Volume 12 Number 582

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Over his terms in office, actions taken during the Trump administration have exposed gaps in our constitutional system. These actions attacked a host of weaknesses where executive power expanded without Congressional approval, These were largely unpopular and unjust. Whether one supported those policies or not, the experience exposed weaknesses in our laws.

It might be wishful thinking but there are holes that a future Democratic Congress and President might try to close, judging by the unpopularity of the Republican president because of his tariffs and the war with Iran. This would only occur if the Democratic Party controlled both Houses of Congress and the Oval office

Here are major reforms with brief explanations of what each could involve--if that day comes in 2029.

Desirable Reforms

1. Presidential Emergency Powers Reform Act
This measure would sharply limit the ability of presidents to declare national emergencies to bypass Congress, requiring affirmative Congressional approval within 30 days or the emergency powers would expire.

2. Congressional War Powers Restoration Act
This would tighten and clarify the War Powers Resolution to ensure that no president could initiate or expand military action without explicit Congressional approval. Funding would automatically terminate after a short period unless Congress votes to continue it.

3. Civil Service Protection Act
This measure would prevent presidents from reclassifying civil servants into politically vulnerable categories, ensuring that career experts cannot be easily dismissed for political reasons

4. John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
Named after civil rights icon John Lewis, this act would restore federal oversight of state election changes, expand early voting, limit partisan gerrymandering, and make Election Day a federal holiday.

.5. Background Check and Assault Weapons Regulation Act
This measure would create a list of people who are unsafe to bear arms, mandate universal background checks, close private sale loopholes, and reinstate limits on military-style weapons.

6. Democracy Protection and Campaign Finance Act
Designed to counter the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, this law would require full transparency for political donations, limit super PAC influence, and expand public campaign financing.

7. Judicial Ethics and Term Limits Act
This proposal would establish enforceable ethics rules for Supreme Court justices and create staggered 18-year term limits for future appointments, reducing the high stakes of lifetime appointments.

8. Immigration Modernization Act
This bill would create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, modernize asylum processing, expand legal immigration channels, and provide humanitarian protections for Dreamers.

9. Background Check and Assault Weapons Regulation Act
This measure would create a list of people who are unsafe to bear arms, mandate universal background checks, close private sale loopholes, and reinstate limits on military-style weapons.

10. Congressional Trade Approval Act
After disputes over unilateral tariff decisions, this proposal would require Congressional approval for new tariffs beyond short-term emergency measures, restoring legislative authority over trade.

11. Healthcare and Medicare Expansion Act

Building upon the Affordable Care Act, this proposal would expand it to replace Medicaid, create a federal public insurance option and lower the Medicare eligibility age.

12. Social Media Accountability Act
This law would set clearer rules for social media companies, making them legally responsible for harmful content posted on their platforms. It would require them to be more open about how their algorithms decide what people see and take stronger steps against foreign disinformation.

13. Humane Border and Community Protection Act
This act would abolish ICE, close large immigrant detention centers, and forbid arrests when the only issue is undocumented status. In its place, a smaller unit within the Department of Homeland Security would focus only on serious crimes, trafficking, and national security threats, not mass deportations

14. Women’s Health and Bodily Autonomy Act
Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this act would codify nationwide access to abortion and reproductive health services at the federal level.

15. Clean Energy Acceleration Act
This act would establish a national carbon pricing system, invest heavily in renewable energy infrastructure, and mandate a transition to net-zero emissions by mid-century, building on initiatives first launched under President Barack Obama.

16. National Resilience and Climate Act
Separate from emissions reduction, this bill would invest in coastal defenses, wildfire mitigation, and climate-resilient infrastructure in vulnerable regions.

17. Constitutional Accountability Act
This act would limit self-pardons and pardons involving close associates, requiring transparency and possibly review mechanisms to prevent abuse of executive clemency power.

18. Intelligence Transparency and Limits Act
This bill would increase Congressional oversight of intelligence operations, limit domestic surveillance authorities, and require stronger reporting standards to prevent misuse of national security power and cancel power without permission..

