Holiday News For My Subscribers

I hope this message finds you all well, enjoying your holidays with family and friends. In my house, we did the “gingerbread house smackdown” which has become a tradition (five years in a row now), and my contest entry was a gingerbread house that imitated life–my life in 2024 to be exact.

As you can see, one roof panel broke as I was building the house, and so required a “fusion”. You may have read earlier posts, including the most recent, in which I mention the cervical fusion I unfortunately had to undergo in July. The blue candies were the best I could do for titanium:

The second roof panel I decided to have some fun with, given the good turn that life took after the surgery: I was fortunate enough to be able to co-author an amicus brief in a geofence warrant case with a Senior Attorney from The Pacific Legal Foundation. Moreover, I will be joining PLF in late January as a Litigation Fellow! You heard it here first!

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you have a restorative week or so before the excitement of the New Year is upon us!



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Motivation by Love vs. Motivation by Fear

The first half of my current trip around the sun–my birthday is at the beginning of June–has featured too much of the latter. The main event was choosing ACDF surgery—which scared the you-know-what out of me—over a scarier alternative. (I was in danger of becoming paralyzed due to the instability in my cervical spine.)

The scars, physical and emotional, are slowly starting to fade, but there is still much rehab of all kinds for me to do.

This period of time hasn’t been entirely without motivation by love, thankfully. I look forward to sharing a passion project with you soon. And, with a lot of work and a little luck, I look forward to many more such projects.

So yes, I have made the journey from mostly fearful to mostly thankful. And I see the sun coming out right now, so let me go grab a bit. (It’s been an essential component of my recovery.)

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

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It can’t happen here–not quite yet anyway.

35 years ago yesterday the Berlin Wall fell. Here’s a picture of a piece I’ve kept nearby for decades, given to me by a friend at UCLA who had removed it himself just after the wall came down.

This, plus hearing the news about the anti-“misinformation” bill pending in Australia, made me think of one perspective on Tuesday’s decisive election results in the U.S.: a majority of the American people refused to elect two politicians who had stated explicitly their intention to build a Berlin Wall preventing the free flow of information.

It can’t happen here–not quite yet anyway!

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