A regular reader writes in to protest my assertion that America now has enough proven fossil fuel reserves to last for centuries, warning “Fracking technology isn’t sustainable.” As with other shorthand terms designed to eliminate case-by-case by analysis, when “unsustainable” comes to mean merely “bad,” the results can get silly. We know where the term [...]
From the mailbag Another Fearless Drug Warrior is writing my boss at the daily Review-Journal, trying to get me fired. One “Scott Miller” wrote in on March 12: I must state upfront that I am not a regular reader of any Stephens publications and am not likely to become one in the foreseeable future. Because [...]
A reader — one of many similar — recently wrote in to complain “They tell us that Social Security and Medicare are broken. The fact is the government used that money for wars and should have left the money in the so-called lock box. … I’m incensed that those programs are called entitlements. I paid [...]
Vin’s note – I received this from Dr. Russell L. Blaylock, a retired neurosurgeon and author. He generously granted permission for me to post his answer here. Dr. Blaylock is a former clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and is currently a visiting professor in the biology department at [...]
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Cxxxxxx Cxxxx wrote (reproduced below without edit, remarkably): Dear Mr. Suprynowicz, I am a 13 year old boy who attends a school in Connecticut, fairly close to where the Newtown tragedy occured. I have also read your book, Send in the Waco Killers. My father and I [...]
In response to my recent columns on the Nevada DMV urging (or even requiring) that 83-year-old widows who prefer to retain their late husbands’ surnames “get their names changed” to match those on Social Security cards likely issued when they were 16 years old, I received numerous smug and sanctimonious assertions that “Driving is not [...]
In my Jan. 9 column — “I like to pay taxes; with them I buy civilization” — I wrote: “What’s that? What about those unemployed through no fault of their own? Get rid of all the government interventions in the labor market, including payroll taxes, and jobs would sprout like fungi. Of course, they might [...]
Let us turn to the mailbag: “No, our money is just fine, Vin,” writes in one correspondent, answering my column of Nov. 21. “In spite of what the gold bugs would have you believe; the value of the dollar is still, historically and relatively speaking, at the place it was a century ago.” It’s hard [...]
Since few of us can actually wade through and comprehend a federal budget (or even a 2,000-page “health care law,” as written), most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to a few easy-to-remember sentences. The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far [...]
“Vin, sometimes you run excerpts from letters that arrive at your desk, but you rarely run an entire letter, much less an uninterrupted series of letters from the same writer, which would give us a better idea of the thought process of a typical reader.” Yes, and there’s a reason for that. But since such [...]