19. Presidential Financial Disclosure Act
Inspired by concerns during the presidency of Donald Trump, this law would require presidential candidates to release tax returns, divest from business holdings, and strengthen conflict-of-interest. It would mandate that they cannot trade in securities while in office and requiring them to place their holdings in a trust whose contents would not be known to them while serving their country.

End Note

Taken together, these proposals reflect a broad theme: rebalancing power. The Constitution divides authority among branches. Over time, presidents of both parties have accumulated expanded tools, particularly in emergencies, trade, and national security. The Trump years highlighted how far executive discretion can be stretched when statutes leave gray areas. A Democratic Congress and President would likely respond by writing more precise limits into law.

Whether one sees these reforms as necessary corrections or partisan overreach depends largely on political perspective. It is about how much discretion any president, Republican or Democrat, should have. History shows that powers expanded for one leader do not disappear when another takes office. For lawmakers concerned about institutional balance, the next opportunity for unified government would be seen not simply as a chance to pass policy goals as a moment to restore the balance of power.

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“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

James Madison Federalist No. 51, 1788

Volume 12 Number 580

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Our Nation’s Wealth

And this gulf is hidden to most behind a key measure –average household income. In this, the U.S. sits well above the vast majority of countries. Most people globally earn much less than the average U.S. household. The U.S. generally ranks near the top in terms of household income. Coupled with our wonderful geography, many politicians puff about us being an “exceptional nation.”

The Fiction

Given the wealth of our nation, you would expect that the average U.S. citizen or household would enjoy a comfortable lifestyle or quality of life. It is the old story of “figures can lie and liars can figure.” Fully two-thirds of our people live marginal existences, having household incomes that are described as lower-middle income or poor. This is hidden behind the total average income measure because the rich in our country are so rich they sway the total average.

The Wealth Gap

For example: The top one percent of U.S. households holds roughly 35 percent of all U.S. wealth. Back in 1980 the comparable figure was 25 percent, meaning there has been a greater concentration of wealth in recent years. A sign of the decline of the middle class is seen in the average (median) age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S., which rose from 28 in the early 1990s to 40 in 2025, a significant increase driven by affordability crises, high rents, and student debt.

While the middle class is struggling, the five richest men in the U.S.: Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, AI ventures); Larry Ellison (Oracle founder/co-founder); Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/technology); Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder;) and Larry Page (Google/Alphabet co-founder) have amassed more money than the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. That means that these five gentlemen have more money than 174 million of us – combined. That is a ridiculous level of wealth. So, the rich have so much that when they are added in, we appear to be a very wealthy country. That is so for a few, but the majority of people are struggling.

The History

How did this impasse occur? Simply put, the monied interests have taken advantage of the rest of us. In the process of acquiring their wealth, with it comes power. This power has extended to the rich exerting outsized influence in politics and legal matters in this country. It started with the great wealth created by the industrial revolution in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, exemplified by Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Gould, and others.

This was tamped down in the early 1900s by the advent of the anti-monopoly laws. The Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, through the domination of the Democratic party through the 1970s, benefited from a strong union labor movement, which gave rise to the ascendency of the middle class in the United States. Union influence went beyond their employment boundaries, since non-union businesses often gave their workers union-style benefits just to keep them from joining the ranks.

The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 was a turning point. We saw the arrival of an administration that was driven to break the power of unions at the behest of his wealthy supporters. Between the Republican Party and friendly courts, unions went from one-third of workers down to approximately ten percent today. With the decline of the unions went a parallel decline in the middle-class, that was not coincidental. In the following years, the country’s wealth became even more concentrated among the rich, a trend that has continued unabated until today. It’s a classic case of the rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else.

Where We Are

So, we have become a nation where the wealth is concentrated among the very rich and is run by a man who sees himself, at best, as a dictator and, at worst, as a king, or the other way around. Either way it is awful and sounds like a banana republic. Restoring and strengthening the middle class is a massive, but necessary, undertaking for the health of our country,

Such an undertaking will require a coordinated action by government, business, and the education system. Below is a framework to achieve the ambitious goal of a renewed resurgence of our middle class with an adequate quality of life. While it might appear to be pie in the sky, something like this was the New Deal back in the 1930s, that got our nation started out of the awful Depression.

