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Draining the Carbuncle

Trump's Bold Surgery on a Festering Global Threat In the annals of medicine, there's an ancient maxim that cuts straight to the heart of decisive action: "ubi pus, ibi evacua"—where there is pus, there evacuate it. This isn't some quaint Latin proverb gathering dust on a shelf; it's a timeless surgical principle, harking back to Hippocratic wisdom, demanding that when an infection festers into a swollen, toxic abscess—a carbuncle, if you will—you don't pussyfoot around with half-measures or endless palliatives. You lance it, drain it, and give the body a fighting chance to heal before the poison spreads and claims the…

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Adieu, Ayatollah

The New York Times Has Been Wrong About Iran for More Than a Century The New York Times has spent more than a century getting Iran wrong—sometimes through outright distortion, more often through a stubborn refusal to see the board as it actually is. Pull up a chair, maybe grab a good cigar if that's your thing, and let's walk through the record. It starts in 1979 and lands right here in late February 2026, with the paper once again sounding the alarm over decisive action while ignoring the century-old machinery that made that action inevitable. 1979: “Trusting Khomeini” – The…

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A Primary Means to Focus Minds

Texas Tremors: Primaries Reshaping GOP Procedural Boldness In the shadowed halls of the United States Senate, where procedural intricacies often eclipse substantive debate, the current impasse over the SAVE America Act serves as a stark reminder of institutional inertia. Drawing from the legacy of Senate gridlock under leaders like Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell—an era that diminished hands-on floor expertise among establishment figures and elevated conservatives as the adept tacticians—we find ourselves at a crossroads. The SAVE Act, with its mandates for proof of citizenship in voter registration and photo ID requirements at the polls, passed the House with bipartisan backing…

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The Finest Use of the Bully Pulpit

How Trump’s 2026 SOTU Was Stage-Managed to Perfection I. Introduction: Turning a Long Speech into a Command Performance Let’s be honest: when a State of the Union clocks in at nearly 1 hour 48 minutes—the longest on record—you expect viewers to start checking their phones halfway through. Yet President Trump’s 2026 address never felt like a slog. The pacing was crisp, the energy never dipped, and the mix of victory-lap confidence, sharp humor, and genuine showmanship kept the room—and the country—locked in from the opening line to the final word. This wasn’t accidental. Every beat, every pause, every camera angle, every…

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The Travis Letter: Victory or Death

Reliving the Alamo Siege on Its 190th Anniversary Imagine, if you will, the dusty chill of a late February dawn in 1836 Bexar—modern-day San Antonio. The air hangs heavy with the scent of gunpowder and mesquite smoke, the distant lowing of scavenged cattle mingling with the rhythmic thud of Mexican artillery. It's been scarcely a day since General Antonio López de Santa Anna's forces unfurled their blood-red flag from the tower of San Fernando Cathedral, signaling no quarter for the rebels holed up in the old mission turned fortress: the Alamo. And here, on this very date—February 24, exactly 190 years…

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The Chief Justice Herds the Cats

A Narrow Check on Emergency Tariffs I. The Core Ruling and Its Significance At its heart, Learning Resources v. Trump reaffirms a foundational principle: Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress can lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises. The Framers, scarred by British monarchs’ arbitrary levies like the Stamp Act of 1765, deliberately vested this "power of the purse" in the legislative branch to prevent executive overreach. As James Madison warned in his speech delivered to the Virginia Ratifying Convention on June 6, 1788, diluting that authority risks "the gradual and silent encroachments of those in…

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The Economy Has Gone to the Dogs

Why Democrats Are in Trouble Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna stood on the House floor and read the names of four completely innocent New Yorkers into the Congressional Record as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files scandal. It was a self-inflicted wound. Those men had zero connection to Epstein. They were random faces from an old photo lineup. Khanna had to walk it back after the Guardian called him on it. Fast forward one week. A pro-Palestinian activist named Nerdeen Kiswani posts on X: "Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor…

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Talking the SAVE America Act Into Law

There's a Way Forward But Does Senate GOP Have the Will? Senate Majority Leader John Thune has a point when he calls floor time the coin of the realm. Every hour spent grinding through quorum calls, dilatory amendments, and endless debate is an hour not spent on confirmations, funding bills, or the next must-pass item on the calendar. It's the same scarcity that once let Al Gore extract promises of a clean vote on the 1991 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in exchange for his support. Thune's caution is real: reviving a true talking filibuster on the SAVE…

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Building AI’s River Rouge

Factories, Financing, and Freeing Energy The column started with a single X post from @HedgieMarkets laying bare the financial engineering behind the AI boom: massive data centers funded through special purpose vehicles, off-balance-sheet debt, and leverage that would make a subprime lender blush. Meta's $27 billion Hyperion deal with Blue Owl, Oracle's $38 billion Vantage play tied to OpenAI's Stargate, xAI's $20 billion raise looping in Nvidia GPUs-these aren't just big numbers. They're bets on explosive revenues that have to show up in the next 5 to 15 years, or the whole structure risks looking like a house of cards when…

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The Irreplaceable Mentor

Why Human Experience Still Wins in the AI Era The fire's crackling low tonight, casting that warm, steady glow across the room. Blue jeans, flannel-pull up a chair-maybe a good cigar if that's your thing. We're not here for stiff lectures or casual rambles. This is just one mentor sharing what he's seen, what he's learned, and what still matters when the world changes faster than we can sometimes keep up. Let's start where this whole conversation began: that IBM announcement from Friday. A $240 billion company, the kind that's supposed to be the bellwether for where tech is headed, flips…

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