A Slow-Motion Train Wreck
Or: What in the Hell Happened to the Golden State? A few days ago, someone on Quora posted yet another ragebait item about deep-Blue California having the fifth-largest economy in the world, whereas red states were all populated by losers and parasites. Right. Here’s the thing: California OUGHT to have a great economy because it has absolutely everything going for […]
Continue reading→From There to Here
Some months back I spent the better part of a week driving to Austin from New York state, at the wheel of a rented, very large moving truck. The cargo of said truck was the contents of three storage lockers, spread across two small towns you have never heard of. Both are just down the road from a place you […]
Continue reading→Back in Office after Break
As of January 5, 2026, I am back in office after four weeks of recovery from yet another abdominal surgery. The latest surgery was to correct damage to my abdominal wall stemming from the sepsis incident back in 2022. I have two fresh 6-inch incision scars to add to my growing collection. For the moment I tire easily, my range […]
Continue reading→We Don’t Have to Live Like This
Following the recent shooting on the Brown University campus, in which two students were killed and nine injured, police released clips of surveillance footage showing the suspected gunman. This footage shows a short stocky person, most likely a man, of medium complexion, dressed all in black and wearing a surgical mask and beanie hat, presumably to mask his identity. Not […]
Continue reading→The Green Energy Obsession is Over
And it’s About Time For all his many flaws, Donald Trump has served a larger good by shifting the Overton Window. Topics that were once sacred cows, about which no contrary opinions were permitted—DEI, all things trans, climate change, net zero, to name a few—are once again up for discussion. They are not faring well under renewed scrutiny. This is […]
Continue reading→If You Can’t Question it, it’s not Science
The problem with climate science is that it isn’t science, and hasn’t been for years, having veered off into thinly veiled advocacy. The frenzied reaction to the recent DOE Climate Working Group report exemplifies this failing. All the usual suspects have lined up to trash the CWG, often in highly personal terms. This is a giant tell that it’s most […]
Continue reading→The New Normal
Was in the home stretch of my daily two-block walk from the house to the shop a couple of mornings ago, placing one foot in front of the other in the customary way, thinking about nothing in particular, when my reverie was suddenly interrupted by a large navel orange going splat on the driveway a couple of steps ahead. At […]
Continue reading→That was a Stretch
Or: How a Gift Turned into a Creative Exercise. My girlfriend of many years is having a birthday soon. This not your typical birth anniversary, though; she is turning 65. This is an event of some significance. With it’s passage, you can no longer pretend to be middle aged, much less young. It is the widely recognized if unofficial start […]
Continue reading→Transitions
Like most of my canine companions, the midsize hound mix with the sad brown eyes came to me by a roundabout route, having passed through other owners and situations before landing on my doorstep. Her most recent human was a woman who had worked for me for a while before moving on. Winona, not her real name, had found the […]
Continue reading→The Permanent Crisis
I am what the Left calls a climate “denier,” meaning that I refuse to believe with all my heart that a slight warming trend means Armageddon is nigh. There are lots of reasons for holding this viewpoint, and if you have a few hours to kill I’d be happy to give you the Cliff Notes version. I am also a […]
Continue reading→Questions of Character
The following is a message I sent to a friend, who had expressed dismay that I had voted for Trump over Kamala Harris. Politics is personal. We like who we like. But sometimes we don’t even like the people we like; we just see them as preferable to the alternative. At the same time, lots of folks are trapped […]
Continue reading→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→