Steve’s Newsletter Volume 1: Issue 1

By Steven Specht No comments

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter. I wanted to create a space where I can reach out directly to people who might be interested in what I have to say. I have relied primarily on Facebook for the last several years, but their algorithm buries anything that is more than a few hundred […]

Be Nice to Wasps

By Steven Specht No comments

Not long ago, I was startled by a friend describing her afternoon of knocking down wasp nests. I would describe this person as left-of-center, concerned about climate change, and other issues regarding our inability to live within the earth’s carrying capacity. It didn’t compute that knocking down wasp nests would be part of the day’s […]

Hermit Crabs

By Steven Specht No comments

This House Is Not Our Google Home I say that I married into a year-long trip around the country in a travel trailer. It was a second marriage for both of us. For each of us, our first marriages were with someone philosophically incompatible. When searching for a second spouse, each of us had checklists […]

Footnotes in Foreign Relations 1:1

By Steven Specht No comments

Feckless Negotiators TLDR: US policy or lack thereof in the early 1920s helped pave the way for Nazi Germany. Reparations after war were common in Europe, so it wasn’t unusual that Germany got stuck footing the bill for WWI in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. After all, the Germans did the exact same thing to […]