March 21, 2025

Autopen: The ticking time bomb

Joseph Biden’s lack of mental acuity was never a closely guarded secret.  It was just portrayed as irrelevant to his presidency, and the corrupt media swallowed this whole.  Now that an obviously competent president named Do...

March 18, 2025

A brief historical view of tariffs

Back in the early part of the nineteenth century, Britain enacted what were known as the Corn Laws, which heavily taxed the importation of common grains such as wheat, oats, and barley.  As an inevitable consequence, food became a lot more ...

March 16, 2025

What are capital gains, really?

Before he left office for the first time in 2020, President Trump had advocated indexing to inflation the tax on capital gains.  Why?  Because a significant portion of the taxable gain was really the result of government-induced r...

March 3, 2025

DOGE is only the beginning

Trump and his posse have obviously hit the ground running -- but the real picture of unfolding events is yet to be resolved. We seem to be realizing that the defect in our various governments is not entirely contained among the woke, leftist Democrat...

February 25, 2025

Easy to be stupid

Leftists have traditionally clung to at least some degree of power by making it really easy to be stupid. Why bother going to the trouble of taking care of yourself when there’s usually some kind of “social” program that can better ...

February 19, 2025

Could Trump abolish the income tax?

Among many other trial balloons, President Trump has floated the abolition of the income tax — perhaps to blunt resistance to his using tariffs as a bargaining tool in dealing with our trading partners.  George Will has written that t...

February 16, 2025

The auditors are coming! The auditors are coming!

It doesn’t take much effort to notice the flaming panic that Trump’s and Musk’s DOGE has imposed upon the Deep State and its regressive enablers.  Right out of the gate, they’ve uncovered mountains of flagrant embezz...

February 13, 2025

The Year of the Egg

By way of introduction, I managed to pay for my last two years of college by being the hired hand on an egg ranch.  Every morning — I mean every morning — I’d get up, drive to work, and feed 7,000 chickens.  Then...

February 11, 2025

Trump is just the tip of the iceberg

…as the ship of the Deep State crashes into it and starts to sink. Lurking below the Trump figurehead is the basic essence of American culture: personal freedom. We became a nation so we could avoid being dominated by hereditary tyrants. Now w...

February 7, 2025

Staring inflation in the face

Wouldn’t life be different if the value of money didn’t change?  Prices of some grocery items would still fluctuate, depending upon whether they were in or out of season.  But still, inflation remains as a hidden tax i...

February 4, 2025

Rummaging through the Democrats’ moldy old toolbox

First, we find character assassination.  Near the beginning of Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to the top of the heap, we find a sneaky trick played in 2004 against his Republican senatorial opponent, Jack Ryan.  He got a crook...

January 21, 2025

Send in the billionaires

Now that Trump is president (again), his enemies on the left are forced to come up with a new set of complaints.  Gone is the fear of a dictatorship that would have ignored constitutional limits.  It’s also hard to call some...

January 14, 2025

He called himself 'Stalin'

Born Ioseb Jughashvili on December 18, 1878, in the Georgian village of Gori…he adopted the pseudonym Joseph Stalin as did many Bolshevik revolutionaries such as Lenin (Ulyanov) and Trotsky (Bronstein). He first rose to prominence by brutally ...

January 13, 2025

Ideology-Schmideology

I was once asked to explain conservative ideology. Without thinking, I reflexively replied that conservatism is the absence of ideology. It is based on an impartial understanding of the real world and the application of common sense to solve problems...

January 1, 2025

Welcome to the New Normal

Perhaps the real message of last November’s election is not that Donald Trump won, but that woke progressivism lost. After all, though Trump has flaws, he at least lives in the real world and not in some ideological fantasy. It is also fai...

December 28, 2024

Twilight of the boomers

Years ago, a particular generational cohort prompted demographers to coin the phrase “goat in the python.”  The cause of this phenomenon is actually rather basic.  During the Great Depression birth rates plummeted.  ...

December 25, 2024

The boneyard of failed political careers

First off, we have the original boneyard shrine to Richard M. Nixon who managed to rise up from the dead before he fell again. After losing a squeaker to John F. Kennedy, he then lost the California governor’s contest to Jerry Brown’s fat...

December 22, 2024

Wandering around in a forest of deception

It is human nature for us to at least occasionally attempt to deceive one another.  Clever use of language is a convenient method for this to occur.  For example, the word virtually is especially useful.  Although it sem...

November 23, 2024

Oh, that pesky carbon dioxide!

WARNING: The following is forbidden knowledge for committed climate activists.  If you are one, please click the “X” in the upper right corner of your screen and then send a check to Al Gore to help keep him off the street. L...

November 18, 2024

Sending the teachers unions back to school

America is awakening. We are tired of “misguided” public servants constantly making things worse… for no good reason other than being trapped in a foolish ideology. And since the proof is often in the pudding, local public sch...

November 17, 2024

One theory for the Democrats’ catastrophic loss

Now that the Democrats’ humiliating electoral defeat has gone into the record books, the remaining processes are beginning to unfold.  The driving force for this is not Mr. Trump’s popularity or Harris-Walz’s lack thereof....

November 8, 2024

Should Trump try to amend the Constitution?

Now that the election is settled, it’s time to focus on the governing agenda.  Though I’m usually reluctant to mess with the Constitution, I think an amendment is in order regarding Article III. During the campaign, the Democ...

November 5, 2024

‘Tis time to fling predictions against the wall

There are three possible outcomes for this year’s election. First being that Trump barely squeaks out a victory. Lawyers on both sides will then take over the proceedings. Second being that Trump wins “bigly” and the Republicans hav...

November 2, 2024

Kamala is actually dumber than she looks

...and she has helpers. When asked the first thing she would do should she become president, she said she would lower prices.  Really?  How?  I’m guessing a magic wand might be the answer.  Or maybe an...

October 27, 2024

Fear plus ignorance equals climate change

Weather is inherently mysterious.  Multiple forces, such as wind, clouds, seasonal and day-night cycles, and air pressure are constantly interacting and causing continuous chaos.  In the aftermath of two particularly destructive h...

October 19, 2024

How to beat the cheat

Just to be clear, cheating in elections will always be with us.  There is way too much at stake for the players to avoid breaking the rules when “necessary.”  They need only to say, “The end justifies the means,...

