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 […]
Howard Ahmanson
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 […]
St. Paul, Bad Words, and Greed
In a recent post, the one on the fire pits [which turned into a website and a Facebook page, I’m told] I used an eight letter b-word which pushed the Kennel Kode to the limit. I thought it justified in […]
Why Land Use is One of the First Liberties
[Note: This post is taken from a short address I made to legislators in Sacramento on April 16, 2012.] I was first politicized by this issue perhaps 33 years ago, when an attempt was made to run the Orange County […]
Sign the Petition and Save the Fire Rings!!
The latest local government outrage is the attempt of the Newport Beach City Council to tear out the fire rings at Big Corona and other places. Fortunately, they have to seek the approval of the Coastal Commission to do this. […]
Washington D.C.: The Center of the Universe: And Who to blame?
Joel Kotkin on Newgeography.com writes about the nearly recession-proof nature of Washington, D. C. and its metro area. It is a city of government and the mandarin classes, and they never go out of style. But it seems to me that […]
Three Californias? Integrating a Couple of Recent Proposals
It has often been proposed to split California into two states. In the past, these proposals generally agreed on dividing Northern California from Southern California; the cultural differential between the two was strong in the Kennedy years. The reader may […]