The Torch Bearer, Not the Mule

Trump wasn't a mutation. He was the guy who showed up already carrying the right key. What that means for whoever tries to inherit the lock — and why Flake's "fever will break" might be right for all the wrong reasons — Part Two of The Oxidizer.

How a Dead Receptionist and a Wiped Tape Created the Best Show British Television Ever Made

Forget the killer robots for a minute. Forget the Op Art sets and the champagne. This starts with a murdered fiancée, a cancelled crime drama, and a contract that happened to expire at the wrong moment for everyone except British television.

The Accident

Nowhere else on earth has the thirty-year fixed mortgage. It isn't a market product. It's a 1933 emergency measure nobody repealed, and it's still holding up the roof.

M. Appeal: How Diana Rigg Invented the Modern Action Hero and Nobody Bothered to Pay Her for It

Before Emma Peel, television heroines waited to be rescued. After her, the ones who couldn't throw a punch were the boring ones. Also, the BBC paid her less than the cameraman. Of course they did.

August 15, 2026 - Week in Review

I am still on a hiatus from the dark place, where my digging in on the Civil Rights era kept leading me to worse and worse topics, people, and governments. That shit sucks. And all this "American Exceptionalism" mumbo jumbo requires that you ignore a lot of really

The Oxidizer

Trump didn't blow up the Republican Party. He removed the rate limit. We're living with the consequences

The Numbers Don't Say That

White men fell from thirty percent of American medical students to nineteen. A Princeton professor calls that proof of anti-white discrimination. It is mostly women applying to medical school, and no repeal reverses that.

One Laser ...

The 1960 hierarchy was written down and voted on. Everything that did the real sorting afterward had no author.

Down Eros, Up Mars (Ben Hur, 1959)

What Ben-Hur smuggled, what it built, and why $400 million wouldn't buy it back

The Doctrine Was Never the Mechanism

Brendan Carr didn't need the Fairness Doctrine. He needed a merger.

Are You a Communist, or Can You Afford a Burrito?

Nobody was arguing about food. Chipotle is a price index, the complaint was about land, and the reply — eat ramen, and are you a communist — is a slogan from a postwar sales campaign for the thing that's now unavailable.

The Lunchbox from Hell: How Solid-State Learned to Growl

The Lunchbox from Hell. My first quality amp, and fond memories indeed.