I read here that Melinda Gates has decided that ‘birth control’ and ‘family planning’ are important. On the one hand, I have a lot of concern about the ‘contraceptive culture’ and the impact of separating the way we make babies […]
Howard Ahmanson
The Rise of Redneck Stand-up Paddleboarding
[Props to my co-parishioner Miles Stoudenmire for coming up with these pictures.] It appears, from the evidence of these pictures, that the SUP culture can harmonize with the huntin’ and fishin’ culture of the rednecks and their northern counterparts. [The […]
L.A. vs San Francisco: Who Runs California?
Zócalo wonders why the Bay Area, with half the population of the Los Angeles Basin, tends to dominate the state politically. I don’t have a theory about that, but I have several suggestions. 1. A lot of Southern Californians are immigrants, […]
Philanthropy and Investment: The Distinctions Begin to Blur
I grew up believing that ‘philanthropy’ and ‘investment’ were two distinct things and not to be confused. They both serve the public, but in different ways; investment in business by [hopefully] producing worthy products at enough profit to make a […]
How The Tobacco Companies Should Spend Their Money
Once again, in the debate over California’s Proposition 29, the tobacco companies seem to have all the money in the world, even though relatively few people smoke nowadays. Under the circumstances, I don’t shed much of a tear for them. […]
RIP Thomas Fuentes, 1948-2012
Thomas Alexander Fuentes, long time Director of Communications for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, and also Chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County, died in May 2012. People had actually expected him to die the previous fall, but […]
Our Second Linguistic (Phonemic) Test
A few months ago we gave our readers a phonemic test about the distinction between pen and pin. Now we will try our second, on a much newer shift that is obscuring a distinction that most English speakers used to […]
Prison not the Answer: the Veterans-Only Court and Brother’s Keepers
What these war veterans do for each other models what the Body of Christ, especially in smaller groups, is supposed to be like. These vets are “moving from a highly disciplined environment where violence is normal to an unstructured environment […]
New York City Transit’s Inconvenient Pricing
New York City, much to my disappointment, has discontinued its transit one-day unlimited ride ticket. [You can still get such a ticket for a week, but I’m never in town that long.] What you can get is cards with $10.70 […]
Urbanist Observations On A Bachelor Spring Break
[I apologize that I have not gotten pictures for this post, unlike the one about my San Andreas road trip two years ago. That I took with three friends; this one I went by myself. So I took very few […]