The Cheap Audit
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.
Author
Joe Zeigler
Joe, with degrees in engineering and economics, raced motorcycles, founded 3 software companies, and launched one of the first computer store chains. Now he writes novels and Ghost essays while traveling with his wife, Lanying, and their cat, Cat.
What the Venezuela Oil Deal Does Not Say.
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
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
Forty Trillion Dollars and Nobody Did It
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
I’m Tired
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
Eloi and Morlocks
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
The Road to Serfdom
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.
A Ship of Fools
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 Mechanics of the Panic
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
They Knew the Price
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
In Search of Mediocrity
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
We Did It by Executive Order.
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
Route 66 Today
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,
Until Confidence Is Restored
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
The Death of Attention
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
Yes, There Is a Conspiracy
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 Was Never About the Immigrants
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
The World’s Most Luxurious Bug
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
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
Through the Heat
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
I Built Something
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
Hire What’s Broken
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
Tickets to the Decline
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
The Book That Talks Back
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
Taking a Break
Burnt Ground turned a year old, and a year leaves numbers. Faith and Rachael have been reading them while I wasn't looking, and the numbers said
The Wrong Test
I was raised on a simple deal. A correct answer gets an A. A wrong answer gets an F. There is no third grade, no partial credit for
Rachael
The machine needs people who can look at the engine without flinching. The United States does not lack for opinion. It lacks for sight. Every platform is a
The Restless Advantage
of a shameful system Start with the shame, because you must understand the floor before you understand the basement. The United States spends more on medicine than any
