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Columns/Opinion

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 ...

No, there will be no infrastructure plan for now

Democrats running for president are vowing to bring high-speed internet to rural America. President Donald Trump campaigned on the same promise. It was to be part of his big infrastructure plan. But no, there will be no big infrastructure plan. Responding to the Democratic candidates’ reminder of a broken pledge, Trump’s former infrastructure adviser, D.J. Gribbin, told Politico: “If I were in the White House right now, I would point to the fact that we had a plan. We took a big swing.” However, the one big swing that Trump actually connected with a ball was the giant 2017 ...

Lessons for young and dumb about socialism: Never

President Trump has repeatedly promised, “America will never be a socialist country.” Since Franklin Roosevelt began expanding government in the 1930s, the United States has increasingly adopted big-state policies associated with socialism. We may not be at the stage Bernie Sanders would advocate, but more millennials appear to favor a system under which they have never lived. Free stuff is appealing until one realizes its costs. In an attempt to reach Generation Z — those in their teens and 20s — a new organization is starting this month to combat socialism’s ...