When a child pretends to be somebody else, they will loudly proclaim, “Look at me, Mommy!” Parents watch young children perform and congratulate them on their effort, regardless of quality. At a certain age, we celebrate the performers at least as much as the performance. But that changes at an early age or when the audience is made up of other children.

I was a child actor in Baltimore from ages six to sixteen. For many years, the cast was mostly children. In addition to our annual production of A Christmas Carol, we chose stories with children as the target audience. I played various Mark Twain characters and a penguin.

Starting at age twelve, I worked in adult productions in Baltimore and elsewhere. I was usually the lead or only juvenile in the cast. These were comedies and/or plays where I was a child dealing with a type of ethnic persecution.

The problem with modern entertainment is simple. Their job is to entertain by staying focused on each product’s target audience. But they have decided that impressing their peers by showing their social awareness is more important.

Star Trek

Star Trek has had many versions in its remarkable sixty-year history. Three major ones have been:

• Original Series (TOS) with William Shatner as Kirk
  Next Generation (TNG) with Patrick Stewart as Picard
  Kelvin with Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock

At its best, each episode (other than cliffhangers) tells a story, keeping viewers hanging on until it concludes. Many have just been good stories. Quite a few made a point. Often, they made a point simply through the composition and interaction of the cast members.

The three Kelvin movies made a billion dollars. The last was Star Trek Beyond, made in 2016. When Alex Kurtzman became the lead producer for Star Trek in 2017, things changed for the worse. Episodes became less about entertainment and stories and more about promoting social good. Media Collapse YT produced a YouTube video covering the history of the decline. The last step was Starfleet Academy

[C]ritics gave it a 87%, but the audience score landed at 51%. One of the most dramatic critic versus audience splits in franchise history, which typically means one thing. Professional reviewers are aligned with the production values, but actual paying subscribers are not watching

This is a perfect example of pleasing insiders, ignoring the audience, and losing money. As it happened, Kurtzman’s contract was ending, and Paramount was getting a new owner. The good news for Star Trek fans is that a new team is in charge and a new script is in production with “Fun” as a driving word.

The material is what it is

I know a couple who both have doctorates and didn’t know what to say to a newborn. My brother-in-law and I both have graduate degrees. We used to joke about spending time rolling around on the floor with our young children yelling “My Ball!” I played a penguin in one production. It was placed incorrectly when it was rolled on stage. That’s life. Sometimes you have to relax and let your “dignity down” to serve a purpose.

Children’s stories and fairy tales aren’t Shakespeare. I have a rather simple rule. If you are going to take a role, be gracious, take the money, say “Thank you,” and don’t badmouth the story, the role, or the audience.

One actor thoroughly failed to understand the value of the material. I won’t specify the details. Someone who had a role in one of C. S. Lewis’s classic Narnia stories was quoted as saying it was rather silly. That person might investigate the history of Lewis and his stories. I dare say the tales of Narnia will be remembered and retold for years, long after the current production team is forgotten.

Respect the audience

Always remember that your audience is your customer. Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy tennis shoes.” He made a point of keeping his political views to himself so everyone would buy his shoes. Several famous male basketball players are commenting on Women’s NBA issues. Some people view everything as political. I think they are protecting the sport they love.

Three kinds of lectures put your audience at risk. The first was something we discussed with Kurtzman at Star Trek. Lectures without good drama will get people to turn away every time.

Second, I don’t need lectures on sports programs, sports fields, and athletic equipment. If I want to study, I turn to material and people I respect. Sports are my outlet when I want to relax.

Finally, let me talk about actors and knowledge. As a child actor, I once spouted the Pythagorean theorem in a play. I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Four months later, I studied that concept in Geometry class. At various times in my life, I’ve seen the impact of a bubble on the way it makes people certain they are right. An actor risks his career by assuming his audience is naïve or uninformed and needs the actor’s wisdom to make the world a better place.

Those in the club cannot conceive that any outsider can make a useful contribution to society. I saw this in the reaction to the role of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The public saw both men playing a role, but fashionable historians dismissed it.

Trump saw multiple problems and started to work on them, with varying degrees of success. For various reasons, he has been more successful in his second term. Apparently, some people can’t stomach the idea of living with any memory of a Trump legacy and are willing to reverse real progress to erase his memory.

TACO and Greenland

“Trump Always Chickens Out!” Really? I’ve heard a better explanation. He reaches for the stars and settles for the moon. More importantly, he was asking for something vital to the safety and security of the United States and the world.

Greenland is a vast area of ice with only about 55,644 people. It is three times the size of Texas and 25% bigger than Alaska. It matters for only one reason. Location, location, location! It sits between Europe and the United States and between the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean.

Whoever can put bases on Greenland can control a sizable portion of the Arctic and have a base for planes to monitor activity above, on, and below the Atlantic. Denmark doesn’t have the assets to defend Greenland. Greenland is also reportedly considering seeking independence. A nation of less than sixty thousand people certainly doesn’t have those resources.

Trump sees Chinese efforts to gain access to various assets in Greenland and Russia’s efforts to claim Arctic territory at Greenland’s expense. His “reach for the stars” demand to claim Greenland for the U.S. was a conversation starter to ensure serious talks began, and Greenland’s security was enforced. A Wall Street Journal article summarized the agreement.

While additional details are needed, the outline of Friday’s deal among the U.S., Denmark and Greenland solves the most pertinent security issues. By ensuring U.S. military access to Greenland in perpetuity, expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, and restricting other countries’ military and economic access to Greenland, Washington has achieved the goals Mr. Trump set out when he called for the acquisition of Greenland. …
The pact makes America and its partners safer and puts China and Russia on notice that the U.S. and its Arctic partners will stand shoulder to shoulder against their malign behavior in one of the world’s most dynamic regions.

Political control of Greenland would have been both a headache and costly. Trump never really wanted that. He saw military and security issues. This treaty resolves that. He gave up only what he never really wanted.

No to World Peace

Trump supporters have joked that if he arranged world peace, war would become popular. That may be coming true. In August 2025, Trump helped arrange a peace treaty ending a 30-year conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Brenda Shaffer and Svante Cornell of The Hill wrote an excellent article describing why that matters for other operations in the Caspian.

President Trump launched the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, TRIPP for short, in partnership with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
This route is much more than a simple road; it represents an active American intent to safeguard access to the heart of Eurasia, helping partner countries maintain their independence and preventing Russia, China and Iran from dominating the strategically vital Caspian region.
The U.S. and Western allies need to promote infrastructure that blunts the impact of disruptions to freedom of the seas and spurs the development of energy resources outside the Middle East. TRIPP is an important component of this policy.

The article explains TRIPP’s value, its strategic importance, and our adversaries’ reaction. All this is on top of the basic value of a peace treaty after thirty years of war. What’s not to like? Simple! Donald Trump did it. Mat Whatley of Townhall has an article pointing out an absurd proposition being proposed in the European media.

[M]ultiple mainstream press outlets in Germany, Greece, and Poland have argued that Armenia should think carefully as to whether it would be safer to keep a Russian military base in its country than demand that it leave. Yes, that’s correct: Russia is, apparently, being touted by media broadly viewed as credible as a reliable guarantor of a European country’s security. Take all the time you need to think that logic through.
There is, naturally, a cause for this madness — and it is Trump Derangement Syndrome. The underlying message as to why Armenians should keep a base full of Russian military occupiers is that doing so would make it less likely that Trump’s most substantial (but too little acknowledged) foreign policy triumph — peace between Armenia and its neighbor Azerbaijan — will ultimately succeed.

That’s right, creating peace between nations and a strategy to hurt Iran and Putin can’t succeed if it is connected to Trump in any way.

Banquet Hall

When John F. Kennedy saw Pennsylvania Avenue in 1961, he thought it was an embarrassment. He arranged to have the existing buildings torn down and replaced with new and more impressive public and private buildings.

Donald Trump has long been embarrassed by the fact that the world’s greatest power hosts state dinners on grass lawns under tents. There is no class on grass. He thinks we should have a banquet hall. If Trump were a popular Democrat, every foundation in the country would contribute; there would be no controversy, and it would be done.

The East Wing had to go to build the Hall. It was normal construction. The old makes way for the new. Oh! No! Trump destroyed a major landmark! Now there is talk that even if it is built, it will be destroyed because Trump can’t have a legacy!

I received the care I needed because these people, regardless of their color, had the training and skill to perform tasks, up to and including those of surgery and anesthesia.

We live in a strange time where there are people who believe certain skills and habits are “racist” and a sign of “white supremacy” and should not be taught to or required of minority students. This is insane. It not only ruins those students’ lives and futures but also hurts everyone else. A child raised to believe this learns no useful skills or habits. They only learn to blame and hate everyone outside their “tribe” and follow the loudest, angriest, hot-headed demagogue of the week.