October 16, 2024

The Democrats have damaged their brand

The latest news is that Kamala is crashing in the polls.  I’m shocked...shocked, I tell you!  Though I’m compelled to chuckle, I still advocate serious competition for the hearts and minds of the electorate — so ...

October 14, 2024

Enough ‘spring forward/fall back’

Hey, guess what -- World War I is over! Get used to it! We no longer need to conserve that new-fangled stuff called electricity so we can defeat the Kaiser. It just so happens that the semi-annual time-shift currently imposed on all but two of the...

October 8, 2024

Problem-solving, from bums to bucks

The most important part of solving a problem is to correctly identify it.  However, some “problems,” such as impending catastrophic weather/climate conditions, are almost entirely imaginary.  They are actually a cynica...

September 29, 2024

Return of the Silent Majority

Here I am, in deep blue Oakland, California…walking around my neighborhood while wearing a camo-MAGA-Trump ball cap.  Pepper spray at the ready, just in case I wind up in a “situation.”  Instead, however, I receive mostly...

September 22, 2024

The best thing that could happen to Democrats is that Trump wins

Were they to win this year’s presidential election with significant coattails in Congress, that would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to the Democrats.  Why?  How?  Being seriously infected with deran...

September 9, 2024

Sidewalk Psychology and the Leftist Mindset

Cutting right to the chase: Leftists are suckers for dictatorial authority. Early into the COVID hysteria, I was walking alone and outdoors. A woman wearing a face mask saw me coming towards her and immediately started bawling me out for not covering...

September 2, 2024

The next two months

Labor Day has come and now we have the traditional kickoff for the home stretch of the election campaign. Interestingly, Kamala Harris wasted no time in confirming the common perception that she is a total dingbat. This is not necessarily a fatal occ...

August 25, 2024

The perils of underestimating Mr. Trump

Just as the Harris-Walz campaign was getting ready to bask in the warm glow of their post-convention honeymoon, the Trump folks dropped the RFK Jr. bomb on them.  It is fairly reasonable to suggest that this was no coincidence. Mr. Trump...

August 18, 2024

Kamala made a fool of herself? Time for more climate hysteria!

As Kamala and her woke-prog cronies start to tank in the polls, you can expect them to try to scare the [expletive] out of us, by the usual exploitation of the pervasive public ignorance of the various forms of earth science.  Meanwhile, th...

August 16, 2024

Why is Harris seizing on Donald Trump's policies?

An old joke: A moyel (a professional circumciser of infant boys) was asked how much he was paid for a procedure. “I get five dollars plus tips” was his answer. Kamala Harris’s newly adopted advocacy of excluding tip money from incom...

August 12, 2024

Trump vs. Harris = Familiar vs. Strange

Everybody already knows who and what Donald Trump is. But does anybody really have a clear idea about the electorally unchallenged presumptive Democrat presidential nominee? The time has now come for Democrat operatives to reinvent Kamala Harris in w...

August 1, 2024

The evaporating Kamala Harris

Grab a seat — this is going to be both interesting and horrific. The interesting part is pretty obvious.  The horrific part, however, is about how the political party that once brought us Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Harry...

July 27, 2024

Slow news month

Z-z-z-z-z-z-z… hunh? What? Oh, yeah… that great magician Donald J. Trump just made President Joe Biden disappear. Or did Biden do it to himself? And then the media practically jumped out of its skin to immediately smother Kamala Harris...

July 14, 2024

Climate, Marxism, and other fads

We are publishing continuously today. To see more blog entries, please click here. In the epilogue of his final swipe at climate/weather hysteria, his novel State of Fear, author Michael Crichton brings up the eugenics fad of the late nineteenth a...

July 13, 2024

A feast of schadenfreude

As much as I dislike taking pleasure from observing the misery of others, I can’t help but being delighted by the problems facing the enemies of civilization (A.K.A. today’s progressive Democrats). Well beyond the dilemma revealed by Bide...

July 6, 2024

Thumbnail economics

Disclaimer: I’ve never taken a class in economics.  I was, however, a partner in a startup small business that we ran for 22 years, during which I often dealt with customers, vendors, government authorities, and (ahem) employees....

June 26, 2024

The great mistake

On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the American destroyer USS Maddox. Fire was returned and ultimately there were no U.S. casualties. This, on top of what is now known as a fictitious attack (evidently triggered by false...

June 16, 2024

Trump’s VP and the Twelfth Amendment

There’s a fair amount of speculation these days about whom Trump will choose as a running mate.  Guessing games can often attract a crowd.  The names of Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio, along with even Donald Trump, Jr., are be...

June 10, 2024

Will the Democrats Survive this Year’s Election?

This is obviously a rhetorical question… but it is still based on observations of the real world. Most importantly, the Dems are firmly attached to a seriously unpopular standard-bearer. But, beyond the obvious, Americans and the western world...

June 2, 2024

Gee, I thought Stalin was dead!

Yet his methods persist in New York’s courts.  Stalin’s notorious henchman Lavrentiy Beria famously said that if you identify a person to him, he’ll surely be able to find a crime to accuse him of, and after the usual show...

May 27, 2024

Unmasking the true villain of the Middle East

Way back in 1969, the historian Barbara Tuchman said in an address at California’s Pomona College: “Indeed, I believe we are witnessing something of the same phenomenon of the treatment of Israel at the U.N. compared with its tolerance of...

May 22, 2024

If the Dems ditch Biden, what then?

Douglas MacKinnon, writing in The Hill, recently suggested that the Democrats were going to nominate somebody else at their August convention.  No problem here — and his reason is that Ol’ Joe is so unpopular that anybody else w...

May 10, 2024

The Democrats could use a Donald Trump of their own

Serious competition is a wonderful thing… for the consumers of the results. Meanwhile, America is just waking up to the true meaning of the Trump phenomenon. The Democrats’ “Squad” is an ideological perversion that has seriou...

May 4, 2024

Hamas and Joe Biden meet the law of unintended consequences

Regardless of any particular details, the pandemic of Hamas-inspired campus unrest has pushed news of Trump’s hush money trial down to well below the fold.  It has also put Biden’s presidency in a most uncomfortable spotlight....

