John Donegan

If you thought that the transformation of Jeff Goldblum from a bookish scientist into a fly in the 1986 movie The Fly was a dramatic metamorphosis, just consider the sudden conversion of Elon Musk from liberal hero to hated nemesis. And a transmogrifier wasn’t even necessary!  It seems like just yesterday that Musk was the […]

Roe v. Wade is dead. Now what? The impact in California and the other blue states is negligible, and abortion will continue to be available in those states. But more potentially impactful is the court’s finding that the “right to privacy” that the Roe court “discovered” in the Constitution does not actually exist. This has […]

Why won’t conservatives agree to what you anti-gun liberals see as “common sense” gun restrictions? In a word: trust. Some of the proposals aren’t that bad, but with your visceral loathing of all guns and gun owners, and your insistence on blaming gun violence on everything but the shooter, we don’t trust you to act […]

Sometimes important advances in science can come from a most improbable source: politics. Who would have thought that the political process could contribute so much to advance science? Recently, the publishers of an established and renowned medical reference work, the Merck Manual, found themselves in the politically uncomfortable position of being cited by the Florida […]

Many of you may have read of the brouhaha over the Netflix special of comedian Dave Chappelle, The Closer. Chappelle’s routines are notorious for jokes that insult and mock nearly every group, including whites, women, gays, Jews, and Asians. His usual material largely revolves around biting comments on race and identity, and Bloomberg has glowingly […]

Well, just when we figured that the pandemic was finally in our rearview mirrors, the virus has come roaring back, and the blame is now being focused on all those red-state anti-vaxxers. The pandemic and the vaccine have been politically weaponized.   Caveat: It is dumb to refuse vaccination, and I have myself been vaccinated. […]

There has been a lot of handwringing and gnashing of teeth recently about the homeless problem. Who are they and what should we do about them? The most visible and problematic homeless are the substance abusers and mentally ill. The problem seems to be getting worse, as we see tent cities springing up in our […]

As some of you may have noticed, the theory that the source of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been a lab in Wuhan, China, is no longer just the stuff of fevered right-wing fantasies and rabid Trumpists, but has become mainstream. In fact, by the time that this column runs, the lab-release scenario may be […]

What do we do about crazy people? The recent murder of a local police officer and shooting of another by a person whose mental illness had allegedly been previously reported to law enforcement highlights the difficulty of responding to reports of mental illness.  On May 10, 2021, Edward Giron killed SLO Police Detective Luca Benedetti […]

Oh, no! Once again, our Central Coast “woketariat” is in an uproar! This time, the irritated and indignant insurgents have fixed their sights on Cuesta College Trustee Pete Sysak, and on Paso Robles school district Clerk Chris Arends and demand their banishment for the usual liberal litany of “-isms.” What has our youthful cadre of […]

Sitting around housebound during the first week of the countywide coronavirus shelter-in-place order, and inundated with relentless, depressing media accounts of the pandemic, I have had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the crisis, and on our reaction to it. It is likely that once this column is published, the situation will have clarified some, […]