Writing & Thoughts
Reflections on naval history, political science, amateur radio adventures, and music.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act or SAVE America Act, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It amends Section 3 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to bar a state from registering an applicant who does not present such proof, in person, at the time of registration. The version the House passed in February 2026 also requires photo identification to cast a ballot, directs states to remove suspected non-citizens from the rolls, creates a private right of action against election officials who register voters without documentary proof, and establishes criminal penalties.
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Watson v. Republican National Committee that the federal election-day statutes do not prevent a state from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day and received afterward.
The US Supreme Court supported states that permit grace periods for returning mailed ballots after Election Day.
Chasing the DXCC Honor Roll has been the long game for generations of DXers. Decades of listening through static, upgrading antennas, learning propagation, and losing sleep over an elusive prefix. The reward is a place on a short list of operators who have worked nearly every entity on the planet. The DXCC Honor Roll should be hard. It should not be impossible. Under the current rules, it is.
Every general election, a measurable number of valid military and overseas ballots are rejected for one reason: the mail did not move fast enough. The ballot was marked in time. It was dropped in the mail in time. It arrived at the county courthouse too late.
The Pentagon released its first batch of declassified UAP files this morning. 162 documents from the FBI, DoD, NASA, and State, with more to come on a rolling basis. Videos, photos, eyewitness reports going back decades. Predictably, the internet is already running with it.
We have inverted our electoral system for the worse
The tacticization of strategy: why dismantling Iran's conventional military spine is not the same as knowing how a war ends.
Some part of the military has been voting absentee since the American Revolution. That’s not a boast. It’s a fact that gets lost in the noise every election cycle, when pundits rediscover the military ballot and treat it like a novelty. In 1775, Continental Army soldiers fighting in New Hampshire were allowed to vote by proxy at a town meeting back home. The logic was simple: serving your country shouldn’t cost you your voice in it. Two hundred and fifty years later, that logic still holds. The law has caught up — mostly. But the obstacles haven’t disappeared. They’ve just changed shape.
The FCC has published new rules in the Federal Register that will become effective for US Amateur Radio operators on 13 February 2026. These changes align US allocations more closely with international standards while maintaining some legacy channels.
You too can earn WAS and DXCC without having to have a kilowatt and a 100 foot tower. Read on.
Veterans' Day Program, Buda, TX, 11 November 2017. It is my honor to be here with you to mark this day of remembrance and hope — to join you in celebrating Veterans Day.
Speech at the Kyle, TX, VFW — 28 May 2018. I am always honored to speak on behalf of the Navy, but it is especially humbling to stand here today and speak about the many American heroes we honor on this special day.
Some uses for which the United States has historically reserved the right to use nuclear weapons may not be a credible threat to some adversaries. Conventional alternatives may create a more flexible and credible response.
Are air power and sea power comparable in their abilities to produce strategic effects? Air power and sea power are both fully capable of achieving great strategic effect.
My thesis is that the foreign policies of the Obama Administration yielded an international relations environment that China and Russia perceived to be weak.
The prospect of war on the Korean peninsula is sobering. The danger is not just getting into a war, but getting into a war for which we are not prepared, either militarily, economically, or psychologically.
Americans want their soldiers to vote. But often they can't. Those are the first sentences of a recent post of mine in the Monkey Cage Blog by the Washington Post.
The evolution of U.S. foreign policy from the late 20th century to the present can be viewed as a transition from a proactive, grand-strategy approach to a reactive, case-by-case management style.
For fifty years, I have been listening to the world through a pair of headphones and a length of wire strung between poles. When I began to imagine a novel set in 1914, I kept returning to a remarkable coincidence.
For most of my adult life, I was a writer — just not a novelist. I knew how to research. I knew how to argue. What I had not yet learned was how to inhabit the past rather than simply describe it.
I was twelve years old when my father pulled a book off a library shelf and changed everything. Here is what I noticed, decades later: the shelf is not evenly stocked.
There is a moment, standing on a bridge at sea in the middle of the night, when the weight of command settles on you like the salt air itself. That is not knowledge you read in a book.
Modern American political discourse often feels like a series of unprecedented crises. We argue about the limits of executive orders, the reach of federal agencies, the role of faith in the public square, and the persistent sting of racial inequality. But to look at these as "new" problems is to miss the fundamental nature of the American experiment. The United States was not built on a consensus; it was built on a series of profound, recurring tensions that pre-dated the Revolution. These four debates are the "hereditary conditions" of our democracy. They weren't resolved in 1776, 1787, or 1865—and they remain the fault lines of our national identity today.
There is a popular, persistent myth in American classrooms that the United States was born in a vacuum—a "big bang" of liberty sparked by a few enlightened men in Philadelphia who suddenly realized that kings were a bad idea. We treat the Declaration of Independence as a divorce decree that wiped away the past, allowing us to start the world anew. But this narrative is more than just a simplification; it is a dangerous historical amnesia. By forgetting that the American Founding was the continuation of a 500-year British struggle, we have lost the manual for how our own government is supposed to function. The United States did not invent the limitation of executive power; we inherited it, refined it, and—in the modern era—have begun to squander it.
American military service members are deployed all over the world. Dr. Donald S. Inbody — military voting expert and author of The Soldier Vote — explains how they can fulfill their civic duty to vote even from a conflict zone.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police officers has shocked the nation. Incidents like that have occurred too many times before, but this time the response by the public has been different.
Who does the church welcome through its doors? Who should the church welcome through its doors? This past year, Oak Hill United Methodist Church asked itself that question.
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