April 22, 2024

With a name like 'gefilte,' it’s got to be good

Yes again, Passover is upon us. Time to celebrate the escape from bondage and eat the bread of affliction. But really, what were the folks in marketing thinking when they introduced a product named gefilte fish? Gefilte kind of means “ground up...

April 16, 2024

Aww, Israel -- Don't hurt 'em

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Really? Back in the days of Hitler and Mussolini, they were very much inclined to make fun of the “flabby democracies.” That stereotype has now been substantiated. Ever since last October 7th, it...

April 7, 2024

Corporate greed feeds a world in need

In the 1967 film The Flim-Flam Man, George C. Scott plays a 19th-century traveling rural swindler.  Near the beginning, he utters a memorable phrase: “Greed and ignorance will never let you down.” In the aftermath of the 2009...

March 29, 2024

The Key Bridge collapse and the Tao Te Ching

Within the classic Taoist book of wisdom is found the parable of the empty boat.  Fishermen, casting their lines from the banks of a stream, get all entangled when an empty boat drifts past them.  They all laugh, knowing that it w...

March 27, 2024

A brief history of the US presidency

After George Washington, things got kind of dicey.  Jefferson verses Adams happened twice.  The first time, Adams won, and the next time, Jefferson won.  Sound familiar?  The election of 1800 showcased the intr...

March 26, 2024

Engineered Reactions

It doesn’t take a lot of perception to realize how stupid, or rather gullible, are the adherents to leftist ideology. How else could someone believe that the drug-addicted human trash littering our world are only here because greedy landlords a...

March 17, 2024

Bernie jumps the shark

America’s most conspicuous political clown has finally overestimated the ignorance of his followers. I’ve always doubted Bernie’s ability to do arithmetic, but his appeal for cutting another day off the work week without reducing...

March 11, 2024

Some china shops deserve to have bulls

Were Donald J. Trump to not actually exist… we’d have to invent him.  The corruption and malfeasance of the American political establishment have brought consequences that have been accumulating for years.  In other words: thin...

March 4, 2024

This year’s possibility of political surprises increases with the level of discontent amongst the voter class

Polling is one thing.  Ultimate results of political contests are something else.  There is a profound, lingering disaffection with the way our “leaders” are doing business.  Some poll respondents may be shading their repli...

March 2, 2024

Why October 7?

Ever since the horrible events of that day last year, I’ve been scratching my head, wondering, why did the Hamas attackers go to such grotesque extremes such as raping women to death and chopping off the heads of babies?  Add to this ...

February 25, 2024

The taxman cometh...but for whom?

Lurking in plain view is a real monster — a monster so dangerous that it puts even imaginary demons to shame.  I’m talking about the repeatedly proposed wealth tax. Early in the Biden administration, our (not) esteemed Treasu...

February 24, 2024

The layman’s guide to saving the planet

Years ago, it occurred to me that just about everybody is a devoted environmentalist, since nobody wants to live on a burned-out husk.  We just disagree on what the real problems are and what to do about them. It so happens that the firs...

February 18, 2024

The presidential dilemma

It is beyond ironic that, of all the current wannabes, Donald J. Trump fills the presidential shoes better than any of the others.  He was never before a politician, and he has managed to turn the whole process upside-down.  Why?...

February 10, 2024

This year’s political tea leaves

Much like a weather forecast, political polls become more accurate as you get closer to the target moment.  As of now, it looks as if the Democrats are in for a well deserved epic drubbing.  My freelance opinion is that, in spite ...

January 23, 2024

What happened to the Democrats?

Back in the day, Democrat politicians were not nearly as radical-left as they are now.  What happened? For example, John F. Kennedy was an ardent cold warrior.  In the campaign of 1960, he accused the Eisenhower administration ...

January 15, 2024

Twilight of the Democrats

I often say that the greatest political miracle in of all American history is that the Democrats somehow managed to survive the Civil War. They did, however, have to wait until 1884 to win a national election when New York governor Grover Cleveland d...

January 8, 2024

Meritocracy and the Democrats

What is painfully obvious but not often said in so many words, is that today’s Democrat party is caught in a trap of its own making. Back when they got clobbered in the midterm election of 2010, Dan Balz of the Washington Post announced on Publ...

January 7, 2024

The jackboot of Jewish imperialism?

Oy!  Those Jews...conquering the world, one Palestinian at a time.  As per the mainstream media, the dinky little sliver of dirt known as Israel is an aggressive expansionist empire.  History, however, offers a different perspective. ...

January 5, 2024

A new American subculture

In the early years after WW2, perception of the American human landscape took on a new meaning.  For starters, millions of young men and many women were forever changed.  At the time of Pearl Harbor, America was incredibly corny....

December 29, 2023

The problem with freedom…

…is that it stands in the way of tyranny. Some years ago, there was a minor revolt within the ranks of the Sierra Club. A rogue faction wanted the club to declare unchecked immigration to be harmful to the environment. The San Francisco Chroni...

December 15, 2023

Breaking news! Climate change is normal!

Near downtown Los Angeles, on Wilshire Blvd. between Fairfax and La Brea, is a particularly important paleontological site.  The La Brea Tar Pits are an extraordinary window into the Pleistocene, the most recent ice age to envelop the Earth...

December 10, 2023

I sure am glad I’m not Biden’s food-taster!

Few things are as enjoyable as watching one’s political opponents wrestle on the horns of a dilemma.  Today’s Democrats are trying to reconcile a seriously unpopular incumbent president who’s intending to seek re-election ...

December 5, 2023

What ever happened to Kurdistan?

Unlike “Palestinians,” Kurds are a specific ethnic group with a long history. For the record, the term “Palestinian” is a fictitious contrivance currently used to define the Arabs from various nations who migrated into Pale...

November 28, 2023

Suppose they gave a housing crisis and nobody came?

The Atlantic just posted an article about our domestic housing market that was so full of holes that I just had to comment. First off, the author kind of presents our housing situation as some kind of blender-homogenized and thus uniform condition th...

November 24, 2023

Meet the New Dark Age

Not quite the same as the old Dark Age. The old Dark Age happened when the corporate governmental structure of Rome collapsed, allowing hordes of tribal heathens to overrun what had been the empire’s domain. Today’s Dark Age is instead ha...

