While my dedicated sections focus on specific pillars, the Essays section is where I explore the intersections. This is a space for synthesis—where Stoicism meets artificial intelligence, or where civic duty meets personal development.
These pieces are often more exploratory, serving as intellectual sketches and deep-dives into the questions that don’t fit neatly into a single category but are essential to a well-lived life.
On September 20, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a twenty-million-dollar contract to a firm called LMD Agency, Inc. for what the contract describes as a “national media campaign.”
The money did not begin at Homeland Security. The White House Office of Management and Budget transferred it to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which drew it from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the record names the purpose in full: “OBBBA commemorative events.”
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On the afternoon of October 9, 2026, a gallon of diesel in the United States cost $6.28, down from a record $6.53 set on September 22 but still up roughly 70 percent since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February (ABC News Australia, 2026). President Donald Trump placed a call to President Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to discuss a suspected outbreak of plague in Russia. What he announced instead was a deal: Russia would send more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel to “the American and Global Marketplace” at once, another 500,000 tons in November, one million tons “immediately thereafter,” and then, if its refineries allowed it, three million more. Diesel prices, the president wrote on Truth Social, “will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” (The Business Standard, 2026).
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On November 3, Missourians will answer five statewide questions. Four are constitutional amendments referred by the legislature; one is a referendum the people forced onto the ballot themselves. Two of them are about the machinery of voting rather than about any policy a vote would produce, and that is the quiet feature of this ballot. Before the state decides who governs, it is being asked to decide how much of the deciding the people get to keep.
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Question: Twenty-three days from Election Day the professionals moved in one direction without exception, and the money moved the other way, so which of them should a reader believe?
Answer: Both, because they are answering different questions. Ten rating changes landed this week across five forecasters, and every one of them moved toward the Democrats.1234 Cook Political Report revised its estimate of Democratic pickups upward to two to six seats and called Kansas “Democrats’ Cinderella story of the cycle.”15 Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved Alaska out of its toss-up column and then wrote the sentence that will be quoted until November: “For the first time all cycle, Republicans now need to win more of our Toss-ups to hold the Senate than Democrats need to win in order to flip it.”2
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On July 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14319, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order requires that any large language model procured by a federal agency adhere to two “Unbiased AI Principles”: truth-seeking and ideological neutrality (The White House, 2025a). Speaking at the signing, the president said: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries” (NPR, 2025).
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Question: When the government asks two courts to decide a case on the record it has chosen, what happens if both courts answer that the record is not finished?
Answer: They order more. On October 9, Judge Christopher Cooper refused to close discovery in the Kennedy Center case, extended it two weeks to October 23, and directed the Board to produce three things it had resisted: the FY 2026 financial statements, the text messages, and any non-privileged document showing that the Chairman’s February 1 announcement affected the votes the Board cast in August and September. The same day, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce the underlying handwritten FBI interview notes it had declined to furnish in redacted form, by noon on October 16. Two days earlier, Cooper ordered the unsealing of the 163-page JLL Plan on which the Board relies to justify the closure. And in the third docket, the D.C. Circuit, where the government wants both questions settled for good, let its October 9 dispositive-motions deadline pass with nothing filed and its stay motion still undecided eleven days after the last brief landed.
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