Russell Turpin

America is getting dumber Rose Horowitch writes a bleak article on how students entering college are woefully unprepared for the basic math. Which has always been the case, in some sense. The interesting and disheartening f…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/24/a...

Dark race We had a fun race last night. Despite the dark. There was some overcast, and not even a waxing moon to reflect light back from the other side. The water was rolling ink. Everything else was shades …

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/20/d...

This and that The EU is rolling back some of the regulations that have put barriers to how the large tech companies do business there. While that is a welcomed step, the EU needs to do more to increase business …

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/19/t...

Too young for moss Gallup reports that two in five American women under 45 now would leave the US permanently, given the opportunity. Twice as many answer that way as men. Most won’t. Only a tiny fraction of Am…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/t...

Dick Cheney’s legacy Max Boot writes on Dick Cheney’s legacy: Cheney rightly came to decry Trump’s abuses of power, but many of Trump’s actions grew out of a contempt for congressional, media, and judicial oversi…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/c...

Lost faiths Erik Loomis uses the recent presidential election in Ireland to reflect on a bit of amazing recent history: One of the most remarkable political stories in my life is the transformation of Ireland …

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/l...

The pretenders In explaining MAGA, Beth Macy tells a familiar story about the decline of civic life, especially in smaller towns: Some of my old friends were finding community not in religion but in QAnon, sharin…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/t...

Of flags and houses Like most everyone who competes in a team sport, I celebrate the races we win, regret the ones we should have won, and try to do my part to shift the tally more to the first. I hope my fellow crewm…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/10/29/o...

The Dutch Dutch intelligence will be more selective in sharing information with the US. Whose administration it reasonably does not trust. MAGA likely turned bitter toward Dutch intelligence when it early wa…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/t...

“Viral”: a short review I’m glad a friend recommended this book, because it is quite a bit better than I would have expected from what I have read in the past by Matt Ridley. Several of the middle chapters have inte…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/v...

Focus on the essentials

Alex Hutchinson writes a good article on why supplements, rather than just wasting money, likely also do some real harm to those who too much credit them. It boils down to the fact that people slack off on the important hard things, when they add something easy: A 2011…

Worrisome trends

I don't worry about long-term demographic trends. Fertility rates are falling? Well, in 2100, the US might have 350 million people instead of 365 million, and the world 9.5 billion people instead of 10 billion. Plenty still. Culture and technology will have changed so much when we…

A child cannot force parents to buy a bag of candy. But MAGA can turn this nation into Gilead. Yeah, the end will come. Everything ends. But it may be generations. Market irrationality can outlast any investor's liquidity. Political downturns can outlast us.

Freedom of speech? I wish more (some?) of the many people writing on the 1st amendment today would pay attention to Elon Musk using the FTC to go after Media Matters. That is actual government action. To benefit one …

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/f...

United States of Corruption Trump has made billions from his office, less than a year into his second term. He began by running a pump-and-dump with his $TRUMP meme coin. If you understand the graph right, it shows how he fle…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/u...

We are the brute My last company had one engineering foot in Belgium, with customers in the UK and France. I spent quite a bit of time working in Geel. We had a good CFO, and I trusted he had built all the legal fr…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/17/w...

All bow! Trump is beatifying conservative propagandist Charlie Kirk. He will award Kirk the highest civilian honor. MAGA Republicans are moving to install a statue to Kirk in the Capitol. Most significantly…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/15/a...

Desalination derailed? Corpus Christi’s ever-expanding inner harbor desalination project, pushed for years to solve the city’s water woes, was knifed in a late night city council vote. While much of the repor…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/04/d...

The law and the lies It’s easy to point to some of our Constitution’s failings, especially in the light of recent history. Regarding the presidency, it vests too much power in one individual. It should prov…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/09/02/t...

Ideology as political tool There are many, especially on the right, who classify politics chiefly by economic ideology. Those voices now are decrying Trump’s step to socialism, when he takes a stake in Intel or single-…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/08/25/i...

What I do for fun One of my fellow sailors captured video of the finish, last Wednesday night’s race. These start in the Corpus Christi marina, with first gun at 1800. As usual, it was a beat to a wellhead des…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/08/23/w...

Republicans made all immigrants count in census There are two pieces of nonsense about undocumented immigrants that now are frequent memes in my internet scroll. The first is that Democrats encouraged their entry, to boost the census population …

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/08/18/r...

Data and the shallow state What stands out about, E. J. Antoni, Trump’s nominee to head the BLS, is not so much the softness of his resume as his willingness to abuse data for the sake of ideology. National Review make…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/08/14/d...

In salt air We live near a large, marine bay. We walk along it daily. We take frequent outings to the local brackish wetlands that are nature preserves and birding areas. Our grandson loves to fish off the nei…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/i...

Orchids in Costa Rica When I visited Costa Rica, some years back, we spent only a couple of days in the cloud forest. And I was suffering food poisoning one of those. I suspect it is worth a return visit. Not just becau…

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Everybody look what’s going down One of my sailor friends pointed me to this: A growing number of immigrants on Long Island are so worried about getting deported that they are signing official papers giving temporary legal custody…

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The ghost of research papers future Some European nations provide researchers statistical views of medical information that they have collected on much of their population over the decades. England and Denmark, among others. Those bi…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/t...

Tor strikes me as the more resilient solution to private browsing.

Where is the study? I sometimes say a cult becomes a religion when it successfully propagates across generations. A Christian reading the PEW report on global trends might be dismayed that their religion now is one of…

rturpin.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/w...

The propaganda works well on the MAGA cult.