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When the bombs began to fall on Gaza, a prime minister reached into the Torah and pulled out its single darkest verse. Remember what Amalek did to you. He said it more than once. It ended up quoted at The Hague, in a case about genocide — the oldest command of erasure, aimed at a living people, in the twenty-first century. I am not a Jew. I will not presume to teach anyone their own tradition. But I have read deeply in it — I have sat with the Lurianic sparks and Adam Kadmon

On how a people stops repeating what was done to it. There is a way to carry a wound that heals you, and a way that carries you into harming someone else. Almost everything turns on telling them apart, and almost no one manages it under pressure. I want to work the hardest case I know — because a rule that survives the hardest case can be trusted everywhere else. Start where it has to start: plainly. The Holocaust was done to the Jewish people. Not befell them, not happened —

I left the last essay at a wall, and I want to start this one there, because the wall is the honest beginning. The machine has absorbed every outrage. It has buried its own dead — American dead — in silence, over and over, and never once been made to answer. If you have been waiting for the atrocity so large it finally breaks the spell, stop waiting. There isn't one. The spell does not break from grief. That theory has been tested with blood, and it lost. So here is the way o

Here is what people get wrong about power like this: they assume it hides. They picture a back room, a secret hand, a conspiracy you have to drag into the light. You don't. The enforcers of this movement don't whisper. They rent a ballroom in Las Vegas and say it into a microphone. Let me be precise about what I'm indicting, because precision is the whole fight — and I've earned the right to be careful with these words the hard way, as a man who once flew American ordnance fo

Most American Jews don't know what happened on February 28, 2026, in a town called Minab in southern Iran. They weren't told. The institutions claiming to speak for you — AIPAC, the ADL, the major Jewish federations — did not make it their business to tell you. That morning, when the United States and Israel began their assault on Iran, a missile struck a school. The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh. The Good Tree. It was a name chosen because a school is meant to nourish,

What war actually requires — and what our own hands are doing in Gaza. The people who decide what war requires have mostly never been in one. I have. Two tours — Iraq and Afghanistan, helicopter crew chief. Air Medal with Valor. And I need to tell you something the men who've never stood on a battlefield keep getting wrong on purpose, because the lie they tell depends on you not knowing it. Our rules of engagement were simple. You could fire when you were fired upon. Positive

I keep waiting to be ready. Put that first, because it's under everything else. I've been living as if a day is coming when I'll be finished — land bought, water secured, the pantry full, the man complete — and only then does the real life start. Broke as I am, scattered as I am, I've been grading every day against that finish line. And every night I lose, because the finish line isn't there. Nobody gets to be ready. I wrote that once and thought I understood it. I thought it

The Lessons of the Arghandab and the Tigris The greenest places I ever saw in two deployments were both river valleys. Both were where we did the most fighting. The Arghandab, west of Kandahar, runs through pomegranate orchards and grape rows. These lands have been irrigated the same way for longer than anyone can date precisely. A green corridor, maybe a mile wide, cuts into a landscape otherwise the color of a manila folder, stretching to the horizon. The Tigris and the Eup

A Meeting of Souls I met David the day before I started drinking after years, then months. That's not his name. I've changed it, and I've changed it to mine, because of what I'm about to tell you. He wanted a cigarette. I only had a vape, so I shared it. He was disheveled, standing out in that heat. He talked — about his girl, about hating being in Española, about how you have to watch out for people here because people are no good. He had scratches on his neck. He told me sh

I did the algebra without thinking about where it came from. I've used the word algorithm my whole life without knowing it's a Latinized mangling of al-Khwarizmi's name — the man whose book gave us the word "algebra" itself, working in Baghdad a thousand years before anyone in Rio Arriba County dug a ditch. I know the acequia outside my door by its Arabic root, as-sāqiya, carried through Al-Andalus into Castilian and then into this valley. I have neighbors whose grandmothers

Before the stone did know its name The Word did move, it had no frame No hand as yet had made it still No wall had learned to hold its will Then down it fell as waters fall Not sin, but weight, and but a call And matter closed her hand so tight And named the fist a throne of light A hand did reach and touch the stone It carved a mark upon the bone Yet never knew what it had caught Was never his, and never bought But Sophia stayed beneath the flood She moved as root beneath th

Picture a two-megawatt unit humming in the mechanical room of Santa Fe Community College. Not a building. A closed box the size of a delivery truck, tucked next to the boilers, running inference and video processing for the college's own systems and a handful of regional partners. Its cooling loop comes out the other side at fifty degrees Celsius, piped straight into the campus heating system. In August, the surplus heat runs a greenhouse instead. Net water consumption: close

The exhaust camshaft was one tooth out of time. That's the whole problem, mechanically speaking. One tooth, out of however many, on a chain that has to be exact or the engine bends its own valves against its own pistons the first time it turns over. I didn't know that when I started. I didn't know a lot of things when I started. I pulled a 2011 Prius apart in my driveway because nobody else would, and I found that out the hard way, staring at three timing marks that were supp

I came home from two weeks on the road with almost nothing left, and one night, alone, something happened to my seeing. I loved my senses that night. I mean that plainly — the way the air sat in the room, the weight of my own hands, the sounds a house makes when nobody else is in it. I loved them and I did not trust them. Both at once. The old suspicion was awake in me, the one the Gnostics wrote down eighteen centuries ago: that the senses are the furniture of a false world.

Understanding the Acequia System This week, I mapped every named acequia in my county. Not as a figure of speech. I pulled the State Engineer's public records — every point of diversion, every mapped ditch line — and joined them at a desk in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The count came back: 544 named acequias, ditches, and laterals. More than four thousand diversions tied to those named lines. Forty-two land grants with water still moving through them. Over thirteen thousan

A citizen's framework for siting American AI infrastructure before the basins decide for us. The question Washington is asking is where do we put the data centers. The question Washington should be asking is what does the watershed permit. I write from the upper Rio Grande, where ditches older than the republic still move water by gravity and consent — so I have seen what it looks like when a watershed is asked. That inversion is the entire argument. Right now, private capita

Grant County did the policy work. The watershed still paid. On January twenty-seventh of this year, the Grant County Public Utility District board met in Ephrata, Washington, and unanimously approved a power purchase agreement with a Houston natural gas company called VoltaGrid. The agreement authorizes a twelve-megawatt on-site gas turbine to be installed on the Vantage Data Centers campus in Quincy, behind the customer's own meter, to serve a single hyperscale tenant until

What Washington decides about American water is being decided without us. A note from the Llano ditch. I walked the Llano ditch this spring. The water was moving the way water moves in a ditch that has been moving water for a long time — slowly, with the small turbulences that say this is alive, under cottonwoods that have been drinking from it longer than the United States has had a constitution. The mayordomo who walked part of it with me did not need a clipboard. He knew w

The Sacred Flow of Water This year, we face a drought in our watershed. Water is scarce, a precious resource slipping through our fingers. Yet, we are not the first to confront this challenge. For centuries, our acequia communities have managed water with wisdom. This wisdom is born from living on this land, from understanding that water is shared. It flows through all of us. How we use it upstream affects everyone downstream. Now, we have a chance to deepen that wisdom and h

The Essence of Farming Farming gave birth to civilization. And depending on how we farm, it can give birth to new ones. We carry a much bigger and older role in nature than we do in civilization. For most of human history, our relationship with the land wasn't a lifestyle choice — it was the source of meaning, rhythm, and identity. It was the job no one could take away. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that. The Illness of Civilization Civilization is sick. Not metaphorical