Thomas Sowell is a Black man born ninety-six years ago into poverty in Gastonia, North Carolina, near Charlotte. As a child, he moved to Harlem. He learned discipline and was permitted to enter some of New York’s quality schools. His family structure didn’t support his studies, so he needed a few years and the help of the Marine Corps to get back on track, but he did.

He earned degrees in Economics from Harvard (1958), Columbia (1959), and the University of Chicago (1968). He then taught (among other places) at Cornell, Brandeis, and U.C.L.A. He became a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in September 1980 and has been there ever since.

While teaching at Cornell from 1965 to 1969, he witnessed the harm caused by affirmative action. He has been writing about the subject ever since. His major book on the subject is Affirmative Action Around the World. He uses the term “Mismatch” to describe the problem when students are placed in schools where their skill level doesn’t match that of their cohort. Justice Thomas cited his ideas in the Supreme Court opinion for the case involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

I’ll limit this discussion to medical programs, but it applies to any technical area and any civil rights issue.

Three groups are involved. The first makes all the noise and all the plans. They want all the credit and avoid all the blame. These are the people who insist on good admissions numbers. They don’t care what happens after that. Agitators, politicians, media, NGOs, and the entire academic bureaucracy live by these numbers.

The next group is the students involved, both the favored minorities and the disfavored. Let’s start with an admittedly arbitrary division. Assume three levels of schools based on the performance percentile of the expected admitted cohort: Good (90%), Very Good (95%), Topflight (98%).

In an ideal world, ability would be the only criterion, and most of the admitted students would understand the material at the rate it is presented, complete the program, and become professionals. If the goal is to produce as many minority professionals as possible, the question isn’t input; it’s output. They must stay in the program.

In his autobiographical A Personal Odyssey, Sowell explained the problem for affirmative action students:

As a result, minority students dropped out of STEM programs and moved into racial studies or other “anger” studies. They would eventually become social agitators rather than technical professionals.

If the goal is to have as many minority doctors and other medical professionals as possible, we can’t mismatch them. There certainly are top-flight minority students. Every student needs to be stretched to the maximum of their ability. But we also need to match good and very good minority students with the appropriate training.

Affirmative action wastes spots by filling them with mismatched students. Those places never produced doctors. Qualified disfavored students never get a chance to receive the training.

The entire community suffers when there are fewer medical professionals. We need to focus on graduation, not admission.

State Banquet Room

The so-called “ballroom” is more than that, and it was on Trump’s “Do List” long before he ran for office. He offered the funds to build it while Barack Obama was President.

Trump is embarrassed by the current setup. When the American President is invited to a state dinner in a foreign country, the event is held in a real building with a solid floor. It’s the kind of place suitable for gentlemen in tuxedos and tails and ladies in gowns and high heels. Indoor toilets are available for actual needs and to serve as an excuse to leave the table when needed.

In the United States, if anywhere else, state dinners are held on a lawn. Presumably, some kind of wooden planking is used as flooring to protect the grass and make walking a little easier. Would you believe the United States of America provides port-a-potties?

Any citizen with an ounce of pride in the country would find this both embarrassing and outrageous.

Then there is the more genuine issue of security. State dinners involve multiple world leaders and senior government officials. Even if President Trump hadn’t already been the subject of multiple assassination attempts, the case for moving them inside a secure building is so obvious that even lawyers and journalists should be able to understand it.

To end this absurdity, Trump arranged private funding to build an appropriate facility. As usual, if Trump says “Up,” Lilliput says “Down.”

The self-anointed members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States sued to stop the work. This is insane on several levels. As described above, the work is needed for many reasons. The old wall is torn down. Security facilities are being built underground. The appellate court spent one hundred pages trying to justify its claim to the authority to stop the work. The dissent was thirty-five pages.

Let’s be clear. There is no legal, logical, or security reason not to build this. Donald Trump wants to host an event in this building before his term ends. A bunch of small-minded people in Washington will do everything they can to block it. An ABC News article notes that the administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court’s delay.

Birthright Citizenship

It is difficult to know whether the court’s ruling on birthright citizenship (Trump vs. Barbara) is driven by any need to show independence from Trump. It is a financial disaster and rewards criminal behavior. It also gives an enemy nation another way to harm us.

There are two ways to obtain citizenship at birth. It can happen through location [jus soli (the right of the soil)] or by parentage jus sanguinis (the right of blood)]. For example, the children of Americans on duty overseas are considered natural-born citizens if they want to run for President.

Justices Gorsuch and Alito noted that the majority took the early English reading and “soil” interpretation.

And Justice Alito noted that the

Justice Alito also notes a major security concern. Enemies in the past have raised and trained citizens of their country to look, act, and speak like Americans. They are then planted here as deep agents. This ruling makes that job easier.

Enemy nations can spend a small amount of money on birth tourism and produce a considerable number of American citizens. Neither the parent nor the child was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States for any significant amount of time. They can be trained to both hate America and act American.

Justice Alito then notes that “Even if he plots to harm this country, he cannot be deprived of his status as a citizen, at least under current precedent.”

Alito closed his dissent with several concerns about the Court’s interpretation. He noted that it “preserves a powerful incentive to enter or remain in this country illegally” and

The dissenters in this case are certain this ruling cannot stand for long and will eventually be reversed by the courts. Perhaps when a President other than Donald Trump makes a similar appeal to protect the nation, it will be socially acceptable to allow it.

Summary

The notion that Donald Trump’s actions are unreasonable or egomaniacal may be politically useful, but it’s not true, at least in these cases. His actions have valid reasons. It is a shame that what is good and needed for the country is being delayed because some people don’t want to let the person proposing it get the credit.

Harry Truman became President of the United States on April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died. FDR had kept him remarkably uninformed about major programs. Victory in Europe occurred in May, but the war in the Pacific against Japan was still raging. Truman knew nothing about the “Manhattan Project” or the Atomic Bomb before he became President. He may not have known much about the estimates for the other options.

Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen wrote a book called Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb. They wrote an article on that subject called Invasion Most Costly in the August 1995 issue of the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. Wikipedia and Britannica have excellent information about this era.

The battle for Okinawa went from April 1 to June 22 and cost 7,613 American soldiers dead and 31,807 wounded.

Based on my research, I will give you a sad number and ask a question. One hundred thousand Japanese civilians died. Did it happen in Hiroshima or Okinawa? It is a trick question. The answer is “Yes.” It happened in both places. That is a major part of what made one option for Truman so frightening.

The Proceedings article describes the problem Truman faced. Japan faced a demand for total surrender. Germany had also faced that and did not surrender until Hitler was dead in his bunker. Multiple foreign diplomats in Tokyo had described Japan’s strategy.

Truman had two objectives. He wanted to save American lives, and he wanted to end the war as soon as possible. A shorter war would save lives on both sides. It would let Americans get on with life. It would also stop the destruction of Japanese territory.

There were two basic choices: bombing and invasion. Given Japan’s obvious strategy and the nature of previous battles, invasion was going to be very costly in lives on both sides.

Bombing had been happening. A Wikipedia article covers all the bombings up to and through World War II. It covers strategies by all parties and ends with the atomic bombs. There have been claims that Americans were less concerned about harming or killing Asians than they were about killing Europeans. If you look at the history of the bombing, that doesn’t hold up.

German cities were destroyed with only marginal concern for protecting civilians.

Bombing in Japan was different from Germany because the building materials were different. Army Air Force Generals “Hap” Arnold and Curtis LeMay were trying to show that bombing alone could end the war. Instead of conventional bombs, LeMay was using napalm and firebombing the targets.

Arnold and LeMay were ready to subject Japan to continuous firebombing until nothing, and nobody, would be left standing. A complete food and fuel blockade was already in place. Clearly it was a matter of getting a diehard military group to be willing to surrender.

Truman had to choose between two terrible options. Both would cause the death of many civilians. Japanese leadership would not let civilians be spared during an invasion. Bombing would not cease.

The atomic bombs were not something used in isolation. They were an alternative to an incredibly bloody invasion. They were used in the hope that their shock value would get the Emperor to intervene and end the horror. Somebody needed to say, “Enough!”

It did the job. Hirohito decided the time had come. He recorded a speech. Someone tried to steal the recording to prevent the surrender. It didn’t work. The war ended.

For eighty-one years, people have tried to be wiser and kinder than Harry Truman. He took what he saw as the “least worst” path available, and it worked.

