Rick was one of the first professors I met at MSU. Generous with his time and counsel, he greatly influenced my career. And it was a treat to teach with Rick. Here is the beginning of a fifty-year friendship with a fine scholar. I met Rick in 1969 while teaching economic anthropology at Indiana University […]
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Ramona and I greatly enjoy our home. It began as a log structure built from timbers I cut in the early 1970s. They were milled a mere mile west of our home site. I like that. We added to our home over the decades. Fortunately, Bob Utzinger, former dean of MSU’s School of Arts and […]
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Federal bureaucracy gets in the way of complex ongoing relationships that serve civil society. If you want to see the case for limited government, consider that there’s a siege happening in some dusty corner of Nevada over tortoise welfare. Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher currently engaged in a standoff with the federal government over grazing […]
Read MoreThe intro to this week’s FREE Insight is written by James Jay Carafano. Carafano is The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies. He writes a weekly column on national security affairs for the Washington Examiner and is editor of a book series, The Changing Face of War, which examines how emerging political, social, economic and […]
Read MoreI came to Bozeman from Bloomington, Indiana in 1970. My senior colleagues at IU assured me this was a huge mistake. Their well-intended reason: Montana was a colonial economy, one isolated and insulated from cultural and commercial success. The state supplied commodities, wheat and wood, coal and copper. From the Civil War to the first […]
Read MoreWhy Civil Rights Metaphors Are Inappropriate for Getting Off Oil Writing on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” former green-jobs czar Van Jones invoked Dr. King to justify the environmental movement’s singular focus on stopping the Keystone XL pipeline: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs […]
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I again observe that one of the great benefits of living here is meeting a remarkable array of talented and interesting people. For example, this winter I’ve met three individuals who have recently worked in Antarctica. More recently, when skiing in the Big Sky area, Ramona and I met a surgeon who is a pioneer […]
Read MoreI welcome several changes in this New Year. And how fortunate we are to live here! On many cultural, commercial, and medical dimensions, life in and around Bozeman is ever better. Yesterday we had over 50 elk on our place. (Fortunately, our haystacks had been trucked off. Herds of elk eat and destroy them. […]
Read MoreThis is the season of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men”. Although data indicates the world actually is becoming more peaceful, peace and good will remain exceedingly difficult goals to achieve. However, the Christmas season is an excellent time to recognize those who try: Success is contagious. This week’s FREE Insights […]
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At a time when Americans are becoming increasingly dependent, here is a reminder of what liberty and independence really are. ________________________________________ On October 10, 1923, Nobel Prize–winning author Rudyard Kipling delivered the Rectorial Address to the students of St. Andrews University in Scotland. The title of his address was, “Independence.” For most Americans […]
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