November 13, 2023

It’s really quite easy to rewrite history

But you still won’t be able to change what has actually happened in the past.  For starters, the Civil War really happened… no matter how many statues get torn down or places renamed.  Fort Liberty in North Carolina was, unt...

October 29, 2023

A guess at what World War III will look like

The following is nothing more than an educated guess. The current military conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East will not likely end via negotiated armistice, though Mr. Putin may figure out a face-saving way to cut his losses, while Isr...

October 23, 2023

The worst kind of anti-Semite

As my father used to say, the worst kind of anti-Semite is a Jewish anti-Semite. The most infamous of this breed was Karl Marx. Both of his grandfathers were rabbis, but he hated Jews. Why? Because they’re so bourgeois -- shopkeepers, doctors, ...

October 17, 2023

Corporate culture in the two major parties

Here in the U.S., we have two large political corporations, also known as parties.  One is called the Democrats and the other is called the Republicans.  Each has its own unique corporate culture. The Democrats are known to lin...

October 11, 2023

Did Hamas just jump the shark?

Just as the latest invasion began in Israel, swarms of the usual suspects began protesting in front of Israeli consulates in various American cities.  Some of the anti-Israeli demonstrators were themselves Jewish...being committed leftists ...

October 4, 2023

Whom did Trump harm?

Mr. Trump's current legal "issue," brought on by the New York state attorney general, concerning the values he placed on various properties, is way beyond absurd.  First off, there's no injured party — he satisfied a...

September 26, 2023

The Call for a Four-day Work Week

Some years ago, I visited some old lefty friends, who both just happened to have MBAs.  A periodic recession was happening then and we started talking about macro-economics.  Being lefties, they advocated cutting the work week to four days ...

September 22, 2023

The curse of corporate culture

If you were to do an internet search, you'd find mostly positive statements about the benefits of corporate culture.  Then again, if you were to look for a book about the evils of communism published in China, Cuba, or Venezuela —...

September 15, 2023

Hamlet ponders: To impeach or not to impeach?

A particularly welcome benefit of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that inquiries will soon begin into whether President Biden should be impeached, is that the mainstream media now have to cover it and abandon their virtual blackout of the...

September 13, 2023

When a comic strip gets to the heart of (old) America

Way back when newspapers were only in the form of ink on paper, there was a comic strip that was so popular that a Broadway musical (1956 — lyrics by Johnny Mercer) and subsequent movie version were made.  It was unique in many ways, ...

September 8, 2023

The problem with the death penalty...

...is that our society produces way too many heinous villains who truly deserve it.  The primary purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent from predations by the guilty.  However, euphemisms on the subject ...

September 5, 2023

We're all witnesses to an attempted political murder

Never before has the American people been subjected to the obnoxious spectacle of a former president being relentlessly pursued by craven partisans using government (read: taxpayer-funded) resources.  One explanation involves Mr. Trump'...

August 25, 2023

It's Trump's party now

In case you haven't noticed, the old Republican Party is lying quietly in the boneyard of history.  Gone are the Doles and McCains.  The Romneys and Murkowskis will soon be joining them.  The latest demonstration of ...

August 10, 2023

False history and its unwitting victims

If I were president, the first thing I would do is create a new Cabinet department: the Department of Fatuous Gestures (DFG).  Virtue-signaling is way too disorganized to reach its full potential.  Schools, streets, sports teams, ...

August 6, 2023

A brief, sad history of bias in the news

In the beginning, there were newspapers — just paper and ink.  The penny the reader paid to buy a newspaper wasn't intended to cover the complete cost of production.  The publisher also sold commercial notices to adverti...

July 30, 2023

Watergate vs. Bidengate

Dialing the time machine back to 1972, we find a previous presidential scandal.  Though not directly involved, Richard Nixon was the focus of blame.  A handful of operatives in Nixon's campaign and administration performed a ...

July 23, 2023

Orwellian or Kafkaesque?

Or both?  There's no doubt that these are atypical times.  And it is human nature to find some kind of template in which to fit them. Longstanding suspicions of the evil nature of many powerful members of our government(s) ...

July 9, 2023

What part of 'shall not be infringed' do leftists not understand?

With nauseating predictability, the usual political hacks clamor to compromise our Second Amendment every time some ghastly crime involving a firearm occurs.  Seldom if ever is attention paid to the workings of the twisted mind that actuall...

July 5, 2023

Working around Kamala

It has become more than just painfully obvious that Joe Biden is not fit to run for a second term.  What political strategists call optics, however, is a serious impediment for the Dems in avoiding an electoral disaster.  They are...

July 1, 2023

The leftist scourge of artificial economics

Artificial economics is almost entirely a political phenomenon, rather than a technologic one like artificial intelligence.  In The Myth of the Robber Barons, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. coined the term "political entrepreneur" in order to d...

June 4, 2023

Artificial intelligence is nothing new

It has underpinned leftist dogma for many years. A modern paragon of the artificial intelligentsia has to be the alleged economist Robert B. Reich.  His emanations are so nonsensical that space does not allow for a representative account...

May 28, 2023

What to do with Joe Biden?

At times like these, I sure am glad I'm not a Democrat.  While several aspiring Republican notables are throwing their hats into the ring, the Democrats' standard-bearer is collapsing in the polls.  Having another full ter...

May 18, 2023

The great debt ceiling hoax

In my reading of U.S. history, I've never come across a moment of financial distress that was caused by the statutory limit on the federal government's ability to sell bonds and other debt instruments.  I may still be wrong, but it ...

May 16, 2023

Why did CNN give Trump such a huge break?

Just guessing here, but I think they simply believed their own BS — and expected such a perceived lame demagogue as The Donald to self-destruct when given the chance in front of a national audience.  Boy, were they wrong!  N...

May 9, 2023

A government at war...with itself

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, U.S. politics lost an imposed discipline that had been necessary during the course of such a bipolar conflict as the Cold War.  This became particularly evident two years later, when a black conserva...

May 7, 2023

Welcome to Economic Fantasyland

For starters, there's a meme making the rounds today that inflation is really being caused by the price-gouging being heaped upon innocent consumers by greedy corporations.  Rather than cut back on government borrowing and the printing ...

May 5, 2023

Cinco de Mayo: A consequence of French antisemitism

For the record, Mexican Independence Day is September 16th.  On that day in 1810, Mexico became the last major Spanish colony in the western hemisphere to declare independence from the king of Spain—who just happened to have been taken pri...

