Bill of Separations

America's founding answer to state power was a list of things the state may not do: it may not establish a religion, may not abridge speech, may not […]

Government: Wait... I'm supposed to be doing something about pickleball

Follow one town's actual attention for a season and the allocation stops making sense. A parks department commissions two hazard assessments on a single oak […]

Runaway Process

Why did a healthy oak, older than the town that killed it, actually have to die? Not the proximate answer — a hazard report, a rejected second opinion, a […]

The Report Was Always Going to Win

Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]

Government Schooling Is Unacceptable

Ask someone why the state runs the schools and the answer arrives instantly, before the question has even finished: of course it does, who else would? That instant, unreflective quality is itself worth noticing. Almost nothing else this large — […]

Where We Are Today

No single post on this site was written to be read as a system. Each one starts from something narrower and more provoking — a ballot measure, a zoning fight, a dead anarchist's pamphlet, a tennis tournament's prize structure — and follows the […]

Fourteen Propositions -- California 2026

Before getting to what's actually on it, the ballot itself deserves a harder look than it usually gets. California's initiative process was built in 1911 as a check on a legislature the Progressive movement considered captured by the railroads — […]

Voting for People Who Aren't Born Yet

Seven states will put an environmental measure in front of voters this November, and reading through all nine at once — a $500 million Arkansas bond, a Colorado sales-tax carve-out, a right to hunt written into a state constitution, a […]

Universality: Redistribution Without Categories

[Owning Essential](/posts/owning-essential) made a narrow claim about a California ballot measure: once a government grants expedited process and exemption from rules to a defined list of project categories, the list itself becomes the site where a value system gets imposed, […]

Owning Essential

Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]

The Game Is The Thing

Every game with a prize attached is, underneath the rules everyone actually watches, a payout structure — and that structure is never neutral. How the money gets divided among winners, losers, and everyone finishing in between is not a detail […]

Stewardship of Loneliness

In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it. […]