Some people are convinced that America is the source of all evil. America gives them the right to say that and will do so until people like them take over. You can’t argue with them because their purity is an axiomatic belief.

Others believe there is always a gentler answer if you look hard enough. That would mean that there are no evil people in the world. History teaches a different lesson.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be in Truman’s shoes at that point. I suspect he didn’t either. He was. He made the call, and the war ended shortly thereafter.

When Martin Luther King spoke of not judging people by the color of their skin, he was trying to end a world where many people could not do what others did. There were far too many cases where people asked, “May I?” and the answer was “No.”

It wasn’t just people with “too much melanin” who were blocked. Those who wanted to interact with them were also blocked. Railroad companies tried to block the rule requiring a separate car for blacks. The extra car added to the cost of moving the train.

There was no architectural or maintenance reason for duplicating bathrooms and water fountains. Hoteliers and restaurateurs saw the green of money more than skin color and would have been more than willing to tell their on-site staff to take money from anyone willing to pay.

Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was having trouble securing permission to recruit black men to the University of Alabama for his football team. He arranged for a West Coast team with talented black players to come to his campus and embarrass his all-white team. He then asked, “Now, may I get Black players on my team?” Winning college football was important enough to bend other rules. He got permission.

I was born in 1946. I remember all kinds of tragic love stories about inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and inter-racial love affairs. In the 1950s, many of the stories ended with these affairs blocked. Yet, in the real world, there were many couples in all those categories. I grew up in Baltimore. In the Fifties and Sixties, there were few white-black couples. There were a fair number of white‑Asian couples. In large cities like mine, interethnic and interreligious marriages were numerous.

Housing and employment opportunities were restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity. I had a part-time job while I was in college working at an A&P. My manager was excellent. He lamented that he would not advance up the company’s corporate chain because he wasn’t Italian. That wasn’t law; it was stupidity. A&P is gone. That’s one of the reasons.

The famous Brown V. Board of Education Supreme Court decision dealt with the fact that Black children were not allowed to attend their closest elementary school if white children went there. In many states, the laws quoted the phrase “separate but equal” and told Black children, “You may not sit next to white children to get an education. The Court told those children, “Yes, indeed, you may.”

King’s famous quote was about moving the country to a point where skin color was irrelevant. Sadly, anger over differences is a way to animate people to vote, give away economic favors, and, for some people, get rich. Once the benefits roll in, the benefits of division make the task of ending them more difficult. Thomas Sowell has published nine books on the use and misuse of racial issues.

You must! I won’t

The public knew things were going the wrong way when racial identification and sorting were accepted as the cure for racial problems. The first issue was busing. No sooner had children been told they could attend their closest school than they were told they couldn’t. We were told that the way to make sure everyone got an evenly good education was to make sure the schools were racially mixed.

Now, children of all races are sent away from their neighborhood schools based on their race. They were told they must use school buses. Parents who crossed picket lines to let children go to the closest schools were called racists for opposing sending children to schools other than their closest school.

This was, of course, resisted. You must! We won’t! Private schools have flourished. Those who could afford it, no matter what their skin color, fled the cities and took their kids out of poor‑performing schools. Many city school systems have never recovered.

Then there are the “educationist” experiments. If the kids weren’t learning, innovative ideas were needed. We can’t use phonics to teach reading. English is too demanding; let’s allow Ebonics. Math is racist. If a child says 2 + 2 = 5, it is simply “white supremacist” to call that incorrect. We are told we must pay ever-increasing taxes to cities and the Department of Education because we are not sophisticated enough to understand their innovations.

We also must let people with external genitals say they are women and walk around naked in female bathrooms and locker rooms. The other people in those rooms must accept that person’s presence. We’ve had courts say this is a form of legal reality.

Those of us who value sanity and freedom of speech don’t want to live in a world where we must let children say 2 + 2 = 5. We also don’t want to be told we must let men say they are women and it is acceptable for them to be undressed where women are changing and showering. That kind of world is insane.

We must work and vote to keep the freedom to call folly, “folly,” and end it.

The public has assumptions about the purpose of publicly supported institutions. The support is based on the fulfillment of the functions needed. Police, courts, fire, border enforcement, and national defense are tasks generally assumed to be funded by society in general. Various levels of education may also be funded through taxation.

Antonio Gramsci had a different use for institutions. He saw them as a tool for social change. If change agents gained control of institutions, society could be changed for what he considered “the better.” Paul Schwennesen wrote an excellent article on Gramsci’s strategy and its consequences.

Haidt has repeatedly described the problem in the development of the leadership class. Our universities no longer serve to train them in the contest of ideas. Instead, only one side is heard. Haidt quotes John Stuart Mill about the danger of people who hear only one side of the debate:

But there is something worse than that. These people go through life in such a tight bubble that they’ve never heard anyone respond to one of their ideas with a massive belly laugh and the exclamation, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

The New York Times and its writers produced a series of articles claiming that America was founded in 1619 as a haven for slavery. Then the history faculty of the University of North Carolina wanted to give the lead author a tenured faculty position. I covered this before. Anybody who has the foggiest idea of the role of the English and the American Civil War in ending slavery must give the 1619 effort an F-minus and wonder if the Times knows or cares about the difference between a fact and a fax.

An even sillier idea is the belief that human beings are more powerful than Mother Nature or God. Whatever mammal has the smallest brain in creation is apparently smarter than highly educated graduates of our best medical schools. The little mammal is knows the sex of the newborn as soon as the genital area is visible.

I’ve watched C-SPAN and seen physicians unable to answer the simple question, “How do you define a woman?” I have been asked to describe my “gender assigned at birth.” In 1946, the form was much simpler. There were two choices, and the doctor marked “Male.”

The arrogant leaders don’t realize they could continue their foolishness if they didn’t insist on annoying a lot of people by making our lives difficult. For some reason, the British Commonwealth countries are masters at this. Britain, Canada, and Australia are leading in the gender related legal harassment issues.

The Alliance For Responsible Citizenship just finished presenting an outstanding set of speakers in London on a variety of issues. Australian Sall Grover started her talk this way:

Grover then deals with the real problem when political leaders say up is down and fine you for not saying what they tell you to say.

This is the issue with all their follies. In 1984, George Orwell talks about party members being totally committed to the party line. Orwell described something called Newspeak. Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World also describe dystopias where ideas are limited and controlled to limit the range of ideas the population can encounter, deal with, or use against their rulers.

The fight for common sense and, more importantly, freedom of speech won’t be easy, but it is critical.

Matthew Crawford had an excellent article in the March 2026 issue of First Things magazine where he made an important distinction. An individual traveler is to be granted the assumption that he is not an opportunist. He should be given every courtesy. The same thing applies to those the nation allows to enter as legal immigrants.

When a stranger greets a child, they look at their parents to see if the stranger can be trusted. A citizen has an obligation to care for the safety of their family. They expect the government to guard the border and ensure that those who come to stay permanently will contribute to the country rather than harm it. Obviously, that can’t be true in an “open borders” regimen.

Crawford pointedly explains why those in charge have an obligation to protect their neighbors before protecting a stranger who would immigrate.

If there are enough people involved, immigration is costly to the existing population, even if there is no crime. The Dallas Federal Reserve talked about the impact on the cost of housing:

There is a massive increase in school costs and waiting times in hospital emergency rooms. These costs are before the damage caused by criminal behavior and motor vehicle fatalities.

The self-anointed charitable leaders completely misunderstand the signals they’ve been sending to a major segment of the Islamic immigrant population. A substantial portion of this group is young, male, and unattached. Islam includes a tradition of seeking to dominate the world. Christian victories in France and Vienna prevented that. Islamic males are assaulting European women virtually everywhere and paying almost no price. The women and their families are supposed to accept it to avoid creating a wave of Islamophobia.

Society’s leaders think this is “Christian Love.” In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published a novel titled Submission. He talks about France becoming increasingly Islamic. Jews are leaving because life is becoming unsafe. Life for women is changing. Some men have multiple wives.

I read the book in 2017 when there were articles in the Washington Post about Jews leaving France. I saw it as a warning. Amazon reviews described the book as satire. Its rankings included “Fiction Satire” as a category. I realized it was a warning, not a joke.

The immigrant “Trojan Horse” is now big enough to cause a major problem everywhere. In 2015, the BBC covered a French government report on Islamist ‘Entryism’.

It is a major step forward that the French government sees a problem. They are proposing a law to deal with it. I don’t doubt their motives in that law, but there are problems with it.

But France is not the only country dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to change society this way. Germany is facing the same problem and dealing with it more directly. They are actively monitoring and banning groups. Deutsche Welle reported that in July 2024 the government banned the Islamic Center of Hamburg [IZH] because it was “accused of undermining the German state as well as women’s rights.”

