Our pool had turned into a swamp. On July 23, 2020, we’d finished draining, cleaning and painting it, and were just starting to fill it back up when the thunder came…and with it, the toads. About 8–10 smallish spotted toads frolic’d through the night, and in the morning when we…

I wrote this piece several years ago but never posted it. Posting it now in case any of the ideas here are useful. Statement of Problem: False information presented as fact and shared on social media is obviously a serious problem. Popularity of an item does not generally equate to truthfulness. So ‘like’s…

Telling bad policy, bad political theories or models, from good is not hard — does it harm innocent people? Ah, you say, but at a certain level of goverment all policy harms someone. The test is, when we find a particular innocent person harmed, what is the response? A good…

“They had a quota. This is common knowledge in Xinjiang.” These words struck a chilling resonance with me, when I was speaking this morning to someone close to one of the young men in the Uyghur labor camps. I had asked how he had been taken. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about…

Happy birthday, America! Or if not happy, then at least in pursuit of it. The inspirational sentiments in the Declaration of Independence have always been aspirational — that is, things we aspire to even if they are not current reality. We declared that “all men are created equal” while slavery…