Welcome to Your First Mega-Monthly Issue!

As I said in the Sept. 6 issue, for the foreseeable future, I won’t be publishing twice a week, but just once a month. This will allow me the time I need for the almost-finished and half-finished books I’ve been working on for the last 10 years. This issue is something of a transition. I’m still working on some changes I want to make. But as you can see if you scroll down, the monthly issues are going to be considerably longer than the weekly issues. Mostly because I’ll be including more than a single book and movie review and because I’ll be including one or two chapters from the books I’m trying to finish. This month, I’m including the recently revised first chapter of The Challenge of Charity, a book that compares the social impact of the non-profit community center my family and I established on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua to the for-profit residential resort and hotel complex that my partners and I built nearby. I’m also including a chapter from a book based on a presentation I made to 1,700 Japanese investors in Tokyo recently. Working title: The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Acquisition. This chapter is about what I think is one of the most important laws that govern not only wealth building but every other aspect of human achievement. I’ve placed these two chapters towards the end of the issue because they are a bit long and I didn’t want to distract you from the shorter pieces, including: * A look back at the big debate * Yet another thing the Japanese do better! * The wealth of wisdom in The Wealth of Shadows * Everything you would expect in a movie titled Small Town Crime * The many pleasures of The Decameron * Your Monthly Quiz: safe cities and firearm ownership… cholesterol levels and statin drugs… the Capitol riot and Hunter Biden’s plea deal… and more And finally, in the Readers Write department, I try to answer a question I’ve asked myself more than once over the years: “Why hasn’t the long-predicted financial Armageddon happened yet?” TOC TEST Notes from my journal