Chancellor Merz is also directing many Syrians to return home. Italy used a paperwork maneuver to order Islamic leaders to leave the country.

The point is that more and more European countries are recognizing the need to control who is in their countries. The United States is not alone in recognizing the problems and dangers posed by massive immigration.

World leaders who tried to downplay it for years have joined in realizing there is a genuine problem.

They said that 1776 was not the key date in American history. Rather, the significant date in our history was 1619 when a group of settlers came here searching for a place where they would be allowed to enslave other people.

To pull this off, they needed to have a public that would buy anything they were told about history and not be confused by facts. It would help if people with fancy degrees went along.

Let’s look at facts. In 1619, slavery was universal. You didn’t have to go anywhere to do it. Slavery, indentured servitude, and family members sold to pay off debts were universal. People owned people of the same color, the same tribe, or any other group. The word “slave” comes from “Slavic” because so many Slavic people were enslaved by the Ottomans. In fact, slavery still exists. An organization called Walk Free produced a Global Slavery Index 2023 and determined that there were fifty million enslaved people in the world in 2023.

I keep referring to Thomas Sowell. He is a Black man who was born in 1930 in Gastonia, North Carolina. His book Black Rednecks and White Liberals has a chapter called The Real History of Slavery. The book was written before the 1619 exercise in slander. The chapter is sixty pages. In the first few hundred words, he puts the lie to the notion that slavery in America was a unique evil. He also describes the hypocrisy and motives of people who make this argument.

Slavery wasn’t unique to Western Civilization, or even Britain and America. They stood alone in developing a revulsion to it and paid dearly to end it. One of the early leaders, William Wilberforce, was born in 1759, 140 years after 1619. By that time, there was growing discomfort with the slave trade. Britain led and enforced a ban.

Freeing the slaves, either by their owners (manumission) or by law, was seen as more complicated to those at the time than we think of it now. There were two major dangers. The first was the threat of a race war. Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted were among those who saw the need to end slavery but also recognized a danger in the sudden freedom of many slaves.

The other concern was about the lack of economic skills of the newly emancipated. They were illiterate and inumerate and had no property or assets.

In earlier times, The 1619 Project would have been laughed off and scorned by a public that understood actual history. Sadly, there have been too many decades of propaganda posing as education. When Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been used as your history textbook, you’re in trouble. A fascinating word was used to explain the 1619 Project’s “minor fault” that shouldn’t prevent its acceptance. We were told it caught America’s true nature, even though it was “ahistorical.” Ordinary folks thought it was simply wrong or a lie. They lacked the sophistication and years of education to call it ahistorical.

Three Atlantic Coast Conference basketball teams are in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle area of North Carolina. Duke, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are the sources of those teams. People in the region have different views on the universities associated with those teams. It is sometimes asked in jest if the schools match the quality of the teams. In 2021, Nikole Hannah-Jones was offered a tenured position on the UNC faculty. There was a furious backlash. She decided to decline the UNC position and take a similar post at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C. instead.

Many North Carolinians decided that the UNC basketball team was far more respectable than the faculty, especially the History Department. When we see in surveys that young people favor Socialism or even Communism over Capitalism and have no appreciation of America’s government and freedoms, we suspect their education is a major part of the problem.

John F. Kennedy - April 29, 1962, Speaking to Nobel Prize Winners
I think tahis is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that hs ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

America’s founders had every reason to consider themselves exceptional and look to the standard models of government, where the self-anointed “better people” put themselves in control of everything and leave the masses with no authentic way to overrule them.

There have been many such forms of government over time. In fact, most systems are that way. First, we must be clear about our terminology. There is Benjamin Franklin’s famous response when he was asked what kind of government the convention had produced: “A republic, if you can keep it.” It was not the kind of republic described by Plato in his famous work, The Republic. Neither was it a democracy in any form remotely resembling that term as it applied in Plato’s lifetime.

It is a form of representative government in which elected leaders specialize in public issues, much like tradesmen and others who focus on other skills. The public knew good and bad farriers, coopers, and dressmakers. They also had ideas about political leaders and could choose among them. Each of these skilled people had opinions about other craftspeople but could not tell people who to use.

People went to the best provider they could afford. “Best” is something each customer decides. Every service provider understood the need to continually maintain or improve their service. The public evaluated and purchased services they were not equipped to perform. They could not make a multi-drawer desk, but they could tell who made better desks.

As citizens, they played a similar role. They may or may not have had the material resources to keep up with government issues, but they had a sense of how those in offices performed. Regular election cycles gave the voters a way to announce their decision on the quality of the work being done.

The founders clearly rejected forms of government lacking that kind of feedback. Obviously hereditary monarchy was out. They also rejected Plato’s version of a trained group of the “best and the brightest” selected, separated, and raised from birth to be the wisest and therefore best suited to govern and decide all issues for the society.

Our revolution occurred in 1776, and the Constitution was written in 1787. George Washington was inaugurated as the first President on April 30, 1789. July 14, 1789, was seventy-five days later. That is France’s Bastille Day.

We have had one government with, admittedly, a civil war. The French began by attempting to completely change their calendars, clocks, and everything else. They had a “reign of terror” with a very active “Madame Guillotine”. The leaders of the terror ended their lives at her hands.

They’ve had multiple monarchical governments, a Napoleonic Empire or two, and are now in their Fifth Republic. France is heavily bureaucratic. They created The École nationale d’administration (ENA) to democratize access to the civil service. It has apparently become more like a filter stopping those who are not graduates.

Charles de Gaulle led the design of the Fifth Republic in 1958 with a strong Presidency. He was the first President. The current President, Emmanuel Macron, is an ENA graduate but is politically weak. There is growing talk of a sixth republic.

The essential difference between the American and French Revolutions is in their understanding of rights. America’s Bill of Rights is essentially the right to be left alone. It is what the government can’t do to you without due process of law. It also covers the rights we all have “equally, endowed by our creator” to speak up and voice our complaints.

In the French view, rights are things to which we are entitled. The government must get the resources to provide those things. That kind of government must be bigger, greedier, and more intrusive.

Hannah Arendt didn’t get caught up in the phony distinction between Nazis and Communists. She put them together and wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. This is a study of those who lead this kind of change, as well as the psychology of the public as it unfolds.

We saw the disasters of totalitarian governments in Russia, Germany, China, Cuba, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Yet there are still people who believe they can become the leaders of a totalitarian government that won’t fall into those traps.

Friedrich A. Hayek lived through those disasters in Europe and wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning.

This year is the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is a great tragedy that too many arrogant and ungrateful people don’t understand the wonderful and unique nature of Western civilization and the form of government the Founders created.

Antonio Gramsci understood that America was not ready for a Communist revolution because the public had too much respect for its society and culture. Bradley Thomas of FEE described Gramsci’s strategy. It involved “of a ‘war of position’ for socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside.”

Let me be clear. These people have a goal in mind. It is not the defense of the Constitution. They are certain they’re smarter than their neighbors and that in a socialist government, their brilliance will be recognized. They will have the authority to help set production and resource allocation and keep their neighbors from harming themselves or society by making poor decisions.

You may think they’ll make your life better by getting money from somebody richer than you are. They won’t. Those societies always make everybody poor.

You have a role to play in the voting booth. Especially in primaries, socialism is not about fairness. It is the path to tyranny.

We’ve had an amazing and unique form of government for a quarter of a millennium. It would be a shame to let small-minded egotists talk us into something else.

He has extensively studied the culture of various groups that influences their economic performance. In 2005, he published Black Rednecks & White Liberals, a study of various groups. He analyzed economic behavior within and between groups. Many of us recall with delight the many years when C-Span’s Brian Lamb would conduct the best book discussions anywhere. A YouTube producer called Bloodlines and Borders built an excellent video about Sowell’s ideas on groups, which begins with Lamb talking with Sowell about his book Black Rednecks & White Liberals.

I will cover various aspects of this chapter in future articles. For now, I’d like to explain the concept and the emotions involved. Middlemen provide a necessary service that involves financial risk and involves delayed gratification. They are often accused of greed when their costs rise, even though they haven’t raised their margins. If the task is performed by a minority ethnic group, this is Sowell’s “Minority Middleman.”

Grocery stores, especially small ones, are easy targets. Costs include taxes, rent, supplies, and the cost for every item of food they stock. They pay the truck driver more if gas or tolls go up. Crime is a cost. Any heavy bars to protect the store cost money. Every mandate the politicians pass to make the world wonderful costs money. The customers see the cost at the grocery store, and the grocer is not “one of us.”

