About This Blog

Vox clamantis in deserto is Latin for voice crying in the wilderness and it’s a reference to the Biblical prophets Isaiah and John the Baptist. Basically I chose this title because the internet is surely a wilderness and because I am not altogether sure that anyone will care to read my posts.

I am a former professor, former banker, and former programmer turned writer and translator with a fairly useless doctorate in Romance languages. Though I have engaged in web publishing since the 1990s, I never really “got” the concept of blogging as I was rather convinced that too few people actually cared about the random thoughts of others to justify the investment of one’s time in the authorship of vain musings. However, Facebook’s evolution into (among other things) a forum to share one’s thoughts, activities, interests, and moods eventually led me to see the intrinsic satisfaction of sharing with a plausible, even if uncertain, audience.

This WordPress iteration started in April 2013 (though I have back-filled some content using dates that would have been appropriate to that content had I been blogging at that time). It was a slow evolution forward with a few title and tagline changes and even fewer posts. Eventually the title stuck in 2016 and merited an accompanying domain name in 2018. Though internet anonymity is a disheartening illusion, I find that plausible invisibility enables me to express controversial ideas more transparently. I maintain only reasonable illusions (and delusions) regarding the meaningfulness of this endeavor. On the one hand, I do not really expect anyone to read it; on the other hand, I simultaneously think: who knows what someone will stumble upon by way of Google. But ultimately, I am not convinced that a blog is any different than any conventional print medium; a writer’s desire for expressiveness exists regardless of audience saturation.

No Unlicensed Practice of Profession

Nothing on this blog constitutes the practice of law or medicine. I am but an academic, a thinker, a teacher, a scholar, a professor; the opinions and analyses that I express are limited to that capacity and expressed in conformance with the First Amendment.