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They must have lost their minds in San Francisco

San Francisco, a city described in song for its natural beauty, is descending into an abyss of homelessness, the use of sidewalks as toilets and a place you might not want to visit, much less live. The latest, but surely not the last demonstration of insanity, is San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors’ adoption of new “person first” language guidelines meant to “change the public’s perception of criminals.” The words “convicted felon,” “offender,” “convict,” “addict” and “juvenile delinquent” are now out. These individuals will henceforth be referred ...

Strive toward its best aspirations

The U.S. Constitution provides two methods for its own amendment. We’re familiar with the first: Amendments may be proposed and approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. This method has been used successfully 27 times. The second method has never been used. Article V stipulates that upon the “Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States,” Congress is obliged to call “a Convention for proposing Amendments.” The states have never forced Congress to convene an assembly to amend the Constitution, though ...

His restaurant got green and others can too

I run Mexican restaurants in San Diego, the taco capital of the United States. We see our restaurants as community gathering places and believe we have a responsibility to make a positive contribution to the world. In recent years, that has included trying to reduce our environmental footprint. A large part of our business is takeout orders, and that is only increasing as delivery apps are changing the way Americans eat. A few years ago, some of our customers expressed concerns about the packaging we used for takeout food. We took those concerns seriously and began learning what we ...

Cruelty is the point here, but is it evil?

We meet, my friends, in the face of evil. In popular culture and historical memory, of course, evil has many faces. It is Darth Vader raising a lightsaber and Dr. Doom glowering from behind a metal mask. It is Charles Manson grinning his lunatic’s grin and Adolf Hitler ranting himself into a frothing rage. But in everyday life, evil is seldom so obvious or loud. In everyday life, evil is the face of a man balancing a briefcase and a cup of designer coffee, the face of a woman buying groceries. It is the face of nothing to see here and going along to get along, the face of doing my ...

Drowning minute by minute

On the stand Monday in the federal courthouse, Jeanmarie Perrone told a hushed crowd, minute by minute, what happens to the body during an opioid overdose. From the patients she sees in her job as an emergency physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, two or three a week, who have a 10% chance of dying in the next two years. To the people she revives on the streets of Kensington and on the Market-Frankford El, just going about her day. It was what everyone needed to hear first, in the first wave of testimony in U.S. v. Safehouse, the civil case that will determine ...

Triggering Big Tech’s banishment to news blacklist

I learned last week from a Silicon Valley whistleblower, who spoke with the intrepid investigative team at Project Veritas, that my namesake news and opinion website is on a Google blacklist. Thank goodness the Big Tech giant hasn’t taken over the newspaper syndication business yet. Twenty years of column writing have allowed me to break news and disseminate my opinions without the tyranny of social justice algorithms downgrading or whitewashing my words. But given the toxic metastasis of social media in every aspect of our lives, especially for those who make their living ...