Sowell describes similar groups:

The YouTube video quotes Sowell, noting that in 1972, Idi Amin expelled the entire South Asian population of Uganda. He called them the brown Jews because of their dominance in commerce and their perceived economic control.

These groups all have similar characteristics as they build their places in society. There are times when they are useful to the leaders for assorted reasons and are protected. At other times, society’s leaders need a scapegoat for public anger, and these minorities serve as better targets than government or church leaders. Sometimes they have been expelled, and the cost has been severe for the society that expelled them.

I posted an article last fall about the return of antisemitism. The increasing prominence of open antisemites among Democratic primary winners makes the subject more important. I will be discussing Professor Sowell’s analysis in future articles.

Artificial Intelligence is a constant goal and a dream in the field of computing. Star Trek envisioned an AI device called the medical tricorder. It was a tool for Dr. McCoy in the “Original Series” (STOS).

McCoy constantly grumbled about the primitive state of medicine back in the 20^th century. In the 24th century, he could scan the patient with a tricorder. It would determine the symptoms, perform the necessary tests, generate a diagnosis, and prepare the appropriate treatment while considering any contraindications. We’re obviously not there yet. TV has good scriptwriters.

In the meantime, there is work to make AI more effective across all fields, including medicine. A group called XPrize is offering seven-figure prizes for serious progress on these medical devices. A major step has been taken, and a considerable prize has been awarded.

In the last week, I had two conversations with physicians about AI tools and their use in medicine.

The first doctor is a noted specialist in Movement Disorders. This specialty treats a group of problems including Essential Tremor (ET), Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, dystonia, and others.

I have ET and have been treated by this kind of specialist for years. The visits involve walking, standing, and moving my hands and arms. I can’t recall any diagnostic blood work or body scans. The doctors view my actions and produce a diagnosis based on my symptoms. They must determine which disease(s) a patient has to determine the correct treatment.

I am in an ET support group with a monthly YouTube conference call. In the latest call, a doctor discussed using ChatGPT to consider which disease the patient might have, given the observed symptoms. The problem is simple. He must be careful in how he specifies the symptoms. Is the tremor a two or a ten on a scale of 1-10? How unsteady is the walk?

The result will be quite different if he omits one symptom or slightly exaggerates another one. He walked us through some example calls, including one with incomplete information. Then he added more information and got a more complete answer.

In this specialty, the symptoms are diagnostic information. Other illnesses are important to the extent they add to tremors or dizziness. The patient’s medications are important for contraindications.

I know the other doctor at my church. He is a Surgical Pathologist. He reviews biopsy slides and blood samples and provides opinions on whether the material is malignant or benign. This is often done while the surgeon is waiting to decide what to do next in terms of cancer surgery.

He described a tool called Hologic from Genius AI, a major AI support tool for his specialty. It reviews X-rays and highlights potential areas of concern. Physicians can start with those markings and see if they make sense. Other areas of the slides would then be scanned to check whether the tool missed anything.

The quality of AI is the same as any other computer tool. Output quality varies based on input quality. Hologic was developed in collaboration with the relevant specialists, who clearly outlined the rules for identifying what required attention. They also helped direct attention away from known false flags.

Every cooperating doctor knows the need to put patient health first. They don’t completely trust any input, either human or machine. Even other doctors can be wrong. But they should be seeing Hologic as an apprentice who needs more attention. They can report anything it misses. Subsequent product releases will be the same as a better-trained apprentice.

I know the idea of a computer as an apprentice may startle some people. I’ve dealt with computers for more than fifty years. It is important to know enough to recognize when the computer is giving or permitting an incorrect result.

We have too many people of the other type. Store clerks can’t tell when the change is wrong, and newspaper articles have bad grammar and werse speling. (Yes- I did that on purpose.)

Computers are excellent tools if they remain tools. Science fiction, including Star Trek, consistently explored societies lacking the knowledge to manage or fix their computers. They were either slaves to computers or on the verge of collapse.

Science fiction writers have warned us that when medical tricorders are available, they will be given to people who trust them because they’ll have little medical training. They may not even be able to benefit from the training if it were available.

I don’t know how we do it. But we need to keep training doctors who can use any AI tool and have the skill to stop and wonder if the tool is missing something.

I worked with Univac computers, and they have development centers in the Twin Cities. From 1980 to 1982, I lived and worked in the St. Paul area. The people were nice. Frankly, I found the cold and snow overwhelming. We moved to Huntsville, Alabama.

I have been concerned and saddened by what I’ve seen and heard about the changes in that area in the last few years. They have found a way to focus on the negative. When you do that, you produce more negativity.

It is fair to say there is a significant drop in quality from Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale to Tim Walz. The current governor’s Memorial Day actions reveal the benchmarks he uses to set his own standards. Those who set low standards usually live down to that level.

Memorial Day is a day when law-abiding and law-enforcing people pay tribute to those who gave all to protect the nation and its freedoms.

Minnesota Democrats tried to change the day into something related to the death of George Floyd. This was a man with a long criminal record who was violating a restraining order to stay away from a woman who had reason to fear him. Townhall cartoonists Margolis and Cox have an excellent cartoon showing a generic Democrat ferociously destroying a memorial headstone.

The tragedy of today’s progressives is the idea that no one, past or present, is as concerned about the world’s real problems as they are. The people of the past may have solved one problem or another, but those problems aren’t as important as their issues.

They grant that ending slavery, widening suffrage, improving working conditions, health, and living standards were all right. But that’s what previous generations were supposed to do. If they truly were good, they would have solved the real problems we’re dealing with: microaggressions, overpopulation, xenophobia, climate change, and all the other evils of human nature.

They admit that Hitler had to be stopped but say that we don’t give Soviet Russia enough credit. They know communist governments in Russia and China each killed more of their own people than Hitler, but their goals were more noble. Also, they are certain that when they become the leaders of a communist society, they won’t be harsh. Human nature will change. Everyone will see their wisdom and no harsh methods will be needed.

They take a different lesson from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. They see that whoever controls the present controls the story of the past. Winston Smith in 1984 constantly rewrites the past. Both Orwell and Huxley describe societies that prevent forbidden thought by removing any triggers for those thoughts.

It may seem silly or pointless when progressives destroy monuments, paintings, or other tributes. It’s not. When the accounts of founders or leaders like Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill are erased, their histories, ideals, and victories no longer need to be explained away or countered.

Memorial Day is a tribute to those who agreed to fight for a specific purpose. A discussion of those purposes raises issues and ideas that are best ignored and buried in the trash bin of history. So, they refuse to take the standard lessons from history. They see them as folk tales and propaganda to keep the masses in line. They don’t want the public to honor anything which differs in any way from the soon-to-be party line.

Put simply, those who think they have big enough hearts to understand what creates anti-social people tried to take a day meant for those who gave their lives for others and turn it into a day to celebrate their caring and a thug and a taker.

There is another part of this refusal to look up to the heroes of the past. When we focus on helping others, it is easy to consider ourselves virtuous. We have our lives together. Those we help have problems. The helpers give from a position of social superiority. They don’t have to improve to match their standards. Helping others is necessary and wonderful, and those who do it are heroic, but making them role models is not appropriate.

When we extend honor to a person or group, past or present. We are acknowledging a trait or act that benefits society in some way. We are called to look at that beneficial behavior and try to benefit those around us in some way. We won’t do the same thing, but we can look at their behavior and attitudes and use that to do better than we did yesterday.

Breast Cancer

In 1974, Betty Ford became First Lady when her husband became President. She had a medical exam a few weeks later, and a breast lump was found. As history.com notes:

There were no guidelines for regular screenings, no fundraising walks, no patient-support groups. At that time, the words breast and cancer were spoken in hushed tones—like something shameful. But Betty was adamant she should be completely open with the American people. How many other women in America must be going through this too? she wondered.

Instead of staying quiet, she kept the public informed step by step. They heard that she had a mastectomy and “the good news that, largely because the cancer had been detected early, the first lady’s prognosis was excellent.”

After she made open discussion possible, ads asking for money became prevalent, and reminders to get preventive screenings were, appropriately, impossible to ignore.

Polio

I am eighty. Those who are seventy or less may fortunately not remember this. Polio was the most frightening word of my early childhood years. It could cause multiple levels of paralysis, including forcing the patient into an iron lung. In the summer, any word of polio would shut down the swimming pools.

There was ambiguity about the treatment of the famous person who had polio. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had dealt with polio for more than ten years before he became President. The media agreed not to print pictures of him using crutches or obviously “crippled” in any way while he was in office. They agreed that a country facing tough times and then at war needed to feel it had a strong leader.