April 9, 2023

50 is the New 70 degrees Fahrenheit

Gee, record snowfall practically everywhere.  Many have been enduring well-below-normal spring temperatures.  When is that atmospheric heat-trapping going to kick in?  If I had mastered Photoshop, I'd have put togeth...

April 7, 2023

How much did Trump have to pay DA Bragg to indict him?

According to various outlets, the Trump campaign collected over $5 million the first day after the news of the indictment broke.  Over a quarter of the donors were newcomers to ever supporting a candidate.  Add to this the closing of ranks ...

March 31, 2023

The martyrdom of Donald J. Trump

Were it not for the crucifixion of Jesus, there'd be no Christians.  Such a dramatic end of a narrative ensured the historic importance of its subject.  This is now happening in the case of former president Donald Trump. ...

March 27, 2023

Living with Sapiens

A particularly "woke" Progressive friend recommended that I read Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.  After others also pushed it on me, I let her lend me her copy.  Needless to say, ...

March 15, 2023

Watching the wheels fall off the statist juggernaut

Most governments are subject to corruption.  However, governments that are also subject to any form of electoral politics are compelled to conceal or at least camouflage their corruption.  When the news media, AKA the Fourth Estat...

March 5, 2023

Thank you, Hillary Clinton!

Reaching back through the mists of time, I am remembering the midterm elections of 1994.  As the returns came in, ABC's Peter Jennings was compelled to accuse America's voters of throwing a temper tantrum for giving the GOP control ...

March 1, 2023

Are we really gearing up for World War 3?

There's recently been a lot of loose talk about the looming possibility of a global great power conflict being foreshadowed by the Russia-Ukraine War.  Of particular concern is the quality of American readiness — or the lack there...

February 20, 2023

White House plagiarizes Marx and releases its ‘blueprint’ to address the housing crisis

On this planet that we call Earth, there are only two kinds of people: owners and renters. There are various reasons for renting: young folks are typically not yet financially ready for ownership; they lack the proper credit history; and, most import...

February 12, 2023

The 2024 lines are being drawn now

Back in the nineteen sixties, Buffalo Springfield captured the mood of that time with their hit song: "For What It's Worth."  Today's world is similarly aligned, but over a new confrontation: dogmatic know-it-alls versus t...

January 16, 2023

Climate change talking points

For the record, climate change is real — but that's nothing new.  Just ask a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.  Atmospheric heat-trapping is also real, or else everything around us would freeze solid every night ...

December 31, 2022

A plague of micromanagers

Remember being told not to touch your face?  And to always wash your hands for at least twenty seconds?  Yeah, the COVID surprise unleashed a whole swarm of officious, know-it-all petty dictators.  They were he...

December 19, 2022

Why reparations now?

The absurdity of the concept of reparations for slavery, an institution that ended several generations ago, is beyond mind-boggling.  But there's a blatantly cynical reason for the sudden lurch in that direction: formerly reliable Black...

December 17, 2022

Fusion confusion

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLL) in Northern California has recently gotten a lot of attention.  It was just announced that they finally fused some hydrogen atoms and got more energy out than they put in ...

December 3, 2022

Vicious dogma

I recently finished reading Fareed Zakaria's Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.  Before I ever opened the book, I ventured to guess what his primary conclusion would be.  I was kind of shocked, and ironically disappoi...

November 29, 2022

The many quirks of the presidency throughout history

At its founding, the United States may well have been the first nation ever to have a president.  Presiding over the federal government, the president has somewhat limited veto authority over acts of the Legislature and is commander-in-chie...

November 26, 2022

What to do with Biden?

Now that Republicans have accomplished their much-anticipated control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats are faced with a serious dilemma.  How are they supposed to remain a competitive political force while strapped to a dodder...

November 14, 2022

The Myth of the Community

Some years ago, my barber’s son ran a losing campaign for mayor of Oakland.  He blew several house payments on a very prominent billboard that belched out “Unity to the Community!”  Being a mortgage loan broker by trade, h...

November 12, 2022

Winners and losers in the midterms

The obvious big winner for the Republicans in last Tuesday's midterm election is Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis.  Not only did he hold on to his current job, but the overwhelming margin of his victory and the effectiveness of his ...

November 7, 2022

In defense of electoral skepticism

Nowadays, whenever Democrats beat the odds and pull a victory out of (well, you know where), any serious doubt that is cast upon their success is considered by them to be a criminal act.  However, when Republicans shellack the Democrats, de...

October 16, 2022

One great way to stop species extinction

The other morning, my local CBS radio station (KCBS) ran a story about the drastic decline in the populations of wild animal species over the previous fifty years. It was mostly a rant by a "scientist" from the World Wildlife Fund....

October 8, 2022

Impact of the Dobbs decision has only just begun to take effect

As the Dems are crossing their fingers and hoping against hope that the abortion issue will save their bacon in this year's midterms, the issue is instead taking a back seat to much more compelling economic and social problems.  What is...

September 14, 2022

A heat wave, and now the climate nuts go even more nuts

Having just survived the first real heat wave of this year's summer, I am tragically amused by all of the new climate change hysteria being broadcast.  You see, there's this handy-dandy tool that is so useful in observing earthly ph...

September 11, 2022

Looking back on 9/11

When I awoke that Tuesday morning, I turned on my radio and suddenly realized that the world would never again be the same.  I went to my weekly office meeting, where one of my colleagues asked if I had any idea as to how long this turmoil ...

September 3, 2022

Still waiting for inflation

Yeah, prices have been going up...except for one thing: gold.  What we have been experiencing is shortage-generated price inflation.  Shortages of various commodities obviously cause them to become more expensive, while ...

August 31, 2022

Manned space flight is just another form of welfare

Due to advances in technology, there is now renewed interest in manned space flight.  I hope I'm not alone in asking, "What's the point?"  For extraterrestrial scientific discovery, robots do a much better job at...

August 27, 2022

Left unsaid about college debt forgiveness

According to the U.S. tax code, forgiven debt is taxable as ordinary income.  In real estate there is such a thing as a "short" sale, where the bank holding the mortgage agrees to a sale where the proceeds don't comp...

