Good points and well taken, Jim. Thanks for your insights – and for reading.

In the origin story of Texas and the United States, it’s more than a building —

Trump ally Ken Paxton’s controversial ‘legal warfare’ style has worked in the culture wars — As I headed to Texas from Arizona, the very Republican state certainly had that orange guy’s very defiant, attack-attack-attack politics on its mind. Soon after Donald Trump’s May 24 rally in Dallas, Texas prepared for the impeachment of its Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton (lunchtime, May 27). Reader, lawmakers in…

A humbling omission for Boris and British politics? — As I headed to Texas from Arizona, so it seemed had Donald Trump. And Boris Johnson, who has apparently already spent a week in the US. He joined Republican leaders in Dallas, Texas, to drum up support for arming Ukraine. And yet, he had dinner with the orange guy, the…

Rising rents and mortgages are beyond the ‘working homeless’ — You can’t travel through America — by train, bus, your own car — without noticing that everyone else is hitting the open road as well. Especially in RVs as recreational vehicles are lovingly called by those who cherish the freedoms offered by the trailer attached on back to your pick-up…

Arizona has permitless carry and honours concealed carry permits from other states — The day before the first anniversary of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest of its kind since the one at Sandy Hook a decade prior — I sat in Phoenix Sky Harbour airport and heard the following announcement over and over: “Please check you don’t have a…

Roswell in 1947; Aztec in 1948… —

A ‘portal to other worlds’? — Last month (April 19), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told the US Congress that the Pentagon’s sightings of unidentified flying objects were on the rise, now topping 650 incidents in recent years. However, he clarified, there are no signs of alien life as yet. It put…

‘More boo for your buck’ —