By Eric Le Roy
A couple of days ago, my wife and I took our young Ridgeback Retriever, Baron, for a long autumnal walk near a monastery up in the hills here in Varna. Toward sundown, when a faint mist wettens the twilight air, then sinks, mixing fallen leaves and black earth into pliable sod, tramping along this multi-colored corridor gives great pleasure. Not many people are about – a … Read the rest
There’s a special kind of language that doesn’t tell you what’s happening—it tells you what to feel about it. It’s an art form, really. A performance where words pretend to inform but actually sedate. Bureaucrats, generals, and “information managers” have refined it into a linguistic ballet: graceful, bloodless, and utterly lethal to thought.
It’s called doublespeak. Or, in the more poetic tongues of the East, necro-speak—the language of the … Read the rest
We like clean stories. “Employment is a cage; business is a key; passive income is a hammock.” Clean stories are catnip for tired brains. But the world is noisy, and the numbers have an awkward habit of interrupting the chorus. In the United States, about one in five new establishments doesn’t make it to the first birthday; roughly half are gone by year five and about two-thirds by year ten. … Read the rest
There was a time when cinema smelled like cigarettes and consequence. You could look at Jack Lemmon’s cramped desk in The Apartment and feel the paper cuts. You could watch Connery’s Bond run out of options and feel your own pulse argue with the soundtrack. The Godfather didn’t need a cosmic beam punching a hole in the sky; it had a door closing on Kay. The heroes of those worlds … Read the rest
There’s a fashionable story online that employment is what you do before you discover “real freedom” in business, which you run for six weeks, automate with a YouTube video, and then retire into passive income where your money does push-ups while you sip something artisanal. Cute story. In the actual world—Hungary, the EU, the US—the boring truth is that a job, a business, and “passive income” are three different risk … Read the rest