August 22, 2022

Thoughts on the new civil war

The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political.  It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone.  Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is...

August 19, 2022

The martyrdom of Donald J. Trump

If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, there wouldn’t have ever been any Christians. Had Mr. Trump eschewed politics and just remained a flamboyant, media-genic real estate developer, jack-booted thugs would have never ransacked his home…...

August 15, 2022

The trouble with water

Gee, droughts and floods all happening at the same time.  Because of climate change? Or just newsworthy consequences of ordinary weather?  Some European rivers are running so low they’re losing their navigability.  Kentucky and V...

August 8, 2022

The enigma that could be Trump

Will Trump run again for president in 2024?  Nobody really knows.  My advice to him would be to keep 'em guessing.  When asked directly if he's planning to be a candidate, he should steal a line from Jesus and re...

August 3, 2022

Obsession with diversity is costing us

The last thing someone being prepped for surgery wants to hear is that the person performing the procedure got into medical school by way of affirmative action.  This also goes for passengers on a jet liner when they're being told about...

July 24, 2022

Mark your calendar for Liz Cheney's downfall

Ol' Liz Cheney will be tossed into the bone yard of defunct politicians on August 16.  Some, maybe much, will be said about the relevance of Liz's demise as to November's national midterm election.  But Wyoming isn...

July 22, 2022

Taking hysteria to the bank

The groundwork for climate activism was laid many years ago.  Some of you may remember the great awakening known as the "New Age."  I was in college when the organic produce fad really got going.  My cult radar...

July 16, 2022

A chance encounter with a real politician

Most days I like to take a walk around my neighborhood.  One day, while going along an unpaved and rather hilly street, I encountered a well dressed woman, who looked up at a house that had four flights of stairs to the front door. ...

July 8, 2022

Socialism as the tragedy of the commons

Way back in 1972, I interviewed Garrett Hardin about his famous essay.  Although he didn't know me, I still had an inside track on meeting with him since I had recently graduated from the college where he taught: U.C. Santa Barbara....

June 30, 2022

A different way of looking at inflation

I once saw a professor of economics on TV make the case for gold having a particularly stable value.  He said that for the (then) 150-year record of wholesale commodity prices, an ounce of gold always bought the same amount of pork bellies....

June 25, 2022

The real message of Dobbs

What just happened is that the U.S. Supreme Court has released itself from a prison of its own making.  And, of course, the consequences of this decision are being grotesquely exaggerated. All that has really happened is that SCOTUS has deter...

June 23, 2022

American journalism is just about done

I just came upon an article in the N.Y. Times, via RCP, about the attempts by evil conservatives to use the courts to block government efforts to limit the production of "greenhouse" gases.  It caught my attention because the auth...

June 19, 2022

Why not nuclear?

Since the dummy in the White House has totally caved in to the Green New Deal, the serious importance of generated electricity has become profoundly obvious to the rest of us.  It now seems that, by promoting the foolish assumption that ...

June 15, 2022

Getting ready for the next banana

Let's travel back through the mists of time, to the days when Jimmy Carter was president.  Carter's chief economic adviser, Alfred Kahn, achieved historic significance when he revealed that he had been told not to use the word ...

June 13, 2022

The Green New Deal crashes into the rocks

What a surprise!  Carbon-based energy is much more important than we were led to believe.  A slight reduction in domestic resource development has sent seismic shock waves throughout our economy.  Bottom line: Folks are ...

June 8, 2022

The big 'problem' for which COVID is the gruesome solution

It's no secret that COVID is mostly harmful to (ahem) senior citizens.  Also, there's a significant decline in the number of participants in the workforce.  What is left unmentioned in all of this is the demographic impact...

June 5, 2022

The Democrat tax strategy that will tighten the noose around the middle class's neck

Current Treasury secretary Janet Yellen laid a colossal rotten egg when she floated the trial balloon of imposing a tax on unrealized capital gains.  Not only would the gain be subject to possibly losing some of its value after the tax is c...

June 2, 2022

The term 'military-style' gives the leftist gun control game away

If the opponents of the Second Amendment are truly honest about their objective, why do they have to keep lying about the weapons they want to ban?  A partial revelation is found in the term "military-style"...meaning that a rifle...

May 28, 2022

It's Obama's fault

Our current period of political turmoil can be considered to have begun with the presidential election of 2008.  The meteoric rise of a virtual unknown from the Illinois state Senate to the White House is fairly unprecedented.  Th...

May 22, 2022

What difference does the 'hate' in 'hate crime' make?

News reports are crackling with the breathless announcement that the Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, is also being charged as the perpetrator of a hate crime — in addition to ten counts of murder in the first degree.  I could practic...

May 18, 2022

A leftist wonders why we're so polarized

No, I did not go out and seek this reading material.  A "progressive" friend gave it to me.  It was left over from a bulk purchase she made for a class she taught on (ahem) critical thinking.  The book was writ...

May 12, 2022

What happens after our housing bubble collapses?

Stephen Moore just published a good article forecasting a repeat of the 2008 collapse of the housing market.  Political meddling in what should be a free and fair market is likely to lead to a déjà vu financial crisis....

May 11, 2022

Abortion in the US before Roe v. Wade

From 1971 to 1973, I was an environmental journalist who did a lot of work on abortion and birth control.  The size and growth rate of the human population were considered a significant environmental issue.  I was in my early twen...

May 4, 2022

Yes, abortion is infanticide

Infanticide has always been a serious component of the ugly side of human nature.  Archaeologists have done a lot of digging in Ashkelon, an ancient town in what is typically known as the Holy Land.  They found the town's sewer, and, in...

May 2, 2022

The curse of public vagrancy

Welcome to the Third World...especially if you live along America's West Coast.  After all, it was really closer than you once thought it was.  "Encampments" of squatters abound in parks, in parking lots, under and a...

April 26, 2022

Hypocritical leftists should stop carrying on about misinformation

One thing the left is particularly good at is euphemism.  Stalin made his bones as a Bolshevik thug by robbing banks in order to fund the revolution; they called it expropriation.  Now the obviously desperate Progressives are poun...

April 20, 2022

Triggers don't pull themselves

More predictable than a morning sunrise is the knee-jerk call for increased restrictions on gun ownership every time some heinous event embarrasses our nation.  True, such tragedies occur elsewhere, but they are more likely to involve some ...

