Edifice of Trust

Just as America was wallowing in woke divisiveness and populist conspiracies, and while the other countries of the West sank into self-indulgent complacency, Vladimir Putin has sent a wake-up call. Europe in their desire to save the planet, had put their future in the hands of Russia. Americans, focused on rancorous partisan politics hardly had the time to concentrate on anything outside its borde...

I never thought Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine. It didn't make any sense. It was irrational. I was wrong – but right. He did invade. But I was right because he has not achieved any of his strategic goals and he (and Russia) are in a much worse situation than before the invasion. In this podcast, I analyze Putin's disastrous military misadventure and look at its implications for the future.

Primary elections were intended to improve democracy in America. So was the inclusion of administrative positions such as attorney general or railroad commissioner on the ballot. However, as it often is with good intentions, the unintended consequences are often worse than the problem and increasing democracy has resulted in increasing divisiveness. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust hoist, Vic...

To our Western eyes, the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin are not just dangerous, they are incomprehensible, which only makes them more dangerous. But he is not a madman. There are reasons behind his recent provocative actions. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles engages in some thought experiments to try and better understand Mr. Putin's motives and use those insi...

Ray Dalio, billionaire hedge fund manager and author, has written a new book describing his theory of why nations succeed and fail. He has used artificial intelligence and big data to identify the key determinants in the rise and fall of great powers and his theory reveals why the United States is a declining power and China is a rising one. But the real utility of his theory is as a roadmap of ho...

In a recent letter, former president Trump implies that Democrats are not real Americans and urges fellow patriots (his words) to elect Trump Republicans. Not Republicans but Trump Republicans whose loyalty is to Donald Trump and not the Republican Party. Not to be out done, President Biden accuses those opposed to his legislation of being on the side of rebels and slavers like Jefferson Davis. In...

On January 5, 2022, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards pardoned Homer Plessy for committing the crime of riding in a whites-only railcar in 1892. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected Plessy's appeal of his conviction in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision that set the stage for "separate but equal" treatment under Jim Crow laws. But that decision had placed public opinion over the intent of t...

In the year 2022 the United States will be challenged to address urgent priorities of national importance, but our political leaders will be distracted by political priorities as we approach the upcoming off-year elections. As citizens, we need to make sure that our elected representative focus on issues of national importance and not on ideological agendas or the egos of political leaders. In thi...

Joe Manchin's decision to vote no on President Biden's Build Back Better plan has earned him the enmity of progressives across the country who are calling him every sort of vile and hateful name they can think of. They accuse him of endangering American democracy by his disloyalty to their progressive agenda. But in a democracy, unlike a totalitarian state, a person can vote their conscience and n...

Proponents and opponents of a Mississippi law banning abortion after fifteen weeks recently argued before the Supreme Court. Many fear, or alternatively hope, that the Court will overturn the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that has governed abortions since 1973. The court will not announce its decision until the middle of 2022. But whatever the Court decides will not end the controversy surrounding...

Because his pleas to OPEC to increase oil production fell on deaf ears, President Biden recently authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with the hope of curbing the rising price of gasoline. But the purpose of the SPR is to give the United States strategic options in the face of foreign policy challenges around the globe, not to be used for politic...

Ibram X. Kendi asserts that all humans share 99.9% of their DNA and that, because we are so alike, racial disparities in social and economic outcomes would not exist except for racism. But the 0.1% that we do not have in common must then account for all the wide variations of the human species we see around the world. Charles Murray asserts that based on evidence from intelligence tests there is a...

Democrats are still reeling from the disastrous election results from the 2021 off-year elections. They lost the governorship and the state house in blue Virginia. They almost lost the governorship in very blue New Jersey, however, a neophyte Republican with a shoe-string budget took down the second most powerful Democrat in the state. Progressive initiatives failed while conservatives were oustin...

Progressive Democrats and the Biden White House continue to work on hashing out the details of the American Families Plan along with increases in the tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals to pay for it. But in the real world (compared to the ideal but unattainable world envisioned by progressives) most corporations pass on the increased costs of higher taxes to consumers and workers w...

The progressive left continues to push for passage of President Biden's $3.5 trillion (which in reality is more than $5.0 trillion) spending plan and Socialist Bernie Sanders touts the bill as a "compromise" insisting that the real amount should be more than six trillion. How can the left justify such massive spending since no one believes that the proposed tax hikes to accompany the spending will...

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial ( The Entitlements of U.S. Decline , October 7, 2021) remarked that the Biden Administration's claim that higher taxes and more social welfare spending were "the path to national revival" was startling and audacious "especially when the global evidence is the opposite." The assertion flies in the face of reason just as the President's claim the cost of his pr...

Many of the Founders had grave doubts about the long-term viability of the American experiment in democracy, as documented in a recent book by Dennis Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders . Democracies did not have a very good reputation in 1776. But here we are. And as fractious as our twenty-first century politics are, Dr. Rasmussen's book shows that many o...

T The modern era has ended the geographic isolation that created different characteristics among people that were classified as different races. As a result, people from different parts of the globe are meeting and eventually intermarrying with each other, blurring the concept of race beyond any measure. This trend was highlighted in the recent U.S. Tennis Open which featured rising young stars th...

  Closing the black-white academic achievement gap is an important problem that America needs to solve. But the way to solve this problem is not to lower academic standards to the lowest common denominator. This would be a disservice to black kids and to the nation. We need to raise the academic achievement of black kids, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it will also help...

The Enlightenment based Western Civilization that we live in did not arrive in this world in full bloom the moment John Locke put down his pen. It has evolved slowly and sometimes painfully over the centuries. The greatest achievement of this civilization has been the liberation of human capital through the participation of millions and millions of people in our Western systems of governance, econ...

A new woke ideology of egalitarian idealism is spreading out from academia and into our public schools, corporations and government institutions like a lab-leaked virus. This ideology rejects the Enlightenment principles and ideals on which America was founded. It rejects universally accepted concepts like reasoned discussion and rational discourse believing that they make up part of a socially co...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced last week a continuation of the Fed's policy of purchasing government bonds in order to stimulate economic growth and reduce unemployment despite an uptick of inflation above the Fed's target. This move prompted the Wall Street Journal to speculate that the Fed might also view inflation as a mechanism to cut the enormous size of the public debt; a m...

Leftwing progressives seem intent on using razor thin majorities in Washington to permanently transform the United States into their vision of a Europeanized social democratic state or worse. They are pushing multitrillion dollar spending plans, taking over public schools to indoctrinate children on anti-racism and changing election laws to permanently entrench the left in power. But why now and w...

Fox News likes to pick on Chicago's murder rate, using anecdotal evidence instead of statistics. But increasing violence and murder is spreading across the country and this spread isn't limited to just the big cities. It is coming to a city near you. Police departments are being defunded by left-wing mayors and city councils. Police officers, citing low morale, are retiring or resigning in droves...

My Fourth Victor C. Bolles July 6, 2021 ​ I wasn't too enthused by the Fourth of July specials on television so I created my own patriotic show. I thought you might enjoy some of the videos I watched as well. Happy Fourth of July.