Don Braby
I was born and raised on a dairy farm in the 60s and 70s in the great state of Iowa. My dad Burrell, who served in WWII, was a teenager during the Great Depression in the 1930s. He was 14 when the stock market crashed in 1929. But before he passed away in 1998, I remember talking with him about America's future. He thought America was destined for hard times after the turn of the century. He had the same negative feelings of America’s unraveling that he experienced in the late twenties. I appreciate my dad for serving our country and giving me the tools to succeed in life. I enjoy writing about history and economics. It’s amazing to see how they blend together. America is unraveling and is about to enter the next season. Fall is trying to hang on but winter will come.
Voted
The Greatest Depression “America’s Rendezvous with Destiny”
There are a number of reasons why the United States is about to enter an era of extreme hardship and an economic crisis unequaled by any other depression in history. The ever repeating cycles of history and a psychology which has been slowly changing form since the turn of the century are creating an unraveling we are experiencing now.
Within the next few years, America will have to come to grips with an approaching economic winter that could result in the worst depression in its nearly 250 years of history. What we thought our children’s children would have to struggle through may be ours to endure.
Even though America escaped a depression in 2008, most economists and historians called the recession that crippled the United States from December 2007 to June 2009 as the Great Recession. This profound decline and contraction were partly the reason the economy has struggled to recover.
On the other hand, the Dow Jones and other major market indices have been experiencing an eight-year bull market that had investors once again proclaiming only blue skies for stocks for many years to come.
However, has anything really changed? Culture wars still prevail, America’s debt is at all-time record levels and many Americans are struggling day to day to make ends meet.
Many believe we have already had the once in a lifetime economic collapse. But as of early 2017, hardly anyone was predicting an economic deflationary contraction that would lead America into a dark and devastating depression that may come to be known as the Greatest Depression of all time in future history books.
Are we about to enter a period or era of poverty for many Americans? Is President Donald Trump in the wrong place and at the wrong time as President Herbert Hoover was?
Leonardo da Vinci
The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography.
Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills
we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.
He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued
innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him
history’s most creative genius.
His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math
of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and
inventions.
Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should
remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.