A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land

Email is blackmail with a .com on the end.

the lungs of long-distance joggers, gym rats, hot yoga practitioners, and others who engage in vigorous physical activity can emit as much as eight times the average amount of CO2

The growth of politics is the opposite of the growth of liberty. When liberty grows we get increased individual enterprise and expansion of free markets. We create more goods, services, and benefits to society. The pie gets bigger. But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up.

To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to.

there’s about $80 trillion in the world. The world’s population is 7.5 billion. Dividing it equally, we each get $10,666.67.

Transformations in health care have turned the historically cheapest part of being alive—dying—into something so expensive that many people can’t afford to do it.

And how did our government get so bad? Bad politics. But how did our politics get so bad? Politics grew worse because politics grew.

All the tales of American Indian fighter heroics (whether your hero is Crazy Horse or Davy Crockett) turn to ashes in the mouths of the tellers when facts are considered. The New World was conquered by coughs, sneezes, and craps in the woods.

There is an oft-cited apothegm credited to the Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila (1515–82): “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”