The Fortnightly Rant

Nine hundred years ago, Henry of Huntingdon wrote of King Canute, a Dane who had ruled England about a century before. Canute, in Henry’s telling, had his throne carried down to the seashore, where he then commanded the incoming tide to stop advancing before it reached him. Spoiler alert: the tide did not stop. Tides come and go, but that story has remained. So it goes with many stories that are open to interpretation. A fool might think that the story shows King Canute to be a wet-footed fool. That ancient monarch knew, though, where his powers ended. He was just trying to drive some …

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Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, announced on Tuesday that she is sending teams of election monitors to six states this primary season, New Hampshire being one of them. The alleged purpose of this expenditure of taxpayer dollars is to “increase voter confidence.” Dhillon ought to know better. She attended college in New Hampshire, graduating in 1989. By then, Secretary of State for Life [Emeritus] Bill Gardner* had already been overseeing elections for 12 years, scrupulously enough to make Caesar’s wife look like a floozie. Gardner retired in 2022, but his successor, David Scanlan, would …

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Gracious sakes, look at the calendar! Just a week from tomorrow comes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence! My, my—how time flies when you’re publishing newspapers. Routine journalistic practice would be to honor the occasion by combing the archives and republishing bits of our reportage on that earth-shaking event. Frankly, though, our Human Resources Department has failed to provide us with sufficient editorial staff to perform such a task. Also, not to cast aspersions on Daniel Fowle, our founder and then-editor, but mid-18th century prose is an acquired taste. Instead, we’ll recommend to our readers a volume available at the Portsmouth Public Library: …

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Ice melting at the poles turns into water. Earth’s spin causes centrifugal force, sending that water towards the equator. Adding mass to that region slows the rotation of the Earth. That’s pretty straightforward. It’s basic physics. Ice Capades skaters have been demonstrating that effect for years: arms in, faster spin. Scientists recently figured out how to compare current trends with far earlier times. A newly-published paper says Earth is now slowing at an “unprecedented” rate—greater than at any time in 3.6 million years. Good luck, though, convincing your MAGA uncle that days are getting longer because of climate change. Man-made greenhouse gas emissions have the …

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We should be grateful. Despite our modest size, as the Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ we feel obligated to record, to the best of our ability, the essence of each fortnight as it passes. As everyone knows who has not yet retreated, for mental health purposes, to the wilderness or a bunker, current events have been, for the past decade or so, a constant barrage from every direction of the simply unbelievable. We are not complaining. As Hyman Roth said to Michael Corleone, “this is the business we’ve chosen.” We merely wish to establish how challenging it can be to winnow out, from this bizarre maelstrom of …

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