It is that kind of thinking that is needed today.

What Government Can Do

Assure fair wages: Raise or regularly adjust minimum wages to keep up with productivity and cost of living. Strengthen labor protections (overtime pay, predictable schedules, job security). Support collective bargaining so workers have negotiating power.

Reduce the cost of essentials: Invest in affordable housing and limit speculation that drives prices up. Control healthcare and childcare costs, which are major middle-class expenses. Improve public transportation to reduce commuting costs.

Fair taxation: Ensure progressive tax systems where wealth and large corporations pay their fair share. Use tax revenue to fund services that benefit working families (education, healthcare, infrastructure). Provide targeted tax credits or benefits for middle-income households.

Invest in infrastructure: Build and maintain roads, broadband, clean energy, and utilities. Infrastructure creates good-paying jobs and lowers costs for businesses and families.

What Businesses Can Do

Pay living wages: Shift from “minimum wage” thinking to living wage standards. Share productivity gains with workers, not only shareholders.

Invest in workers: Offer training, apprenticeships, and career pathways, not just entry-level jobs. Promote from within instead of relying only on external hiring.

Long-term thinking: Focus on long-term growth, not short-term profits that come from cutting wages or benefits. Avoid excessive reliance on temporary or gig labor for core business needs.

What Education Systems Can Do

Make education affordable: Reduce tuition and student debt burdens. Expand grants and scholarships for middle-income students, not only for the poorest.

Align education with real jobs: Strengthen vocational and technical education alongside universities. Partner with local industries to teach relevant, in-demand skills.

Lifelong learning: Support retraining and reskilling for adults as the economy changes. Make it normal to return to education without financial ruin.

Coordination

The middle class will grow when government sets fair rules, businesses create stable, well-paying jobs, and education prepares people for real economic opportunity

End note

Restoring the middle class is about::

• Fair wages

• Affordable essentials

• Shared economic growth

When ordinary people have a quality of life where they can afford housing, education, healthcare, and can save for the future, the middle class will be back, and the entire country will be stable and prosperous. It will take bold leaders of the branches of our society to start thinking and acting in these sweeping terms instead of offering piecemeal solutions. Unless they do, the bi-fractured nation will become an entrenched reality.

............................................................................................................................................”The best solution to income inequality is providing a high-quality education for everybody. In our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.”

--Ben Bernanke, economist.

Volume 12 Number 579

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It’s bad enough that Trump policies attack our country’s long-held freedoms, but the man’s even much worse than that. Genghis Khan was a piker compared to what he has done and is doing.

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Here’s a data-driven summary of the estimated loss of human lives linked to policies and actions by Trump, starting with COVID-19 and then covering health/ environmental policies and foreign aid during his presidencies.

These are from a ChatGPT evaluation, quoting peer-reviewed research, expert health impact analyses, and global health modeling. But they are estimates, not exact counts. Estimates can vary widely depending on assumptions and scenarios, i.e., “what would have happened otherwise”.

Trump’s COVID-19 Response

United States Lives Lost:

• The Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health estimated that if U.S. COVID-19 mortality rates had matched those of the other G7 wealthy nations, approximately 40 % of U.S. COVID deaths could have been averted. In 2020, that equates to roughly ~180,000 deaths that might have been prevented with more effective pandemic response and mitigation such as early testing, masks, and coordination.

Environmental Deregulation Mortality

• Environmental policy significantly affects mortality through air quality, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and climate-related extreme weather.

Domestic (U.S.) Air Pollution & Deregulation:

• Weakening major air pollution protections (for example, power plant emissions, vehicle standards, etc.) could lead to 80,000 additional U.S. deaths per decade due to increases in fine particulate matter alone.