April 11, 2022

Truth is the first casualty in war

Competing narratives continue to perplex distant observers of the Russia-Ukraine War.  Recently on these "pages," Leo Goldstein cast doubt about the massacre in Bucha.  Being Ukrainian by birth, he has some reasonable cr...

April 8, 2022

Black Lives Matter and the story of the Exodus

As I walk around my neighborhood, I can't help but notice the plethora of "Black Lives Matter" signs in people's front yards.  My pedestrian mind eventually thought of Passover...and how the Hebrew people marked their door...

April 6, 2022

The War to End All Wars

Way back on April 6th, 1917, the United States entered the First World War.  France, England, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Turkey had already been duking it out for years by then.  Roughly concurrent with America’s entry, Russ...

March 23, 2022

What you can take away from today's news

1) Dictators are dangerous.  Not just to their own subjects, but also to neighboring countries.  Absent the competitive political forces found within even the most corrupt democracies, dictatorships have no way of suppressing the ...

March 12, 2022

The death of baseball bodes ill for the fate of America

Hardly any activity is as typically American as the sport of baseball.  Legend has it that Abner Doubleday, as a general in the Civil War, formalized the sport based on his observations of off-duty soldiers playing a kind of "stick bal...

March 5, 2022

The first major conflict of the Information Age

Thanks to modern telecommunications, the rest of the world has a front-row seat to the devastation unfolding in Ukraine.  The only pleasant possibility is that Ukraine may succeed in defending itself...but at what cost?  And ...

February 26, 2022

Is this the end of the climate change scam?

Perfectly phrased by John Kerry's nonsensical plaint that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will increase the combustion rate of fossil fuels is the abject silliness of the whole concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Particularl...

February 17, 2022

Myths about the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's program

Much mischaracterization surrounds the greatest economic crisis in American history.  For starters, I'm going to skip ahead to the election of 1932, where Franklin Roosevelt defeated the otherwise popular Herbert Hoover to become only t...

February 7, 2022

Robert Reich vs. inflation

Robert B. Reich just posted an article extremely critical of the Federal Reserve.  Go figure.  He's seriously opposed to raising interest rates.  He almost robotically burps out the left's canard that i...

February 4, 2022

Today's truckers in Canada are yesterday's Yellow Vests in France

Back in France, before the pandemic began, there were mass protests against government malfeasance.  Rather than the usual street rabble, these folks were mostly middle-class and upset with artificially increased fuel prices due to a ridicu...

January 31, 2022

Whoopi Goldberg for SCOTUS

In this age of intersectionality, it only matters what you are, not who.  Besides, Whoopi's a pretty likable gal, and she checks all the necessary boxes.  And since Breyer was the last remaining person of t...

January 17, 2022

Crossing the talent desert

A late friend who had been the chairman of a college art department was featured in a documentary video.  In the film, he said that "talent was overrated."  He put the emphasis instead on desire.  Thi...

January 13, 2022

And Atlas continues to shrug

For most of my adult life, I've been told about Ayn Rand's famous novel — but had no idea what it was about.  It was particularly popular among my Libertarian buddies.  So I finally ordered a copy...and when it came,...

December 29, 2021

Note to leftists who hate Joe Manchin: The Senate is NOT supposed to be democratic

File this under "Ignorance isn't really bliss."  It is nothing more than the result of a lack of knowledge. Predictably, the radical progressives in Congress are strenuously kvetching about the failure of their latest ultra...

December 23, 2021

Chesa Boudin faces recall [updated]

In the S.F. Chronicle this week, disgraced district attorney Chesa Boudin posted a "Hail Mary" op-ed in order to defend his record prior to having to endure a recall election.  He claims that retail crime is ac...

December 15, 2021

Will Joe Manchin wake up with a horse's head in his bed?

Thanks to The Godfather, this image is implanted in our collective consciousness.  Obviously, Manchin is holding some serious cards regarding the passage of the "Build Back Better" raid on the Treasury that Democrats in Congr...

December 11, 2021

Economics as human ecology

One way of defining the science of ecology is to say it is the study of the flow of energy through a biological community.  There are food sources, environmental conditions, and various species of flora and fauna (plants and animals for tho...

December 2, 2021

Are you afraid of being scammed out of your home?

For just under $15 per month, in perpetuity, the legality of your homeownership can be protected from identity thieves. Really? Here in California, and most likely elsewhere, in order for a vestee to convey a property title to another person or...

November 26, 2021

'Daddy, what does it mean to be middle-class?'

"Hmmm, that's a pretty good question.  Most folks tend to get the answer wrong — especially those doing the news.  They usually say it is entirely determined by how much money you make — but it really has much...

November 23, 2021

Kamala Harris trapped in intersectional Hell

People are scratching their heads over how or why Kamala Harris got to be vice president.  Obviously, she checks all the boxes: two X-chromosomes, other than white complexion, and sort of to the left of Karl Marx.  Other than vici...

November 21, 2021

What a riot looked like in 1970

Back in the spring of 1970, I was in my final days as a college student.  Living in the off-campus bedroom community of Isla Vista, I balanced work with school.  I was the hired hand on the local egg ranch, which required two hour...

November 19, 2021

The quicksand Democrats have led us to

In A History of the English-Speaking People, Winston Churchill gives a pretty good explanation for the formation of modern political parties: various and modestly diverse factions can find common cause and coalesce into a larger body in order to achi...

November 14, 2021

What if they held an intergalactic conference on how to control the weather...and nobody cared?

There seems to have been something missing from the just concluded Glasgow Conference: seriousness.  You can stage only so much political theater before the audience realizes that it's just play-acting.  Even the highest-ranki...

November 11, 2021

Send in the drones!

My, my, my...how warfare has changed.  Kind of reminds me of a Star Trek episode where our motley crew came upon a planet that was continually at war.  There were, of course, two sides that kept fighting each other.  How...

November 7, 2021

Want to know why commonsense K-12 reform isn't happening?

One of the most sacred cows of the "Progressive" mantra is public education.  On the face of things, the government has no particular knack for educating children.  What it does have is its ability to force homeowners to...

November 5, 2021

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

Way back in 1605, a small group of Catholic conspirators attempted to blow up the British House of Lords.  They rented a small space in the basement, filled it with gunpowder...but were ratted out by an undercover agent on November 5. ...

