The Lewis Show

Dear Topaz, Today was a very good day. It was seasonable, but a little warm for this late in September. The sun was out, and some clouds rolled in. It felt like a pretty normal day. Work went well. Of course, being Friday, people are in better spirits and with some of the senior leadership out of the office, a few extra laughs were had with my associates. The ride to work and home was fairly typical. There's still entirely too many people who would prefer to focus on other things rather than driving. It's also nice to see some people heading out of town. I always imagine they're going a happy occasion to see family or celebrate a birthday or a wedding over the weekend. The boys are doing well. Their grades are holding up. Of course, they're both grounded, for various things. Their room's still a mess. The youngest is getting used to middle school and the oldest decided he likes Green Day. Janine and I are very disappointed in this development, and we ho...

I always walk this fence where I don't like how politics has injected itself into all of our conversations, but I still occasionally enjoy having them. I think by and large, we all have sensible conversations, but thanks to the internet and social media, we've kind of let the old rules slip away. I get aggravated by people that I agree with and with people I disagree with online because there's been a huge lack of intellectual honesty the past few years. Someone will find great offense to something one politician does while letting a favored pol pull the same stunt. We've lacked a lot of consistency and this lack of intellectual honesty turns a lot of people off leading them to silence their friends by muting or unfriending them. The next huge hurdle we face now is that no one really knows about fallacies and basic debate devices that used to lead to productive conversations have been replaced by screaming and mob mentality. A good example is reacting to en erra...

Yeah, it's been a while. I am sure that most people were quite alright with the prospect of putting 2016 in their rear view mirrors. It wasn't the greatest of years for me, but overall I had a good year. I began finally after 42 years my forever career. I was hired on by the Commonwealth as a compliance regulator in the life and health insurance industry. I work with a phenomenal group of smart people that are dedicated to ensuring state residents have equitable, reasonable insurance. My household over the past couple years has grown in ways that I don't care to disclose in a public forum. It has come with its share of challenges and blessings. The passing of time has taught me that while I thought I was fairly wise about the world in my youth, I really had no idea. As far as my posts here, I fully plan on a mix of cultural and personal blabbing into the next year when I find spare time, which is going to come at a premium more and more as time passes. I have not fo...

There's nothing like a tragic loss of life for people to tout their political beliefs. And it's so much easier in this social media age. As I've noted many times before though, there's a lot less discourse now and a lot more shouting and yelling. The weekend tragedy in Orlando is a sad and depressing example of this showboating. In the midst of evil and intolerance, sides have geared up to discuss the merits of gun control again. Yet I don't really hear a coherent debate. What I hear are two sides screaming about two narratives that don't mesh together at all. Picture two children arguing. One wants a video game and the other one wants to eat. The focus is in two different arenas, food and fun. On one side of the gun debate are people who are strong advocates of constitutional jurisprudence. Passing increased measures to limit a law abiding citizen access to weapons, they believe, will not solve the problem of evil that exists when a bad person obtains o...

I know I publish so rarely nowadays on my personal blog. People just don't post in traditional means anymore. Most people throw out interesting information and tidbits to their social networks and I'm certainly no exception. But I wanted to post where I could be found if people wanted to interact with me even to this very day. My Twitter is here .  My Facebook is private to my family (sorry, not sorry).  I write for iTechTriad, a great tech driven publication here .  I write historical articles on Medium here . I'm doing a series on Washington's rules now. I always look forward to interacting with friends. Please feel free to check me out, follow me, and let me know so I may do the same!

I know I often say I shy away from and avoid political posts. I don't even tolerate it in my social media timelines and in an election year that is a hard task to accomplish. There is something that is bugging me though about the political process and since I have a platform, here I go! I just wanted to provide two quick reasons why I believe that the boycott is completely asinine in nature and in delivery: Boycotts are lazy - In this political climate it seems to be easy for some to speak their minds via the retweet, repost, regram, or boycott than to actually bring about any activism. I am not advocating rioting and protesting, but a boycott is incredibly slothful and usually doesn't influence or impress your friends. Often times nowadays lazy activists on the other side will then call in a buycott and the effect is completely null  Boycotts hurt regular people - Someone dear to me works for a company that is a target for a recent boycott because of a policy that...