• Other analyses of EPA rollback plans (e.g., weakening enforcement, undoing regulations that save lives) show tens of thousands of annual deaths risked if certain clean-air standards are reversed. A tracker of regulatory rollbacks estimated a risk of over 3,000 U.S. premature deaths per year potentially from recent deregulations.

Long-Range Projections

• EPA benefit analyses often show rules that would save lives if maintained or strengthened. Repealing them means losing those benefits. For example:
  regulations considered for rollback were projected to prevent up to 30,000 deaths per year in the U.S. before rollback.

• Analyses of some combined regulatory rollbacks project nearly 200,000 additional premature deaths over the next 25 years if protections are significantly weakened.

Global Climate-Linked Mortality

• Analyses linking climate change impacts (exacerbated by easing fossil fuel restrictions) estimate that climate-related health risks such as heat, disease, and extreme weather could contribute hundreds of thousands of additional deaths annually by mid-century, though these are global projections that include many factors beyond U.S. policy alone.

• Estimated domestic pollution-related deaths: tens of thousands per year.
  Long-term projection to mid-century: hundreds of thousands annually if major climate impacts play out

Health Infrastructure Public Health Cuts

• There isn’t a single agreed-upon numeric total, but multiple analyses of funding cuts to public health and foreign aid programs project large future health impacts.

• Foreign Aid & Global Health (HIV/AIDS, Malaria, etc.)

• A study evaluating cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which funds global health programs including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), projected that if cuts continue through 2030, between 8 million and 19 million people worldwide could die as a result.

AIDS and Other Health Program Impacts

• Observational trackers suggested that immediate impacts of AIDS program funding freezes may have already led to thousands of additional deaths. For example, there are estimates of around15,000 deaths linked to interrupted services for HIV treatment and prevention. (Peer-reviewed data here is limited and this number comes from advocacy and modeling).

• Modeling beyond this suggests global increases in AIDS-related mortality could be in the millions if programs aren’t restored. but these projections vary widely.

• Estimated (lower bound) AIDS-related additional deaths already: 10,000-15,000.
  Projected (higher bound) global deaths by 2030: millions (model dependent).

Attacking Iran

The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran has been devastating. It began on February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli forces launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo. Iran hit back hard across the whole region.

Overall deaths are estimated at over 10,000, with 43 countries affected. Iran alone suffered between 3,500 and 6,000 killed and up to 26,500 injured. Lebanon lost around 2,500. Israel had 47 dead and over 8,500 injured. The US lost 15 service personnel. Iran also blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global shipping, with the US launching a counter-blockade in April. A conditional ceasefire came on April 8. The human cost was enormous.

Putting It All Together

Category

Estimated Lives Lost (Rounded)

COVID-19 (U.S., avoidable deaths under better response)

150,000–200,000+

Environmental deregulation (U.S., pollution/PM₂.₅)

Tens of thousands per year

Regulatory rollback benefits lost (future U.S. lives)

Up to ~200,000+ over decades

Health infrastructure & foreign aid cuts (global)

8,000,000–19,000,000 by 2030

Aid program disruption (Current)

10.00 15,000+ already

Attack on Iran (As of truce on April 9, 2026)

!0.000 civilians and soldiers

Total (very broad range, combining categories)

Millions globally, hundreds of thousands in U.S. lives

Limitations

• Estimates are not precise death counts. They are modeled projections based on assumptions about alternative scenarios (e.g., if policies had been different).

• Multiple factors overlap. For example, some deaths from pollution and heat might also be counted in climate mortality projections, so totals shouldn’t simply be added.

• Causality is complex. Public health outcomes depend on many variables beyond any single president’s actions, including state policies, individual behaviors, global trends, and prior structural conditions. But there is too much here to call it coincidence that all these things happen after Trump cuts funds and regulations.

End Note

There are credible scientific and economic studies suggesting that:

• Hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths were potentially avoidable with more effective COVID-19 response and continued environmental protections.

• Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands more could occur annually in the future due to deregulation of pollution controls and climate-linked health impacts.

