Posts by Bryan Taylor

In many ways the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America parallels the historic British vote to leave the European Union.  Perhaps the most striking example of the parallel nature of these two events is the failure of modern pollsters to accurately delineate the probability of a Trump…

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. -Donald Rumsfeld I believe that Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote is particularly…

For every finish–line tape a runner breaks—  complete with the cheers of the crowd and the clicking of hundreds of cameras—there are the hours of hard and often lonely work that rarely gets talked about. -Grete Waitz For basketball fans, little can compare with the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament which takes place in March.  Teams…

And I’ll stand there with the Wizard…When people see me, they will scream for half of Oz’s favorite team: The Wizard and I! –Elphaba, Wicked—The Broadway Musical For those of you not familiar with the storyline of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” the story begins by taking the audience back in time from the death of…

A place where there isn’t any trouble.  Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto?  There must be.  It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train.  It’s far, far away.  Behind the moon, beyond the rain… -Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz Growing up we had one of those…

“Oh troika, winged troika, tell me who invented you? Surely, nowhere but among a nimble nation could you have been born in a country which has taken itself in earnest and has evenly spread far and wide over half of the globe, so that once you start counting the milestones you may count on till…

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than what others are saying. -Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld We are overwhelmed by silence!  The quarter ended with a bang, brought about largely by the silence of the Federal Reserve.  In their…

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. -Jonathan Swift It is football season, and in the South we take our football seriously.  Regardless of whether one is talking about a group of seven year olds running a “twenty-six jet” or an NFL team setting up a “soft zone – prevent” defense…

The inherent vice of Capitalizm is the unequal sharing of blessings.  The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. – Winston Churchill We live in a relativistic world; one in which toleration is the highest form of virtue.  While we could wax on eloquently about the profound bankruptcy of such a worldview,…