Columns

The world is going to hell and taking America’s wealth, military power and geopolitical influence with it.

I never dreamed my life would one day intersect with a two-time Super Bowl champion; but it does.

Most of us are aware that operators of trucks, other large vehicles and school buses are required to have a commercial driver’s license or CDL.

After touring the U.S. east of the Mississippi, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “Democracy in America,” an examination of our national character. Equality of conditions was his central theme. So different from aristocratic Europe, middling Americans wore the same clothes, spoke same language, practiced the same habits, and enjoyed the same pleasures.

If left to my own devices — the phone, the computer, the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the house alarm, the microwave, the doorbell camera and even Alexa, the digital voice assistant — I would run them all over with my car because they won’t stop beeping.

The October report from the National Center for Education Statistics revealed some serious concerns regarding the 2023-24 academic year, as more than 1,300 K-12 schools across the country are still struggling due to the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When I first received the book that siblings Scott Campbell and his sister Tracey Campbell Frederick got to print with a huge assist from Scott’s daughter Amy, who typed the manuscript, I thought there was a mistake on the cover of From the South Pacific to the New River, a West Virginia Love Story. Scott had told me it was about his father, John Emerson Campbell, and his Navy experiences aboard the USS Taussig during World War II, and I assumed it to be a third-person account, co-written by Scott and Tracey.

Tiny houses are all the rage these days. A growing number of Americans are selling their grownup homes and cramming their belongings into ludicrously teeny structures the size of glorified dollhouses.

Like America’s 9/11, history will record that a similar event occurred on 10-7-23 during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, when 1,500 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel by land, air, and sea in a violent spree which left over 1,000 Israelis dead and another 3,000 wounded.

There’s long been a gap between the relatively small number of organs available for transplant and the long waiting lists of potential recipients. This week, the world got a little closer to a future in which pigs — yes, pigs — could narrow that gap.