October 31, 2021

If Republicans want to win, they have to repudiate the 'rule of 65 percent'

Back in my days as a Libertarian activist, a colleague referred to the rule of 65% to describe the ever so slight difference between Democrats and Republicans — which he lumped together as "Republicrats."  He said the only t...

October 28, 2021

The Trump effect is gathering steam

As retrospection becomes ever more clear, knowledge of the impact of the Trump presidency has been taking form — especially when compared to the bunglers who came next.  Perhaps most importantly, and without obvious intent, he managed...

October 24, 2021

Media bias in its two main species

There's always been a bias in news reporting, but now it's really a lot more obvious...and intentional.  Why?  The purpose of news reporting is no longer primarily holding an audience in order to sell advertising, but rath...

October 17, 2021

How California seriously messed up its drought problem

Who else but Mark Twain could have said, "Whiskey is for drinkin'.  Water is for fightin'"? A few years after the Civil War, a one-armed veteran of the conflict did exhaustive explorations of the arid West.  J...

October 14, 2021

Can Democrats get off their bad path to the midterms?

There's a flip-side to the news media's biased support for the political left.  Yep — politicians depend on popularity for their survival, and, since they have long relied on the lapdog media to prop them up, they've gotte...

October 11, 2021

Columbus wasn’t the first to discover America

There are plenty of reasons to consider wandering Vikings to have gotten here before the “Italian Navigator”… but they didn’t make any maps, at least good ones that we know of.  Chinese ships lost some stone anchors...

October 7, 2021

If you touch these precious leftist concepts, you'll get a screaming fit

Affirmative Action: Obviously a euphemism for institutionalized racism.  Apparently, it's OK to discriminate against people of European descent rather than blindly consider merit.  And in the absence of merit, mediocracy becom...

October 5, 2021

The great anti-vaccination hoax

Is “anti-vaxxer” now the new “racist”?  For starters, the only person an anti-vaxxer can harm is himself self and anybody else who really respects his opinion. Now that so many millions have been vaccinated, the d...

October 2, 2021

Sacred cows of the left

Wealth Redistribution: Based on the myth that too much wealth has accumulated in the wrong hands.  No attention is ever paid to the creation of new wealth (AKA making the pie bigger — not just cutting it into more pieces).  ...

September 26, 2021

When climate change causes flood and also causes droughts

Perhaps because of desperation or just plain ignorance, climate alarmists are now blaming both droughts and floods on global warming/climate change.  Where it rains or doesn't is largely determined by prevailing winds, not atmospheric h...

September 19, 2021

Don't tell the global warming fanatics, but we kind of need CO2

Back in 2006, three Mammoth Mountain ski patrollers suffocated when they fell into a crevasse.  The cause of death was attributed to naturally occurring carbon dioxide gas.  Mammoth is a sleeping volcano and various gasses oo...

September 13, 2021

The last of the Wobblies

Years ago, I knew an anarchist.  As a lad from New York, he wound up in the Korean War in Army Intelligence.  The experience turned him into a political radical, though his pre-existing bohemian tendencies may have also contributed to that process.  ...

August 26, 2021

Are the Taliban walking into a trap?

Perhaps it's far-fetched, but the idea at least kind of explains the apparent idiocy of current U.S. policy toward Afghanistan.  Let them think they’ve won.  They drop their guard.  Then we mow them down. Al...

August 26, 2021

Here's what makes automobiles the devil incarnate

It's not their exhaust or the fuel they burn; it's their steering wheels.  Drivers get to go wherever they want to go, even if it's not to a "good" place.  Trains run on rails and don't need steering whee...

August 14, 2021

Why all the 'climate crisis' mumbo-jumbo doesn't add up

Fear is a great motivator, but it comes with a catch.  It tends to inhibit good decision-making.  Demagogues love it because it works so well.  Right now, the Northern Hemisphere is having serious heat waves in many loca...

August 13, 2021

The plight of tree-hugging trust fund baby

This is not an easy story to tell because it's so personal.  For most of my life I had a very close friend who was the archetypical tree-hugging trust fund baby.  His mother's father amassed an adequate fortune after escaping a tsar...

August 11, 2021

A qualified defense of globalism

Back in the day, I was a partner in a printing company.  For the first ten years, we used only one type of press — a model that had been in production for decades.  There were so many of these presses in circulation that we ...

August 9, 2021

How World War 2 Shaped Our Lives

What is usually left out of narratives concerning World War 2 is the fact that, during the war, its outcome was particularly uncertain.  Those of us who were born after the war's end have always known it to be a victory for our side....

August 4, 2021

What leftists just don't get about economics

Where do I begin?  I think I'll start with the "Green New Deal."  Proponents emphasize the zillions of "green" jobs that will be created, putting everybody to work for a noble cause.  What could b...

August 1, 2021

I am sick and tired of being told about this virus

I remember before Jonas Salk's polio vaccine — folks were worried, but they had other things to care about as well.  Two rocks off the coast of Taiwan, Quemoy and Matsu, grabbed a lot of headlines.  The St. Louis Browns ...

July 29, 2021

Sure, we all can lie, but should we?

Back in the day, when Dianne Feinstein was a lowly San Francisco supervisor, she proposed an ordinance making it a crime to say something that isn't true in a political statement.  Irrespective of the First Amendment, I wondered then wh...

July 28, 2021

Inflation might be sneaking past you

How strange it is that after and during so many disruptions to "normal" economic activity...we are still being told by official "experts" that whatever flashes of inflation we are noticing will mostly just be temporary. ...

July 22, 2021

Why do so many people take Bernie Sanders seriously?

"Hey, Bernie!  You've got a part in a picture!" An old friend, who was chairman of a college art department, once told me a caricature is a drawing of a person that looks more like him than he looks like himself.....

July 15, 2021

'Daddy, where does electricity come from?'

"Just look out the window.  See those wires?  That's where electricity comes from." "But how does it get into the wires?" "At the other end of the wires, there's sort of a factory that h...

June 23, 2021

Swastikas in the brickwork

Sort of a proverb: If you look for something hard enough, you'll eventually find it — even if it's not really there. During our current moment, public discourse is obsessed with racism.  In a population i...