Category: Events

Please join us for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Thursday, February 26, in Landmark Center to get an update on what we’ve been doing for St. Paul’s future since our last round table back in mid-October kicked-off the effort to use our good offices to bring people together, stimulate ideas and insights and identify growth assets in St. Paul.

After the report, we would like to listen and learn from you ideas and concerns for St. Paul’s future now that we have a new mayor and the attention of a number of civic leaders.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last between an hour and hour and a half.

It has been years – maybe never – since Minnesota, where we’re based, was a daily news lead around the country and world for over a week.  And the news has not been “nice.”  For some, it seems to be the harbinger of worse days to come for our republic, now 250 years old and slowing down in mind, heart and spirit.

Please join us, on short notice, at 9:00 am (CST) next Wednesday, February 4, for an emergency Zoom round table to discuss how we got here and where we go from here?

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last about an hour.

Given that the week between Christmas and New Years tends to be a slower one for many, we would like to invite you to reflect with us.

The Chinese Book of Changes (Yijing) concentrates the mind on where we are and where we are going.  In 1858, future American President Abraham Lincoln put the politics of a divided country on a timeline:

“If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.”

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says to the Soothsayer, “The Ides of March have come!”  The Soothsayer wisely replies, “Aye Caesar, but not gone.”

Should our New Year’s resolutions be attempts to overcome the past or more resilient actions to meet the future?

Please join us at 9:00 am (CST) on Tuesday, December 30, for a Zoom round table on what we might learn from 2025 and what might we expect in 2026 with wars, AI, the value of the dollar, the results of the November 2026 American election, self-proclaimed civilization states like Russia and China, hurricanes and drought, …

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last about an hour.

Looking forward to your prognostications.

Friedrich Nietzsche intuited that the European Enlightenment would self-destruct, as reason would come to ignore truth and replace it with narratives and psychological self-fulfillment.  For Nietzsche, the ultimate driver of human experience is the will to power, which doesn’t subordinate itself to reality and transcendental idealisms.

Have we, in the U.S. and Europe, now come to the cultural condition of surrendering to the will to power?

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, October 23, for a Zoom round table discussion of this possibility.

The triumph of the will, as Nietzsche wrote, actually follows the second law of thermodynamics by letting loose in its victims the proclivities of entropy – the disordered disbursal of energies and the inability to accomplish work.  As the individual will collapses in on itself, an implosion of psychic energy and brain and muscle matter, the person separates from society and the sustaining ecosystem.

Narcissism, nihilism – “my” truth can be any truth – splinters and disintegrates society and culture, bringing about the Hobbesian order of nature, where our lives become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  Not civilized, but savage without moral nobility, excellence of thought, elegance of word or depth of heart.

If our age is, indeed, one of nihilism, what is to become of us?  What should we do – role over and play dead?

I considered his influence in my recent essay, “Friedrich Nietzsche: The Devil’s Advocate,” in August Pegasus, which you can read here.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last about an hour.

If you were the mayor of St. Paul, what would you do?  Raise taxes?  Revitalize downtown?

If you were a member of the city council, what would your “to do” be?

As a resident or bystander watching St. Paul seemingly give up on hope and ambition, overcome by inertia, rudderless, defining its expectations downward, resigned and fatalistic, giving into decline, what would you expect of its leaders – public and private?

Please join us and Mike Burbach, editor of the Pioneer Press, for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Thursday, October 16, at Landmark Center.

Please bring your recommendations, insights, tactics and strategies.

Registration will begin at 11:30 am.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Space is limited.

Event will last about an hour.

Loren Swanson, one of our regular participants, attended our Zoom round table on social media/AI earlier today and thought this Rotary program on AI would be of interest to many of you.

For those who can’t attend in person, you could participate via Zoom.

We will be drafting a statement of ethics for AI shortly.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, August 28 on Zoom for a round table plunge into the emotive cacophony and the chaotic disarrangement of our personas brought to us by social media.

In the U.S., social media is being given culprit status for increasing depression among girls and young women and for driving young men into isolation and solitude.

Now what if social media posts become generated by AI to use images of exceptional emotional power and displacement and send us fixating stories supported by data on what best triggers depression?

A movement is emerging in the U.S. to ban the use of smartphones by students in public schools out of a belief that the companies that sell them and those that make money from their use are not able to minimize the negative externalities attached to social media products.

One reads that the cell phone/social media platform will be far more determinative of human life than was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press – but not in a good way.  Printed books mostly increased knowledge and reasoned debate and made modern science and modern civilization possible – increasing human capitals and social capitals.  If social media is destructive of these capitals and contributes to atomization of communities, anomie, prejudices and antagonisms in politics and short-sightedness in personal decision-making, what great good can come of it?

Join us to share your stories about social media, your best experiences, your worries and your recommendations for throwing out the bath water, while keeping the baby hearty and healthy.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Given the recent political assassinations and attempted assassinations here in Minnesota, we believe we need to do something about our political culture.

We’ve drafted a statement to be provided to local leaderships and the press.  We would like your help in improving the draft.  

Please join us for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Thursday, July 24 (please note new date) at Landmark Center.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last between an hour and hour and a half.

Over the last few years, notably in time for Putin to wage territorial war against Ukraine, both Russia and China have proposed a new concept for international relations: the civilization state. The international community has ignored this new way of thinking about who is right and who is wrong.

When I brought it up recently with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States at the Vatican, he was keen to learn more.

I shared with him the important article on civilization states written by Ivan Timofeev in Moscow.  We included Ivan’s article in the November 2023 issue of Pegasus.

Here is George Will’s take on the failure of the American foreign policy elite to take notice of this new theory of international relations (Will is a columnist for the Washington Post):

Although there is no excuse for it, there is a reason for the failure of U.S. leaders to understand Putin.  He is an open book who has been reading himself to the world since long before he published his 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”  This farrago of ethnic mysticisms and history seen through a pseudo-theological lens is Putin’s “Mein Kampf.” His resentments and revenge aspirations are all there.  But are largely ignored or disbelieved by the West’s statesmen and publics who complacently believe that the end of history meant the end of toxic nonsense such as this:

Putin believes Russia is a “civilization-state” with cultural-cum-religious significance, rights and responsibilities that justify the erasure of other nations.  Which is why the Economist correctly says that for Putin, “war has become an ideology.”

What Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Brands describes as Putin’s “quasi-genocidal barbarities” are committed in the name of a totalizing, uncompromisable objective: the political and cultural extinction of Ukraine.  Russia has kidnapped, for the purpose of “Russification,” uncountable thousands of Ukrainian children.  Their return is, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says, Kyiv’s “number one” priority in negotiations.  Try explaining that to Steve Witkoff.

This real estate developer, Donald Trump’s designated war-ender, says he and Putin have developed a “friendship.”  Witkoff echoes Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, saying that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev shares similar “dreams and aspirations.”  Witkoff wonders, “Why would Russia want to absorb Ukraine?”  Putin explained in his 2021 essay, which shows that peace is impossible.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Monday, June 30 on Zoom to share your thoughts with us about the credibility of the “civilization state.”

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Please join us for a Zoom round table on tariffs and the future of our world economic order at 9:00 am (CDT) on Tuesday, May 13.

Here is a timely cartoon from the cover of the New Yorker, no fan of Donald Trump:

I also attach here a critique of Trump’s tariff proposals in the Wall Street Journal from the very conservative former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.