After his death in 1945, talk about his illness could be more open. History.com has an article describing FDR’s work in starting organizations about Warm Springs and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. NFIP would eventually become known as the March of Dimes. Right after FDR’s death, a campaign started to honor him by putting his image on the dime. The first batch of Roosevelt dimes was released on January 30, 1946, on what would have been his 64th birthday.

I remember containers near cash registers where you could drop a dime. I also went around the neighborhood with my mother collecting dimes. In those days, a dime bought a candy bar and a soda.

The March of Dimes’ continued financial support for medical research finally paid off when Jonas Salk, a young doctor whose work was funded by a March of Dimes grant, developed a new vaccine to combat polio. In 1954, the March of Dimes helped support a mass vaccination of more than 1.8 million schoolchildren.

Essential Tremor

But what about problems without a spokesman? I have many problems, some of which, like heart trouble, have ample support. Other problems are complicated, and people, for some reason, hesitate to talk about them.

I mention this now because U. S. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) just said she has one of those problems, and it is one I share. She said she has Essential Tremor. Her opponents are trying to use it against her. She said, “I have had it for the entire time that I have served in the United States Senate. It has absolutely no impact on my ability to do my job or on how I feel each day.”

My mother had essential tremor all her life. I have a milder form of it. There are multiple forms of the problem depending on which body part(s) is/are affected. Our systems are amazing devices. Every part is balanced in terms of balance and counterbalance. Our hands, arms, and necks keep everything in perfect smooth balance because the signals coming from the mind are not interrupted or disrupted in any way. The word “tremor” describes the shaking of the affected parts of the body. When it involves the head, arms, or hands, the person seems nervous. They also have trouble eating and need to leave more room in cups of coffee to avoid spills.

Getting a correct diagnosis and treatment for Tremor is difficult. Many Primary Care doctors don’t know about it or know the correct subspecialty for referrals. Movement Disorder specialists focus on diseases in which signals from the brain no longer cleanly control body parts. I go to such a specialist at Duke. They have a useful page describing their work.

They can distinguish between various movement diseases. One of those, Parkinson’s, progresses at a rate and has such serious symptoms that I would not vote for a Parkinson’s patient for a six-year government office. Essential Tremor is quite different. My mother lived for at least forty-five years with an obvious tremor. I think I’ve had at least a mild case for most of my life. It has been clear, obvious, and progressing for twenty-five years. New computerized tools such as voice-to-text are making my life easier every day.

I also host a monthly Zoom support group on the first Wednesday afternoon, operated by Hopenet (https://thehopenet.org/blog2/).

Collins released her medical information for at least two reasons. First, she could confirm that she has Essential Tremor and not Parkinson’s. Second, she lets people understand that what they see as nervousness is a medical symptom, not nerves or fear.

I’ve dealt with this problem for years, and I saw what my mother went through. I often joke that I am anything but “the shy and retiring” type. But I am aware of my tremor when I consider putting together a talk or presentation.

I don’t live in Maine. I can’t vote there. But I can say this. For many people with this problem, the idea of mixing socially is daunting. Giving a talk is almost unimaginable. Engaging in the amount of public interaction and speechmaking needed for a political campaign is a serious undertaking for anyone. For someone who has Essential Tremor to take on this task is amazing and very encouraging to everyone else who has this problem.

United States – SCOTUS

The federal courts began a journey years ago that troubled many, both lawyers and laypeople. Recognizing that Blacks had been mistreated for years, they thought it would be inadequate to simply make things equal and fire a new starting gun. They permitted various forms of racial favoritism to allow a period of catching up. Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that this would not be permanent but was needed temporarily. Some of these “temporary” measures have been in place for more than fifty years.

Justices Thomas and Alito have been leaders in calling for an end to this. 2026 is the year SCOTUS is making the change. One measure was affirmative action in college admissions. The court ruled in favor of students who sued Harvard to stop this.

Another area was an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act requiring the creation of “majority minority” districts to ensure that minorities are elected. Democrats and the NAACP brought suits to force states to add more of this type of Congressional district. U.S. District Court orders did that in Louisiana and Alabama. Another suit was pending from North Carolina. Both legislatures took the issue to the Supreme Court. In Louisiana v. Callais, SCOTUS struck down a plan to create a district specifically shaped to ensure the election of a second Black representative.

District six was majority Black. District two was redrawn as a second majority-Black district following a lower-court order. That was the subject of this lawsuit.

After that ruling, SCOTUS vacated a lower court ruling ordering Alabama to add that kind of district. A similar suit seeking a court order to redraw lines in North Carolina was withdrawn.

This will not necessarily be an overwhelming loss for the Democrats. If you take a district that is overwhelmingly Black and Democratic and move some of its voters, you are adding Democratic voters to other districts. The Republicans must be careful how they do it.

Virginia – SCOVA

Virginia had a constitutional amendment controlling its redistricting. A bipartisan commission drew the lines with fairness in mind. It worked. The eleven-seat Virginia delegation had six Democrats and five Republicans. That split matched the 2024 Presidential and U. S. Senate vote percentages.

In 2025, the Democrats made the state elections about Donald Trump. Don’t ask what we’ll do, just talk about him. When they got in, they weren’t the typical blue to purple Virginia party people expected. They went all-out woke, including genetic males in women’s locker rooms and sports, and an anti-ICE, anti-law enforcement attitude.

They argued that the need to stop Donald Trump meant they had to help the national party get control of the House of Representatives by any means necessary. They scheduled a referendum to allow a new redistricting to replace the balanced one the people had just voted for.

There was some doubt about the legality of the timing on this. The state constitution requires an election between the proposal of an amendment and its vote. The legality turned on the definition of an election. Those who wanted to have the referendum argued that “election” meant just election day. The opponents noted that more than a million votes had been cast by early voters in the 2025 elections when the amendment was proposed. That meant an election was happening, and no amendment could be put before the voters until 2027.

Plaintiffs sought to block the referendum, but the Virginia Supreme Court wouldn’t hear the case before the vote occurred. I have seen courts refuse to hear cases and permit unfair and questionable voting changes. In a previous article, I didn’t understand why the court allowed the referendum to proceed.

During oral arguments, a question was raised about whether the court would consider the voters’ approval of the referendum in its deliberations. They said that did not matter. That is true in one sense, but not another.

In a YouTube video, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli explained that the court does not rule on legislation until the governor acts. They don’t waste their time on a bill that might be vetoed. They viewed the referendum the same way. The voters could have “vetoed” the legislature’s action by voting down the amendment. The 51.5 to 48.5 was close, but it did pass. That meant there was a law to consider, and the court did so.

Various ideas are being considered now. Most of them are poisonous. The current 5-6 districting plan could be replaced by a new amendment. One proposal would fire all the justices and replace them with people more accommodating to the legislature.

The courts will always be seen to be involved in redistricting. Even if a court refuses to hear a case, the would-be plaintiffs will think that the court has taken the other side.

Thomas discusses the Declaration and the statement that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as the underlying principle of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He assumes governments and laws are created to protect those rights.

The Bill of Rights was not written as a list of services the government was to provide for citizens. Rights were understood as freedoms that the citizens had, which the state could not abuse. The Constitution limited the government’s actions.

That was the way the law was understood until the Progressive movement early in the Twentieth century. The Progressives believed they were smarter than the Founders and that the Constitution should no longer be viewed as a limiter constraining imperfect human beings. They had evolved beyond the timid understanding of the founders.

Hillsdale College produced an almost eight-hundred-page collection of American historical source documents called The U.S. Constitution: A Hillsdale College Reader. Chapter ten is “The Progressive Rejection of the Founding.” It shows the views of the progressives in the first quarter of the twentieth century. They believed in a different source of rights. It is an excellent way to understand the differences.

Frank Goodnow was President of Johns Hopkins and the first president of the American Political Science Association. His 1915 paper, The American Conception of Liberty, explains why the founders built what they did when he says:

The political philosophy of the eighteenth century was formulated before the announcement and acceptance of the theory of evolutionary development.

Then he notes the post-Darwinian attitude when he explains:

Rousseau in his “Social Contract” treated man as primarily an individual and only secondarily as a member of human society. ...
In a word, man is regarded now throughout Europe, contrary to the view expressed by Rousseau, as primarily a member of society and secondarily as an individual. The rights which he possesses are, it is believed, conferred upon him, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs.

PBS picked up a series James Burke produced for the BBC about the impact of science on society. Chapter 9 of The Day the Universe Changed is aptly named; Fit to Rule. Burke discusses Darwin, evolution, and how various groups used it to justify putting themselves over others with varying degrees of severity. Capitalists, Aryans, hereditary upper classes, and various ethnic and racial groups pointed to The Origin of the Species as proof that they should rule and hold others down.

