Jim is a proud descendant of 18th Century criminal exiles from England who swam to the Outer Banks when the British ship taking them to a Georgia penal colony sank in a storm near Cape Hatteras. Having the prescience to prevent their descendants from becoming "TarHeels," they immediately migrated to Virginia, where, within just a few generations they worked their way up into poverty. Jim's grandfather was the first in the family tree to see the distant horizons, but his career was cut short by severe injuries he sustained when a cousin cut down the tree.

After a brief stint in the Army (ours) following post-graduate work, he began his career in the state bureaucracy but was never able to break into the federal bureaucracy. Several years later, he entered the private sector and co-founded a small law-publishing company. Later, finding the publishing of small laws unstimulating and insufficiently lucrative, he began writing political satire/commentary, which is even less lucrative. His greatest vice is taking himself too seriously.