Creaturehood

Walking the Line

The Classroom Is the Census Heritage was never a photograph. Coppell already did the counting. I live in Plano, Texas. I have watched this county change from the parks, the drop-off lines, and the streets I walked with my kids. I wrote that change into Restore the American Melting Pot in April. I wrote the native-versus-native split into Divided Among Ourselves the next day. I wrote the H-1B housing tape into American Families Gain Ground in June: puja rooms, spice kitchens, Dallaspuram, then the first slack in the line when the visa tap tightened. This week the country tried to have…

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Watch the Diner: The Regulatory Capture of the AI Health Code

The Restaurant Chain Wants a Smoking Ban and a Living Wage Who Writes the Health Code? I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I said it when the argument came down to a pad and a hearing. I will say it again in a room every town already knows. Two weeks ago the question on the pad was the hall. Neighbors. Load. A ledger and a vote. Creaturehood was the measure then because particular people still have to live there after the ribbon. This month the same men are selling…

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Compute and Creaturehood

Data Centers Have Neighbors Compute will find a home. The only live civic question is whether the neighbors are treated as creatures or as throughput. I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I will say it again with the argument on the ground. The demand for compute is not a zoning category. It is load. It will clear. It will clear on a brownfield with its own generation, on a river that still has surplus power, behind a posted payment in lieu of taxes, in the next county that wants…

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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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A Time for Choosing, Again

Steeling Our Patriotic Reserve on America’s 250th As we mark the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan’s words from more than six decades ago echo with fresh urgency: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.” This wasn’t mere rhetoric from…

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I Am a Patriot

I Refuse to Apologize for Loving My Country I stand in the same east Plano neighborhood where my wife and I built our life together more than two decades ago. The streets I walked with my kids still carry the echoes of Friday night football lights, backyard barbecues, and the quiet rhythm of working families putting down roots. The mosques have multiplied nearby, the languages in the parks have shifted, and the familiar anchors, the corner stores, the churches where generations were baptized and buried, the schools that once felt like an extension of home, have changed in ways that test…

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Poppy’s Witness

A Father’s Heart, a Mother's Stand, and the Sanctity of Every Life I need to talk about this raw, the way I write when the curtain gets yanked all the way back. No polish for the sake of comfort. No slogans that let us off the hook. Just the naked testimony of a father who has walked the road the culture now debates in headlines and Instagram Stories. When Jesse and Ashley Ridgway, the YouTubers behind McJuggerNuggets, announced they had terminated their pregnancy after learning their child had Trisomy 21—Down syndrome—they described the condition as “objectively s---ty from a health perspective.”…

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Appropriate Forum

Restoring Balance Between Adult Freedom and Childhood Innocence I am the son of a gay father. I loved him deeply, and I carry the ache of a moment when, at thirteen, my blunt and clumsy words wounded him in a way that time never fully healed. For years I regretted not bridging that gap while he was still here. As a father myself now, I find those old regrets mixing with new fears: not that my children will reject someone for who they are, but that they will be denied the protected childhood my parents tried to give me. This is…

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Decline Is a Choice

Inside America’s Homeless Industrial Complex I’ve been watching this crisis up close for years, and the longer it drags on, the clearer it becomes: decline is a choice. America doesn’t have a homelessness problem because we lack money, compassion, or housing. We have one because we’ve built a self-perpetuating system that profits from failure, normalizes disorder, imports clients, and refuses to acknowledge what actually works. Call it the Homeless Industrial Complex. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s public choice economics in action: billions in annual spending, thousands of careers, powerful ideological commitments, and entrenched institutions all aligned around managing a problem…

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The Mental Health Crisis of AI Transition

AI Is Training Your Replacement: Start Training Yourself to Leave At Meta this week, thousands of employees sat at their desks, fingers flying across keyboards, mouse clicking through workflows, while invisible software recorded every movement. The Model Capability Initiative (Meta’s aptly named tracking program) logged keystrokes, cursor paths, clicks, and occasional screen snapshots. All of it fed into training AI agents meant to replicate those very tasks. Meanwhile, an internal directory refreshed with the quiet dread of knowing that on May 20, roughly 8,000 colleagues (10% of the workforce) would receive the layoff email. Some cried in the shower before work.…

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