• Millions of global deaths, many in low-income countries, are projected from cuts to foreign health aid and HIV/AIDS programs by 2030.

These figures reflect estimates with uncertainty, but they highlight that Trump’s public policy choices on health, environment, and infrastructure carry significant consequences for all mankind.

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“President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next”.

--Robert Kagan, Columnist.

Volume 12 Number 574

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Research shows that girls tend to outperform boys in reading and often in overall educational achievement in many developed countries. In the U.S. girls have held an advantage for years. This is also observed beyond childhood into college and in advances in the workplace.

Preparing Children to Learn to Read

It is well known in education that preparing children to learn to read should start in infancy and continue informally until they enter school.. The goal before school age (roughly ages 2–5) is not formal reading instruction, but to build the foundations that make reading easier later. The role of parents is critical. In this regard. New parents should be encouraged to access materials that will help them develop techniques to make their children read ready. This should be coordinated with any nursery or pre-kindergarten school the children are attending.

Why Boys Are Often Behind

Early gaps: Boys are more likely to lag in reading and writing from early grades, which sets them behind in subjects across the curriculum later on. Boys are more often identified as disruptive, have higher repeat-grade rates, and face disciplinary actions that can reduce instructional time and engagement

Expectations: Cultural stereotypes about masculinity and learning can influence boys’ motivation and self-concept. Studies suggest stereotypes can discourage boys’ academic engagement. This reinforces gendered ideas about who is “good at school.” Research indicates that teachers’ expectations can differ by gender. In some systems results in differential attention or assessment that benefits girls.

Socioeconomic factors: Boys are often more sensitive to disadvantages like poverty, which disproportionately affects their school readiness and progression.

What Can Be Done to Close the Gap

To effectively address boys’ underachievement, strategies should operate at multiple levels, from classroom practices to national policy.

Early support: Teachers should recognize from Day 1 that boys need more support in learning to read. Early reading skills predict later success, boosting boys’ early literacy through specialized instruction, phonics emphasis, and sustained reading practice can have long-term payoffs.

Classroom practices: High expectations for all students should be practiced, avoiding unconscious bias in language or assessment. There should be balanced discipline approaches that reduce exclusionary punishments that disproportionately affect bots. Efforts such as parental engagement and mentoring can boost boys’ motivation.

Diverse educational pathways: At an appropriate age providing vocational, technical, and project-based options alongside traditional academic ones can support boys who thrive in hands-on or practical learning environments.

Early Eduation Summary

Closing the achievement gap isn’t just about fairness. Boys who fall behind academically are more likely to disengage, have lower graduation rates, and enter adulthood with less opportunities.. Addressing these gaps benefits not just boys but also economies. Research suggests that many boys benefit when early experiences align with how they tend to develop language, attention, and self-regulation.

Carryover to College Education

1970s Men Held More College Degrees: Men earned about 57oercent of bachelor’s degrees, with women at about 43 percent. At the population level in 1975, roughly 17 percent of men had completed a college degree compared with 10.6 percent of women — reflecting higher degree attainment among men at that time.

By the 2020s Women Surpass Men Consistently: Since around 2000, women have steadily earned more college degrees than men across almost every degree level — associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral.

• In the 2019–20 academic year, women received about 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, with men receiving about 42 percent.

• Recent demographic data show that among young adults (ages 25–34) in the early 2020s, about 47percent of women hold a bachelor’s degree, compared with about 37percen of men — a 10-point gap favoring women.

So the ratio has shifted from more men earning degrees in 1975 to substantially more women earning degrees today — effectively flipping the gender balance in higher education.

This shift reflects broader social changes like expanded access to higher education for women, changing labor market incentives, and evolving gender roles. The consequences touch on workforce composition, earnings trends, and even demographic patterns.

Gender and Adulthood

Big changes: The work trajectory of men and women have diverged as man of the manual labor that men traditionally did have disappeared, while women dominate in today’s service-oriented work.

· The share of men working or looking for work has declined steadily, while the share of women in the work force has increased, Of men age 25-54, 89 percent are in the labor force, down from 94 percent in 1975.

