Lord.  It’s six years ago today that Mr. She died.  It took me a few years to travel comfortably onwards, and yet, here I am. Many of you on this site helped me through the worst, and I am forever grateful.  Thank you.

Today I made what turned out to be a rather amusing (in my own mind) trip to Home Depot to buy 100 feet of twelve-gauge two-conductor copper wire for a wiring project I’ve recently undertaken.  The goal is to get rid of the last piece of “extension cord” that has existed (for going on forty years) in the house and which supports critical infrastructure. I wanted to remove it, and to proceed with everything properly wired, into boxes, and being code-compliant going forward.

I thought I had it all figured out, but—a day or two ago—I uncovered an ugly bit of wiring done by Mr. She in his later years.  I won’t go into all that much detail other than to say that he’d combined both 14-gauge and 12-gauge wire on a 20-amp circuit, and to say that I know that’s an absolute no-no.

I started marinating the baby-back ribs last night.  This morning, I put the flags out on the front porch – and will do so tomorrow morning and Sunday.  Neutral observer will pick up the corn and baked beans today, along with beer, wine, and champagne.

Early this afternoon, I’ll put the ribs in the slow cooker and fire it up.  Once they begin to get tender, I’ll turn it off and let them sit overnight.  That way, I can time it better on the 4th to stop cooking when they begin to fall off the bone.

Confederate General James Longstreet was, in some ways, a man ahead of his time.  He was one of the very few on either side of the Civil War who fully appreciated the change brought about by the development of the rifled musket and the new conical projectile – the Minié ball.  The old smoothbore muskets had a very short effective range.  A young Ulysses Grant had once opined that with the smoothbore:

“At any range over 200 yards, a man might shoot at you all day without you ever finding out about it.”

Today is my Dad’s 81st birthday.  Perhaps the greatest man I’ve ever met.

His father (my grandfather) was sent home from the South Pacific at the very end of WWII.  He got a medical discharge for yellow fever.   But the joke was that he wasn’t all that sick, because my dad was born nine months later, on July 2, 1945.  I was born on a military base during Vietnam, in December of 1968.

I thought I was a great athlete.  And I worked hard at it.  I started lifting weights seriously in the 7th grade.  I believed that the ultimate measure of athleticism was football and discus.  They both require agility, strength, balance, speed, body control, and explosive power.  So I worked hard at it.  All of it.  I lifted, I trained, I did drills.  From a very early age.  I set my school record (and lots and lots of other records) in the discus.  I was all-state in football.  My school inducted me into its Athletic Hall of Fame.

July 2 is the 183rd day of the year.  In about 30 minutes from my clicking “publish” on this post, I’ll be half way to the end of the year.  And it’ll be downhill from that point on.

Lordy me.  I’ll be closer to next Christmas than I am to this last New Year, and I’ll recognize more and more, with every passing day–as I do every year–how foolish and short-sighted it was of me to take the bloody Tree down…

250 years ago today, the Second Continental Congress voted in favor of a Resolution of Independence from Great Britain.

Like many, I’ve been surprised at how low-key this has been.  We’re a few days away from the 250th birthday of the greatest country the world has ever seen, and that country knows how to party.  And it knows how to overdo showmanship and spectacle.  But the buildup for this historic event has seemed more like President’s Day or Labor Day or something.  That seems odd.

But just imagine – imagine if our president right now were Barack Obama.  Every fast food joint would have Freedom Fries in red, white and blue packaging.  GM would release red, white and blue cars as a one-time promotion.  Every movie star, famous singer, and other celebrity would be taking turns professing their patriotism on YouTube, Reels, Instagram, Facebook, and network TV.  Google’s home page would be red, white and blue.  Every night on TV would be more over-the-top patriotic and glitzy than the night before.  Every baseball game would have fireworks for weeks.  The spectacle would be mind-blowing.

All in an effort to normalize leftism to American citizens.

Victor Davis Hanson returns to Uncommon Knowledge to discuss the American founding and its critics. Drawing on ancient Greece and Rome, Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, and the Trump era, Hanson argues that the genius of the American system lies in its difficult but durable structure: checks and balances, ordered liberty, and a Constitution built for flawed human beings.

John Buford knew good ground when he saw it, and there was no ground this good for miles around. It must be held.  Two great armies searched for each other across upper Maryland and lower Pennsylvania and whichever one held these hills south and east of Gettysburg would make the other pay in blood. So, on the evening of June 30th, 1863, Buford came to a decision. He and his two brigades of Cavalry – 3000 troopers – had to secure them and hold them until the rest of the Union Army could arrive. He told his unit commanders:

“They will attack you in the morning and they will come booming – skirmishers three deep. You will have to fight like the devil until supports arrive.”

I’ll admit to being a fan of Nassim Taleb. A former options trader turned philosopher of uncertainty, he’s best known for popularizing the concept of the Black Swan — the low-probability but high-impact event that nobody saw coming.

One of his less-celebrated but more interesting ideas is what he calls the Minority Rule.  It’s popped up in the comments on some recent posts here, but it deserves a fuller treatment.  The concept is straightforward.  Taleb observed that under the right conditions, a small, committed, intolerant minority can impose its preferences on a much larger, more flexible majority. Not through force. Not through fraud. Just through the simple mechanics of showing up harder than everyone else.

If you’re a woman of a certain age, I suspect many of you have, like me, occasionally wondered (sometimes with accompanying horror, sometimes with attendant hilarity), if you’re in danger—in part or in whole—of turning into your own mother.

I remember, as a child, being so embarrassed, and sometimes unhappy, because of Mum.  By her size: Lord, that underwear, hanging very publicly on the clothes line to dry.  By her loudness.  By her rudeness.  And her meanness.  And occasional cruelty.  By her irrationality.  By her emotional outbursts.  And by so much else.

In mitigation of some of her difficult behavior, I’ll just say that, had she been born 50 years later than she was, she’d probably have been diagnosed pretty early on with Borderline Personality and/or Bipolar Disorder, and perhaps her excesses would have been better understood and managed throughout her life. But that was not to be.