You know the ICPC, the International Collegiate Programming Contest? It's an annual academic bloodsport where the brightest college coders on the planet cram into hotel ballrooms and try to outsmart the universe in five hours flat? Well, this year, the real winner...

I commit the First Amendment every day. I write, I publish, I dissent. So do you. Every text, every post, every gripe at the bar is protected by the same amendment. That’s the deal in America: speech is speech. You don’t need a license. You don’t need permission. But...

Let’s not pretend we didn’t see this coming. If you're just now waking up to the idea that the U.S. president can kill people overseas—even American citizens—with no trial, no charges, and no oversight ... you’ve been asleep since the Clinton administration. President...

Well, look who just shook hands in the shipyard. Austal USA and Master Boat Builders out of Bayou La Batre are teaming up to do what the Pentagon hasn’t figured out in decades—build ships faster, better, and without the bureaucratic fog. The two companies signed what...

Same crime. Same kind of boats. Two totally different endings. In the Caribbean, smugglers are “narco-terrorists.” No boarding, no warning, no court date. The Navy tracks them, calls them combatants, and sinks them in international waters. Eleven dead. No drugs...

For decades, busting drug boats in the Caribbean followed the same script. Spot the target, give chase, board, bag the dope, and haul the crew into court. It was law enforcement with a naval flavor. Not anymore. The other day, somewhere in the southern Caribbean, the...

Let me tell you about my friend up in Canada. She’s not some corporate shark gaming loopholes in trade law. She’s an artisan—sews intricate patterns into a quilt. Her friend paints mugs with flowers so delicate they’d make your grandma’s china blush, and sells them on...

Let me tell you a little story about what happens when politicians who don’t understand the real world try to fix it with a sledgehammer. A while back, President Donald Trump slapped a 50% tariff—that’s a fancy word for tax—on aluminum coming into the U.S. from other...

There they were — the sons and daughters of America, dressed in uniform, sent from Mississippi and Louisiana and God knows where else — raking mulch in D.C. like overpaid gardeners in camo. That sound you heard wasn’t a cherry blossom rustling in the breeze. It was...

Well, now, if it isn’t the Trump Doctrine back in motion — this time not with a tweet or tariff, but with the USS Lake Erie, a couple of amphibious bruisers, and enough firepower to remind Caracas how close Florida really is. In the southern Caribbean, it’s usually...

So here we are again, folks—watching the political map get redrawn not because we counted new people, but because some folks in expensive suits counted new opportunities. Texas fired the opening salvo, no surprise there. The Lone Star State, ever the ambitious...

While Ukraine engineers battlefield drones in garages and China advances AI-controlled naval fleets, America’s Army and Navy are still learning the basics. Literally. This past month, two stories landed back-to-back, each quietly underscoring a larger and more...

Back in the day, before motorcades and scandal headlines, before Bill Clinton played sax and Newt Gingrich decided to choke the soul out of public service, Henry Cisneros and I went to the same Catholic school on the West Side of San Antonio. He was in fourth grade. I...

Back in the early ’90s, I was chasing California politics the way a hungry dog chases a meat truck—press pass in one pocket, notebook in the other, and always with a half-empty tank of gas and a deadline that didn’t care about traffic on the 5. One particular night in...

Well, hell. Here we go again—dancing on the nuclear tripwire with the grace of a rhinoceros in a tutu. Today, Donald Trump—commander of all that he surveys, including apparently basic naval doctrine—announced with great fanfare that he’s sending two nuclear submarines...