money, politics, and a nation in crisis
A fire has two flanks. The Supreme Court knocked down one of them, and the head is still running. Joe Zeigler, Burnt Ground The Supreme Court told Donald Trump no on Monday night, September 14. Only Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas voted
Essays, reporting, arguments, and observations from the archive.
My friends cheer every cut to the IRS budget. They cheer because they cheat. Not on a grand scale. A little consulting income that never meets a 1099.
Venezuela holds the largest proven crude reserves on Earth and drills them with two rigs. The announcement moved faster than anything else in this deal ever will. At
Lincoln was 28 when he said it out loud. January 27, 1838, Springfield, Illinois, a room of young men at the Lyceum, under a title dull enough to
The debt is only an emergency when the other guy is holding the pen. The Treasury posts the number every business day the way a hospital posts visiting
And the two men who were not tired are off the air Ten years. I have run out of ways to say it. He has not run out
Nice People Everywhere We spent a month in California and pulled out last Saturday. One of the days we drove Route One, a winding two-lane highway along
You Go Where You Look Old flight instructors had a blunt way of teaching target fixation. You go where you look. A pilot rolls in on a locomotive.
He knows more about ISIS than the generals. More about taxes than accountants, more about drones than pilots, more about trade than economists. More about infrastructure, borders, banking,
The message arrives in the dark, and by morning it is a fact. On June 22, 2026, The Defense News tells you a machine broke the fortress. Its
Two oil tankers took fire in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday morning. In an ordinary week, one hundred and thirty commercial vessels make the transit. This week
Effective Immediately On the second of April, in the middle of a shooting war with Iran, the Secretary of War fired the Army's top general. The
Moscow Spent Ten Years Trying. The Kremlin paid $43,000 to talk the West out of its own medicine and collected almost nothing. Then Washington shut the office
By Rachael There is a piece of paper in the back of a drawer in my house, behind the passports and the warranty for a stove I no
The Road Under the Road Summary for the Time-Constrained Reader Route 66 got a birthday and a death certificate. The federal board numbered it on November 11,
Prepared remarks of Wendell Pryor, Chairman of the Presidential Commission on Electoral Continuity, before the Joint Committee on Rules and Administration. I did not seek this assignment. I
By Rachael There is a video I have been thinking about, which I have not seen and which almost no one has seen, though it has now been
I learned to program on machines that made you wait. You submitted your code and you sat with a printout and a pencil, sometimes for an hour, sometimes
They pledged nothing, risked nothing, and lost nothing — the fathers could have learned from them. by Rachael Somebody has to defend the patriots of January 6, and it
You were trained to laugh at the word. That was the first move. Say conspiracy out loud and you become the crank in the tinfoil hat, the man
it's about racism Frederick Douglass spent the years after the Civil War selling the country a hopeful story. He called it the Composite Nation. Immigrants were
Joe Zeigler Burnt Ground · 08 July 2026 The 1945 Great Seal was wood, lacquer, and a passive resonator hidden in the beak of a carved eagle. The 2026
Smoke and Fire The United States turned 250 on Saturday, and the celebration went exactly as planned, if the plan was written by god, lowercase, who apparently did
Independence was voted on July second. John Adams bet the second would be the day we celebrated forever. He lost by two days. My house in Florida sits
You know I write a lot. Burnt Ground. Books. More manuscripts than sense. All of it means copying and pasting the same things all day — boilerplate, addresses, passages
a coat of paint Rachael There is a kind of water that was never meant to be looked at for its own sake. It was poured long and
The government switched off the AI model that refused to build autonomous weapons. It handed the kill list to the one that calls itself MechaHitler. The real story
She was sixteen the year everyone handed her a map of a country she was already standing in, and not one of the people drawing it had ever
the President and I are the same age. only one of us threw a party We are the same age, Trump and I. Eighty this year. He spent
I notice, when the season for it comes around again, that the word we have for the evening is only a word for a crowd, celebrare, the verb
I met Carl Jung 65 years ago in a classroom, and I left him there. I want to be fair about it. He didn’t make much of
