Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

September 19, 2026

Raise Your Right Hand: The Blind Oath

First, swear. Then we will tell you what you are accused of. Sit with that order of operations for a moment, because the order is the whole instrument. A man is summoned before the court. He is not told the charge, because there might be no charge to tell. The summons brings him in, the book is offered, and the oath is administered before any indictment is read: swear to answer truthfully every question this court intends to put to you. After that, if anything is coming, it comes inside the interrogatories he has just sworn to answer. He has pledged his answers before the questions exist.

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August 7, 2026

Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.