnats” is hardly designed…

We are now near the end of the third week of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to place himself among Russia’s historic leaders by adding Ukraine back into Russia by military conquest. It is, as we know, not going well. An invading force made up principally of conscripts who thought they were…

People in the capitals of the world are in shock. The Russian Federation led by its authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin is in the seventh day of an all-out military invasion of Ukraine. The shock is not because we didn’t know that there were huge numbers of Russian troops surrounding Ukraine…

This article was originally printed in THE RISHEL REPORT at the end of December, 2016, when Donald Trump was yet to take office. Now several years later, Vladimir Putin is threatening to invade Ukraine to return it to a Russian empire reborn. I thought that readers might find that Russia’s…

It is hard not to argue that we live in a profoundly different political world than we did when Donald Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016. Since then, the institutions of government have experienced an acceleration of the dysfunctional turmoil that began with the election of Ronald…

Back at it: Let us begin by thinking about the recent past. Democracy depends on voting citizens. The assumption is that a majority of them have a sufficient interest in, and an understanding of, their government to hire (through the vote) the most fitting of the available candidates to lead…

Those of you who read my two recent blogs on psychology remember that I suggested that each of us works hard to create a personal universe whose function is to keep internal conflict (experienced as anxiety) at a comfortable level. What is important to understand about that is that most…

The last two articles in this series were an attempt to convince readers that the voters really are rational. If the voters are only doing the thing that most reduces internal conflict for them (reduces anxiety), then they are each responding to the world around them in a way that…

In Part I of this discussion we suggested that each of us, in order to keep down internal conflict, creates a personal universe. And that we use everything in that smaller world to keep internal conflict as low as possible. In the best of circumstances that allows us to feel…