Waynesville celebrated its annual festival as scheduled this week, although it was still canceling events as recently as last weekend. I wen...

A hundred years ago, politics in the South were explicitly racist. At some point that stopped; one might argue about when, but for a long ti...

Knowing when you need advice is a good thing.  The road through the Pigeon River Gorge is indeed in a challenging place. There will definit...

  I might actually get enthusiastic about my vote.  More than a little truth in it, I suppose. From Twitter .

Earlier this year I got my ham radio license and so during the recent hurricanes I paid attention to emergency communications. Then I did so...

A very short dialogue,  the Ion by Plato has Socrates discussing artistic interpretation with a rhapsode, whose job was to perform Homer to...

Following the rapid deaths of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has made a peace proposal : Netanyahu offers a deal: those who hand...

One of the hardest-hit areas has decided to end emergency search and rescue operations , returning to normal procedures.  Thousands of volun...

In general, I dislike appeals to psychology in politics. I don't mean this as a criticism of those who work in psychology out of a since...

I’ve been talking about all the volunteer help and donations we got during the recent hurricane. Smoky Mountain News wrote up an article  a...

We've talked about the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting many times since this blog's inception decades ago . One of the talking poi...

Now, here's a subject I do know something about: firefighter examinations in North Carolina. I've taken several of the certification...

The noted historian raises many of the strange things we are asked to believe in spite of evidence to the contrary, or serious omissions. M...

Today Columbus Day is celebrated, in the words of Joe Biden as a monument to Italian-Americans . It's still better than his replacement...

The least discriminate weapon in common military use is the landmine; they are nevertheless very commonly used because of their military uti...

The US is deploying THAAD to protect Israel in its current war. I support this war, and Israel, but did Congress debate this entry into a r...

I've been re-reading with pleasure a John Ringo 2010 scifi adventure called " Live Free or Die ," about a one-man engineering/...

I was born fifty years ago today. I don’t usually make a big deal about birthdays, but half a century is worth celebrating. I started puttin...

Things have mostly calmed back down here in my neck of the woods. The weather is getting pretty, with fall colors coming in upon cool mornin...

We could all use a laugh, I think, though some of us more than others, I'm sure. Here's a random collection of things that made me a...