Justice Thomas understood that the version of that the movement in the United States had its own moral problems and was part of something bigger that had even worse problems worldwide. The U.S. Supreme Court had its own infamous “Three generations of imbeciles is enough” ruling, allowing sterilization as part of the “improving the race” movement by the progressives. Much of it occurred in minority communities or among people who had no voice. It was reduced, but not eliminated, after the public heard about the Nazi atrocities.

The Justice went on to link the progressives to the moral disasters of the Nazis and Communists.

Matt Ford of the National Review opined that the Justice “Can’t Get … History Right.” He objected to the Justice’s view that progressivism was part of the cause of those disasters. He seemed especially annoyed at the idea that Nazism, “National Socialism,” was in fact, socialism of any sort. For some reason, leftists think they’re better than Hitler if they can prove that “left” and “right” look like this:

That is, of course, meaningless if you are dead because you are an egg and the leader “had to break eggs to make an omelet!” Hannah Arendt has a better term: Totalitarian

I don’t understand why those on the left are more offended by Hitler’s crimes than Stalin’s and Mao’s. Not that Hitler didn’t want to do more harm, but the other two each killed many more people than he did.

Burke has a quote to show another part of Darwin’s impact:

Darwin was to have one last major success in perhaps the most unexpected of quarters. When he read Origin, Marx wrote to Engels: ‘Origin is the natural history foundation for our views.’
…
Marx was impressed by Darwin’s thesis that the struggle for existence was at the root of improvement. For Marx, the social equivalent lay in the class struggle towards revolution.

Justice Thomas is right. Darwin has been used as a justification for all who want arbitrary power over others. As Friedrich Hayek has warned, socialism is simply The Road to Serfdom.

Virginia and New Jersey elect Governors the year after the Presidential elections, and often the state winners are from the parties that lost the Presidency. That happened in both states this year. Abigail Spanberger ran as a “don’t ask me what I’ll do” candidate. That is the winning Democratic tactic in any area remotely moderate.

The Democrats also gained a large legislative majority. Their announced agenda is anything but moderate. [Having] taken power in Virginia, [they] are now proposing more than fifty tax increases in the state legislature — including taxes on dog walking, gym memberships, dry cleaning, and parcel delivery.

Spanberger is also anti-ICE, pro-open borders, open to both sexes in women’s locker rooms and sports. Her attempt to understand perpetrators rather than victims is causing problems, as multiple innocents are dying due to a lack of criminal enforcement, especially in Northern Virginia.

But the real hardball is being played when it comes to changing the rules for national elections. Virginia had a constitutional provision governing congressional districting. It called for a neutral method to be used that would do a fair job. They produced a 6-5 Democratic delegation, which corresponds to the Presidential vote, which Harris won 52-46.

But that is not good enough for this regime. Claiming the need to be “fair,” they managed to get the Supreme Court of Virginia (SCOVA) to let them “bend” a few clearly written rules in the state constitution and hold a referendum on April 21 to change the constitution so they can redistrict. The referendum was also advertised as an emergency, temporary measure. Right! The referendum passed by three percent, 51.5 to 48.5.

SCOVA could still enforce the actual laws and overrule this, but I’m not holding my breath. It will be harder because the vote is a fait accompli.

Now look at a proposed map.

Understand what this means. Fewer than 3% of voters used a questionable referendum to shift four seats from one party to the other. Those four seats represented relatively rural areas of the state and views that coincided with the people they elected. This dubious process is going to have largely urban candidates who are part of the Democratic majority in Congress representing people who don’t agree with that.

In addition to going after Congress, they are going after the Presidency. The legislature passed, and the Governor signed a bill adding Virginia to the National Popular Vote (NPV) Compact. This is a mechanism to invalidate the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. Given that most of the support for it is from Democrats, you can assume they believe it will help them.

The winner lost the popular vote in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016. In 2024, they lost both. They usually win the popular vote. Large states like California, New York, and Illinois can return large pluralities that don’t fully benefit the candidate when only the electoral votes matter.

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, one hundred Senators, and three votes for the District of Columbia. This means there are 538 members of the Electoral College, and 270 are needed for a win. Although we all think we have the right to vote for electors, that is not true. That has developed into a custom. All the states have just done it that way.

The Constitution says:

All states currently allow voters to choose a slate of electors by voting for a candidate. Whichever candidate wins, their slate is the group of electors for that state. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Nothing will change nationally until enough states sign on so they have at least 270 votes and can be sure to win the election. Even then, nothing happens if a candidate wins both votes.

If the two kinds of votes differ, a state’s voters will have their choice represented if they are not part of the compact or if they voted along with the popular vote.

The difference occurs once the compact is in place, a state is part of it, and the state’s choice lost the popular vote and would win the electoral vote without the compact. That state would not send the electors whom its citizens voted for. The slate of the national popular vote winner would be seated instead. Why did the people of that state bother to vote?

This mechanism gives every less-than-perfectly honest vote counter an incentive to pad the vote count. A few hundred thousand added Democratic votes in city after city don’t matter all that much in the current system. They might flip one state’s result. Adding these false numbers to a national tally to decide the election is dramatically different.

Also, whoever counts last has a controlling position. They are in the best position to fudge the numbers. They know how much bending is needed. The three West Coast states will make this whole thing so untrustworthy that I can see an almost immediate pressure on states to bail out.

The “National Popular Vote Compact” mechanism is virtually guaranteed to destroy whatever faith remains in elections. “If you can’t win, change the rules,” is not the appropriate attitude in a free and open society. It does make sense in a “Win today – Tomorrow be damned!” world.

The role of the “Good Samaritan” is a short-term role aiding a limited number of people. Before the welfare state, churches, and synagogues, often ethnically based, or social groups would care for families dealing with tough times. Sometimes help was in the form of clothing or food. Immigrants would be helped in getting acclimated. Translations, help with forms and assistance maneuvering through government red tape were provided within these groups.

The newcomers and their children would settle in, stop needing help, and start helping others. They would continue to be proud of their heritage and certain that their foods were best but also be happy and grateful to be Americans.

There is a classic story about Sunday School and “Loving Your Neighbor.” Suzy was a nice 8‑year‑old whose 5‑year‑old brother, Johnny, was causing her lots of trouble. When she was told that she was supposed to love her neighbor, she agreed that it was the right thing to do if she did not have to love Johnny. There is a lesson here that Crawford discusses.

We are commanded to love our personal enemies. We are also commanded to love our neighbors. Conveniently, these are often the same people. The neighbor, like the personal enemy, is someone specific and concrete, someone known. He is therefore someone one could love. But for the same reason, he is someone who is difficult to love. … [My brother Johnny] are you kidding me?!

We can easily love, or say we love, people who we know only as an abstraction and at a distance. It is cheap virtue to display lawn signs and bumper stickers about your love for a group you have never encountered. It leaves a bad taste in the mouths of those who have been or continue to be harmed by that group.

Parents teach their children the difference between safe and dangerous. That applies to people as well as stoves. That task also falls to political and religious leadership in different realms. We expect parents to train and warn their children that certain actions and people are not what they seem to be and must be avoided.

Crawford talks about two Greek words for enemy. Our leaders are making things murky to serve their goals. The simplest parallel is the Trojan Horse. When people arrive in these numbers with large percentages of young unattached men it feels like a military landing.

There is a major difference between our obligation to treat the individuals we meet with due concern and allowing or encouraging a massive migration of people who will immediately put our societies at risk. That is not charity, it is stupidity. I am not going to cut our leaders slack. They are not naive. There is financial and organizational benefit involved here. These leaders are misusing the teachings to support their purposes.

The most insane part of it is so-called birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment was written at the end of the Civil War to make sure Blacks would be citizens as they should be.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

There are two methods for assigning citizenship: by blood and by soil, The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was intended to exclude non-residents or non-citizens and create “by blood” citizenship. It referred to the Blacks born in slavery or purchased into here as “born or naturalized.” The text assumed they had no foreign allegiance.

Obviously, children of diplomats, or foreign officers in training here, or embassy staff would be citizens of their parent’s country. Children of American officials and military born overseas are Americans at birth. These children have their citizenship by their bloodline.

Birthright citizenship grants citizenship by soil depending on the land where the baby lets out its first scream. Sometimes, the mother comes into the country illegally and without the resources to pay for the medical care needed for childbirth. This is not a gracious way to start a bloodline connection to your fellow citizens.

There is another way to start that leads us to believe the child will never have loyalty to the nation. Assume an enemy county called Eland wants to plan for the long term. They routinely take women late in their pregnancies and fly them to the United States. They have children who are U.S. citizens and mothers and children fly home to Eland. They spend years being indoctrinated in favor of Eland and against America. They have created a bloodline of American citizens who are enemies of America.

