Reality Check
Somehow or other I ended up subscribing to a fellow named David Roberts, a green-energy enthusiast, on Substack. I do not recall doing this, but perhaps in a moment of inattention I clicked a button. He seems like a nice enough chap, but he suffers from the tunnel vision to which so many green-energy advocates are prone. David’s latest effort, […]
Continue reading→A Day to Remember
Today, April 9th, marks the 160th anniversary of the surrender of Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee to the Union Army, commanded by Ulysses Grant, in Appomattox, Virginia, ending the American Civil War. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the South’s collapse came gradually, and then all at once. By 1864, after three grinding years of back-and-forth, often inconclusive struggle, Northern leadership […]
Continue reading→Happy Anniversary!
Just Kidding Today is the third anniversary of my cancer-excision surgery. The tumor, revealed by a routine colonoscopy in February, was early stage one, small and well-contained, and “moderately well-differentiated,” which placed it one small step above the lowest rank of concern. It’s location, in the lower GI tract, was textbook. It was a routine, low-risk case that should have […]
Continue reading→There’s Just no “There,” There
Or: Why I could not Support a Kamala Harris Presidency With the recent revelation of large-scale hacks of the US telecom system by Chinese state operatives, the long-running, undeclared cold war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has just heated up. Way up. The full extent of the penetration is not yet known, but insiders have […]
Continue reading→Down but not Out
Yesterday marked four months since my most recent surgery, at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. No, not going to say “four-month anniversary,” a major pet peeve, because the “anni” in “anniversary” is Latin for “year.” I regard the misuse of this term as one of the many symptoms of our ongoing decline, if not an actual cause. So far […]
Continue reading→Gone but not Forgotten
He was healthy, handsome, and would have made someone a good companion. But because he was somewhat older, nobody seemed to want the midsize chihuahua mix with the big brown eyes. So he was passed over, again and again, by folks who mostly wanted younger, sportier models. This was not his first rodeo. Twice before he had been surrendered by […]
Continue reading→Global Boiling is Officially Cancelled
You may have noticed that a lot of folks seem to be in a panic about Climate Change. This concern rests on the assumption that increased atmospheric CO2, presumably from human activity, will cause increased heat retention in the atmosphere, leading to potentially dangerous over-heating of the planet. The principle is pretty straightforward. Incoming radiant energy from the sun, consisting […]
Continue reading→Truth Hurts
The story made quite a splash when it dropped a week ago. A fellow named Uri Berliner wrote a piece for the Free Press, an online outlet, critical of his employer, National Public Radio, for having essentially become a Left-wing mouthpiece. Now a week might as well be a decade in the current age 0f 24/7, high-volume, light-speed, bleeds-leads, news […]
Continue reading→The Energy Elephant
According to a recent article [paywalled; excerpts in link] in the South China Morning Post, China is “at risk of missing its [climate] goals” unless it reins in its ambitious coal-fired power plant building program. This assumes, of course, that China was sincere when it promised to scale back it’s carbon output. Color me dubious. China’s pledge to the Paris […]
Continue reading→American Samizdat
Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, there were two principal state-owned publications, Pravda (“truth”) and Izvestia (“news.”) Russians, terminal cynics, would habitually joke “There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.” But they read both anyway, hoping to glean whatever nuggets of truth might be found lurking between the lines. The Soviet Union […]
Continue reading→A Case of Reckless Endangerment
I was headed southbound, homebound, on Mopac about 10 pm yesterday. Traffic was light, visibility unlimited. Defcon 5; put it on cruise and let the mind wander as the miles pass. I was a little past the 35th street exit, just south of Camp Mabry, doing a bit under under 70 in the middle lane, slowly passing another car in […]
Continue reading→Back in the Saddle Again. Sort of.
I am back at the office after nearly a month of recovery, following major abdominal surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. This surgery was necessary to correct damage caused by earlier surgeries, and to quash a stubborn and injurious infection left over from those earlier interventions. Many thanks to Alicia for holding down the fort while I was out […]
Continue reading→Hard Choices
Had an interesting week, punctuated by an extended back and forth with Dr. Cima at the Mayo Clinic, my surgeon, through the Mayo Patient Portal. I had been unclear about some of the details of the upcoming operation, so I asked some hard questions. The answers were unexpected and not what I wanted to hear. In brief: To eradicate the […]
Continue reading→Less than Zero
Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, who appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on December 5, drew harsh criticism, mostly from the right, mostly for her wishy-washy response to the question “Do calls for genocide against Jews violate Harvard rules of conduct?” Ultimately, she answered in the affirmative, but only after some serious waffling and squirming, in […]
Continue reading→Creative License
Not all that many years ago, when I still had energy and drive and my brain had not yet turned to mush, I wrote music on occasion. Not a lot, but enough to have compiled a modest repertoire. To date I have roughly fifty finished pieces; a bunch more are unfinished. A couple count as “professional,” works because I was […]
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