Blog Posts

It was obvious to me one year ago that the pandemic would yield a time of extraordinary social tumult. Indeed, just over one year ago, I wrote in these pages about the general strike theory of the pandemic, how the viral contagion would be turned into an occasion to try to recast the...

I wrote this almost a year ago. Friends thought I was howling at the moon. Now they think I was prophetic. Spread the word. We need to amend the federal Constitution to prevent race-based transfer payments and distribution of public goods. It was written as I watched the hullabaloo arising...

Evanston, Illinois is a university town, so I expect a certain amount of irresponsible silliness to emerge from its town hall. But using a sales tax on marijuana to fund reparations payments to black town residents is something even Kurt Vonnegut would have a hard time selling as fiction.
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There’s some crazy sort of death-spiral on display in American politics before our very eyes, and I cannot figure out what it is, or what to do about it. It is enough to note it, and submit the pathology to scrutiny.
As always, a good place to start the diagnostic...

Jumpin’ Jiminy, Holy Moly, and WTF: Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have either lost their minds, or never had minds to being with. They are prosecuting a social media influencer for the snake oil he tweeted in the 2016 election.
It goes...

My cell phone blew up mid-afternoon yesterday. Was I watching what was going on in Washington, D.C.? The Capit0l was being stormed! There was a coup taking place!
I never turned on the television, or did more than scan a few Internet accounts of the events. I even asked...

Intellectual historians sometimes refer to the “climate of opinion” as a means of marking one historical era from another. On a more granular level, folks speak of the so-called “Overton window” as the range of acceptable opinion at a given moment in time. (This...

(Originally published earlier this summer at about the time of George Floyd's death. More timely now.)
We finally learned what all the fuss has been about for the past month. It’s not about police reform. It’s not about systemic racism. It’s about race-based transfer...

Wow. Just wow. A shot, or make that a judicial ruling, was just fired that should be heard in every courtroom and courthouse in the nation. United States District Judge Cormac Carney did the right, but unthinkable – he dismissed a prosecution brought by the United States Government...

I was startled during my annual physical this week when I asked my family physician how much longer he expected the pandemic to require restricted activity. “At least a year,” he said. When I asked him what he thought of my traveling by air in the near term, his answer was...