When ‘Too Early to Sue’ Becomes Too Late to Vote

The rightward tilt of US courts has become a full-blown downward spiral. 

The Lighthouse, the Ancient Light, and the Moral Terrain

Stanley Hudson once described his dream on The Office: he wanted to own a decommissioned lighthouse, live at the top, and have nobody know he was there. It is funny because it is perfectly Stanley. No coworkers. No meetings. No Michael Scott. Just sea, silence, and enough distance from humanity to make even retirement feel insufficiently private.

But the lighthouse is a strange place to choose if what you really want is to be left alone.

Carry the Catalyst (Away)

I have been interested in abiogenesis for most of my adult life. I was writing about the chemistry of the first cells on this blog twenty years ago, and at the University of Florida I approached a neighboring question from another direction.

Collections of Atoms III: Coexistence to Communion

Peaceful coexistence sounds like a treaty signed between strangers. You remain there. I remain here. Neither of us destroys the other. The border holds.

Collections of Atoms II: Description Becomes Causation

A thermostat contains a model of the room.

Collections of Atoms I: Models as Translation

One of my favorite exchanges in The Office comes in Season 2, when Jim asks Dwight, “Hey, Dwight. As Sempai, do you think there is ever going to be a day where humans and robots can peacefully co-exist?”

A Time for Choosing

Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing still has moral force because it names a real danger:

Voters As Suspects & Elites As Sacred

America has real emergencies to manage. Fake war and fake voter fraud are distractions from real climate and real democracy emergencies.

Learning & Moral Geometry

I remember a poster quote:

“To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

Arsonist Demands Firefighter Medal

Imagine an old orange man standing before a carefully engineered bridge. It is not beautiful. It is not eternal. It has weak points, compromises, warning signs, and inspection schedules. But it spans the river. It keeps people from drowning.

The old man does not like the bridge because someone else built it. So he blows it up.

Pretextual Instrumentality

The issue is not always the issue.

Burn the ink but not the idea

Propaganda does not bend the moral field. It bends perception of the field.

That distinction matters because authoritarian politics always begins by confusing language with reality. Power renames cruelty and mistakes the new name for moral transformation. It calls domination order, censorship neutrality, corruption loyalty, and fear patriotism. It learns to manipulate the visible surface of things and then concludes, stupidly, that the underlying structure has changed.

Andy Beshear: “AF1FA vs Petrocancer”

Tomorrow, I am announcing my campaign for President of the United States.

I am running because I believe America is ready for a new kind of politics. A politics that is practical, patriotic, pro-worker, and pro-family. A politics that is rooted in a simple, foundational truth: we are all in this together.

That idea has a name: AF1FA — All For One, For All. (Donate at AF1FA.com!)

Sketching the Lines of Conscience

History teaches that a small minority of people will follow corruption all the way down. They will excuse it, normalize it, translate it into partisan language, and eventually retreat into the laziest defense available: both sides do it. Examples abound, but the pattern is always the same: minimize, rationalize, compare, forget.

Fascist Kickback Cathedrals

TЯump‘s D.C. building spree is not about beauty. It is about possession. 

The Ceremony as Mirror

I have made jokes before about TЯump's fake masculinity: the makeup, the shoe-lift rumors, the girdle and Spanx jokes, the whole costume of dominance wrapped around one of the neediest public men in American life.

What Actually Carries Forward

There’s a familiar complaint in classrooms: “We’re never going to use this.” At the level of content, that objection is often correct. Most students will not carry specific formulas or niche facts into their adult lives in any direct way. This is often true in physics and chemistry, my subjects. But the mistake is in stopping the analysis there.

“It’s Much Easier to Act Presidential…”

“…Than what we’re doing here tonight”:

The Triple Threat of Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels impose a threefold tax on civilization: they destabilize the climate, empower geopolitical coercion, and corrode democracy—while a green transition offers the only credible path to resilience, sovereignty, and long-term national strength.

Bowling Alone, Scrolling Together

I’ve had a front-row seat to something I don’t think we fully understand yet.