Monthly Archives: August 2026

The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VI

The Orinoco Settlement N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, and V of this series. January 3 was the writ. August 28 was the recording. This series has treated the Western Hemisphere as an operating theater, not a neighborhood watch. Part II called the Orinoco the biggest real-estate deal since Manhattan. Part IV flew Maduro and Cilia Flores to New York. Part V carried the same logic north to Greenland. Friday closed the southern flank. President Trump and Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, put a number on the prize named before the raid. Seventeen fields. Sixty-five billion barrels. A private company…

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What Flock Actually Sells

The Pole Is Not the Product Flock did not sell Texas a camera. It leased cities a searchable graph of other people's cars. People keep arguing about a black box on a pole. Police chiefs hold up recovered trucks and missing children. Opponents hold up 1984. City managers hold up a vendor invoice and a transparency portal. All three groups talk about a camera because a camera photographs well and fits on a council agenda. Here is the thing the agenda never quite names. Flock Safety did not become a national fixture by selling poles. It sold a searchable graph of…

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Remembering Dolly Parton

Thank You, Dolly Dolly Parton always seemed like a beloved aunt to me growing up. That is the odd miracle of her life. A girl from a cabin in the Tennessee hills, so poor her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal, became someone the whole country claimed as kin. Singers, presidents, ballplayers, rock stars, and people who never bought a country record all said the same thing when she left us: there will never be another. The Opry Girl She was a teenager when she walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage. Johnny Cash introduced…

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The Future is Now

Politics on the Ground, Compute in Orbit I’ve never been a futurist, much less a maximal one. But Elon Musk has shown me that, in the words of the late George Allen, the future is now. Allen did not mean the distant horizon had arrived on schedule. He meant he refused to treat the present as a waiting room. He traded future draft picks for veterans who could win games immediately because he rejected the idea that the important results belonged to some later, more convenient decade. The motto was operational. It still is. I have spent years treating artificial intelligence…

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Why the Midterm Polls Are Already Broken

The Pressure Line the Polls Refuse to Measure The numbers lied in Michigan. They lied in Wisconsin. They will lie again. In Michigan, the final wave of public polls showed Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Haley Stevens by double digits. Some had him up fourteen, eighteen, even twenty points in the closing days. The actual result was a one-point race. Stevens conceded, but the margin told the real story. In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state representative, led late surveys by twenty points and more. Marquette and others had her comfortably ahead. She lost by a fraction of a point to David…

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Speak for Mackinac, Speak for America

Creaturehood and the American Character I have a practice that keeps me honest. From time to time I sit with the full weight of every oath I have ever sworn. Not the polished ones of adulthood, but the first ones: the clumsy, absolute promises of early childhood, the ones made when the world still felt straightforward and my word felt like the only currency that mattered. I do not treat them as relics. I treat them as live obligations. The man I am now must answer for the boy who made them. Circumstance matters. The light I had at the time…

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The Agriculture Lobby’s Amnesty Bill

SAWA: The Sneer at American Workers In April I went through the DIGNIDAD Act section by section and called it what it is: an awful amnesty bill slicker and roughly four times larger than the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli scam. It still sits in committee. It should die there. Now comes the industry-specific sequel. H.R. 9535, the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026, introduced by House Agriculture Chairman G.T. Thompson, arrives wrapped in the language of modernization and food security. Supporters insist it contains no pathway to citizenship. They call it practical reform so farmers can secure a legal workforce. Read the bill.…

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