But they are also given excellent academic training in English and kept current on matters of fashion and slang. Then Eland arranges for them to be accepted by excellent universities in the USA. Eland now has an active force of educated English-speaking American citizens completely loyal to another country.

When Lincoln violated habeas corpus to keep Maryland in the Union, he argued that the Constitution is not a “suicide pact.” The question for the courts is simple: Does the 14th Amendment absolutely mandate national suicide, or is the court going to keep birthright citizenship just because Donald Trump does not want it?

But in another sense, mountains are indeed more complex than they seem. They are made of molecules, which are, in turn, made of atoms. When we see a big block of rock, it is easy to think that it was simple to build. When you understand the amazing complexity of its components, its simple existence is startling.

The simplest material in a waterfall is water, and a water molecule is amazingly dynamic. We can see that it is in motion and are not surprised that it is made of dynamic components. It is astonishing to consider that the rock-solid material in the mountain consists of equally dynamic atoms and molecules. Everything in and around us follows the same rules. Our solid bones and our sweat are both made of molecules containing rotating atoms.

Those who insist on using evolution to explain everything must start with the absence of living things on Earth. Mountains and water, but no life forms. A Greek named Parmenides described the problem with this argument centuries ago. Whether you are considering the beginning of the universe or the development of life on Earth,

“Nothing comes from nothing” (Latin: ex nihilo nihil fit) is a philosophical concept first argued by Parmenides and intertwined with ancient Greek cosmology. This concept suggests that there is no transition from a non-existent world to an existent one, as creation cannot originate from nothingness.

I spent my career in the computer industry studying how they work, so I could develop tools to manage tasks and make life easier for people to use them. Everything in computers, and now cell phones, is the result of sophisticated development, cooperation, and standardization. There had to be agreement on the bit pattern for the letter “A” before it could be sent out on one company’s computer and read in by someone else.

I participated in stage plays as a child and saw what was needed to put on a play. That was also more complicated than it looks.

I go through all that to say that nothing is easy to produce or happens accidentally. Even if we ignore that everything consists of atoms and molecules, there is still significant effort, planning, and coordination required to produce even the simplest things.

I get to brag here about a brand-new granddaughter. There’s the old spiritual that says, “Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, I believe.” We tracked the miracle of a baby’s development. When my daughter first told us the news, she was talking about a sonogram picture of a creature the size of a peanut. That was our name for the child for a while. We asked, “How’s Peanut doing?” Now she has all the pieces she needs.

Many years ago, I studied how a computer went from empty and doing nothing to fully capable and operational. That was exciting. It is trivial compared to what is needed to go from one cell to an infant ready for the world.

To take one part of it, look at the diagram of the spine.

Each vertebra has a bone, a cushioning disc, and space for nerves to pass through, connecting the brain to parts of the body. The structure grows and changes through our lives. It also differs between a chimpanzee and a giraffe.

This complex system is amazing, but it supports connections to other things that are even more amazing. It allows communication between the brain and your eyes, heart, lungs, arms, digestive system, legs, and even your little toe. All those systems have their own complexities, and the dialogue between each of them and the brain is a system that had to be developed.

There are times when we are working on a technical problem, and it seems to solve itself. When that happens, we joke that sometimes “dumb luck beats pure skill.” But when you start to understand the development of a human being from a single cell, the sophisticated systems and the interactions of those systems, and the fact that the creatures and the environment fit together, it isn’t “dumb luck.”

Complex systems like IBM’s System 360, Microsoft Windows, Boeing aircraft, grocery store chains, people, animals, and universes don’t just happen. They are the result of development, planning, and continuous hard work.

Those who don’t understand it, or don’t want to, will refuse to credit the designers and builders who created what benefits them, but that doesn’t change the facts. It just didn’t happen. It was planned and designed.

After World War II and its experiences with Weimar and Hitler, Germany was determined to be fiscally conservative and politically moderate. The Germans were noted for diligence and their mechanical skills. The positive aspect of having their country destroyed was that they had to rebuild from scratch. They knew how to do things. The replacement factories were clean, fresh, and efficient.

Immigration

Germans shared a worldview and a way of being. They agreed on how to take care of their homes and yards. The homogeneity of society and its shared experiences let people get along naturally.

For fifteen years, from 1991 to 2005, Germany’s foreign-born population stayed in the 6.5 to 7.5 million range. During Merkel’s sixteen years in office, the foreign-born population increased to 11.82 million. In 2015 alone, more than one million migrants entered Germany.

Worse than the sheer numbers were the way the newcomers were treated. They were not held to the same behavioral standards as the German citizens. This was especially true when it came to the way immigrant men were treated. New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne was the night that made it impossible to ignore the problem.

Deutsche Welle is a major news organization in Germany. They explained:

Nearly 1,000 men of North African and Arab origin are reported to have divided themselves into smaller groups and robbed and sexually harassed women at Cologne’s central station on New Year’s Eve. Similar incidents occurred on a far smaller scale in Hamburg and Stuttgart.

Five years after the event, Ralf Bosen wrote a long piece in that paper describing the event and the consequences.

Because what happened in Cologne brought fundamental sociopolitical issues to the fore, it triggered a worldwide media response.
During his US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump portrayed the attacks as a cautionary tale from a misguided refugee policy.
In Germany itself, the long-running debate about migration policy and how to live together in a pluralistic society flared up.

He also noted that the media and the police “were accused of being too hesitant to report on the foreign citizenship of the suspects.”

Energy

Her energy policies were even more disastrous. There are many YouTube videos on the subject, but I’ll recommend this one. The video starts by showing how Germany was a leading industrial power at the start of the century. It had skilled, industrious people. But it also had cheap, plentiful energy. Vast amounts of energy are required to produce steel, chemicals, automobiles, and other products. Energy moves people to and from work, powers farm equipment, and keeps hospitals running. When Germany was strong, it had ample, comparatively inexpensive energy from multiple sources, including nuclear.

In 2011, Germany adopted a plan called the Energiewende or Energy transition. They were going to spend five hundred billion Euros to move to completely clean, renewable power. Solar and wind would replace nuclear and petrochemical energy. The video explained:

Solar panels produce no electricity at night and very little on cloudy days. Wind turbines produce no electricity when the wind is not blowing. Germany has a word for periods of low wind and low sunlight. Dunkelflaute, dark doldrums.

When the country is in the “dark doldrums,” other energy sources are needed. That means wind and solar can’t replace anything. The traditional sources must be maintained and ready to operate when the renewable sources can’t do the job. But Merkel and Germany failed to do that. The Energiewende called for the elimination of all nuclear power. To make things worse, Merkel rushed the closing for political reasons.

When the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in Japan in March 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a decision that will be studied in economics and policy schools for generations. Within 4 days of Fukushima, she announced that Germany would shut down all of its nuclear power plants. Not gradually, not carefully, not after building replacement capacity. Shut them all down by 2022.

Without nuclear, coal and natural gas were the backups in the doldrums. Coal is a major pollutant. Russia was their primary source of natural gas. Many people, including American President Donald Trump, warned them that this would make them vulnerable to Vladimir Putin. They scoffed and closed the nuclear plants. They cooperated with Russia to build the Nord Stream pipeline to receive more natural gas from Putin.

Parliamentary government can give a small but significant party a role in successive governments by joining whichever party needs a few more members to form a majority. Germany’s Green Party has used its size to make up part of the majority for years. It has been the driving force behind the major party in the governing coalition in adopting stricter environmental policies. There has also been pressure from the European headquarters in Brussels.

Even so, Merkel’s failure to protect Germany from insane energy policies has been disastrous. Major companies are moving production out of Germany because they can’t compete when their energy inputs are four times more expensive than their competitors’. BASF, the world’s largest chemical company and one of Germany’s most important employers, began shifting investment out of Germany in 2022. Volkswagen had its first plant closure in the company’s 87-year history.

Even worse, the cost of auto fuel and heating a living space in wintry weather has also risen fourfold. The German people are suffering. The most basic thing German Chancellor Friedrich Merz could do would be to work to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the related sanctions and get Russian natural gas flowing back into Germany. He is not doing that. He wants to punish Russia at any cost, no matter the harm to his own people.

Time for a change?

Given the dreadful changes in German life in the last twenty years or so, the public is ready to try something different. A political party has risen, calling itself an alternative for Germany. (Alternative für Deutschland - AfD) You would think the leadership would understand the public’s reaction, but they don’t. Instead of reading this as a need for change, they are trying to ban the AfD by labeling it as extremists.