Why This Exists

I came to this the long way around.

Most of the ways I worked through my life have closed to me. Disability took them, one at a time, and not gently. What it did not take is the thing underneath all of them — a need to solve problems that I have never been able to put down and have long since stopped trying to. Give me a broken system and I will start taking it apart before anyone asks me to.

Nothing has stopped my brain from pushing through whatever it can still push through, and nothing is going to.

So this is where the pushing goes now.

What’s here

• Broadsides — signed argument. Start here if you only have ten minutes.
• The Papers — formal work: theology, philosophy, and whatever else has held my attention long enough to be worth the discipline.
• Research — the reading and analysis behind the rest.
• Inventions — what I’ve built or filed.
• Advocacy — legislative work, veterans’ policy, the record.
• Resources — things I’ve found useful and think you might.
• Community — how to reach me and how to stay in touch.

Every section carries material that is free for you to take and use. Not licensed grudgingly, not watermarked, not gated. If something here is worth anything to you, it is yours. The permissions page has the specifics.

About the Broadsides

The first published writing here started with a post that came across my Facebook feed. That is an unglamorous origin and I am not going to dress it up.

I chose the word broadside partly out of my Navy years — every gun on one side, fired together, aimed. But mostly I chose it because of who used the format before me. Thomas Paine printed single sheets and put them in people’s hands. He was not preaching. He was advocating a solution: here is the problem, stated plainly, and here is what might be done about it. Usually something the reader could do himself.

That is what I am after. Point at the problem specifically enough that it can be argued with, then name a remedy specific enough that someone could actually go do it. Not every piece gets that far. When one doesn’t, I would rather say so than manufacture a remedy I don’t have.

Some of what I write will be disagreeable. I know that going in. I write it anyway, in good faith and with good intent, and I would rather be argued with than agreed with out of politeness.

One thing you should know

No one alive is more familiar with my failures than I am.

There is exactly one exception, and I have been married to her for forty-five years.

I mention it because it matters to how these pieces are written. Whatever I have to say about other men’s shortcomings, I write with my own sitting at the top edge of every paragraph. That is not modesty. It is just the honest position from which any of this can be said at all.

It is also, as it turns out, most of what I actually know. Very little of what you’ll find on this site came from being right the first time. It came from being wrong at some expense, paying attention to the bill, and going back in. That is a slow way to learn anything. It is also the only way I ever have, and it means that when I hand you something here, it has usually already cost somebody — generally me.

— Greg Warnock