· Of similarly aged women, 78 percent are now in the labor force, up from 55 percent in 1975. While women still earn less than men, their weekly earning have climbed 19 percent since 2000, while men have increased just 7 percent in that time span.

Women Advance up the Corporate Ladder

The 1970s–1980s: There were no women in the top executive ranks of the largest U.S. corporations (Fortune 100) in 1980. As more women entered the workforce, propelled by educational gains and civil rights legislation, women increasingly took managerial and professional roles.

The 1990s–2000s: By 2001,11 percent of top executives at the largest U.S. companies were women — a dramatic change from zero two decades earlier. Women’s share of corporate board seats in major U.S. companies (S&P 500) increased nearly 94 percent from the late 1990s into the 2000s. The number of companies with women CEOs grew more than sixfold over this period

2010s–2020s: Women’s representation on boards of major U.S. corporations continued increasing into the 2010s and 2020s — with estimates showing women hold around 30 percent of board seats today.

• Fortune 500 CEOs: For the first time in history, over 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women as of 2023-2025, a major milestone compared to zero in 1980.

• Professional and managerial growth: Women make up a rising share of U.S. managers and professionals due to gains in educational attainment and expanding job opportunities since 1980.

Continuing Obstacles:

Women still hold a small share of the very top roles; historically under 10 percent of executive officers in S&P 500 firms have been women. Glass ceiling persists. Women, especially women of color, remain underrepresented in the highest decision-making roles. This is indicative of persistent barriers to equal leadership representation.

From no women at the top in 1980 to double-digit representation among Fortune 500 CEOs today. Boards have seen noteworthy gains: Women now hold a much larger share of corporate board seats compared to the 1990s. Barriers remain; full gender parity in top leadership has not been reached.

End Note:

Addressing the current lag in male academic achievement requires a balanced, evidence-based approach that improves outcomes for boys and men without undermining progress in women’s education. It should be acknowledged that male underachievement as a legitimate educational concern, not a backlash against women’s gains.

. The goal is to build an education system that:

• Engages diverse learning styles

• Values multiple forms of achievement

• Allows both boys and girls to thrive

The rise in women’s educational attainment has been one of the most consequential social changes of the modern era. The net effect has been overwhelmingly beneficial, reshaping societies toward greater opportunity and inclusion. Concurrently, when societies invest in boys’ education thoughtfully, the benefits extend to families and the whole society.

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“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.”

— Michelle Obama.

Volume 12 Number 574

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Social media in the last 20 years brought about a whole new way for people to communicate, a new way for people to talk to people. Now people are skipping social media altogether and going straight to AI to communicate or starting with social media and then combining it with AI. media. That shift is real, measurable, and quietly transforming how information flows online

Ditching Social Media for AI

Some people are bypassing social media entirely When they want information, more and more of them go straight to ChatGPT or a similar AI tool instead of opening a social feed,

The numbers are striking. ChatGPT now has around 883 million users globally. A 2025 survey found that 55% of Americans use ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini for tasks they previously took to Google. Of all Americans who use ChatGPT, 77% use it as a search engine. Nearly one in four now go to ChatGPT first — before Google, before social media, before anything else.

Google itself has felt the pressure and responded by embedding its own AI, Gemini, directly into search results through what it calls AI Overviews. Type a question into Google today and you are increasingly likely to get a Gemini-generated AI tool instead. These are the same young people who were supposed to be social media’s most loyal audience.

The scale of the shift is hard to overstate. By late 2025, Google’s share of the combined information discovery landscape, search plus A, had dropped from 89% to 58% since 2022. ChatGPT alone now accounts for roughly 20% of total global search-related traffic. A Gartner study predicts AI assistants will handle 30% of all online search queries by 2026. This matters for social media because people used to turn to their feeds to find out what was happening, what was trending, what others thought. Now they just ask an AI. The conversation, and the attention, is moving somewhere else.

The Numbers For Social Media Are Shakey

Are people actually using social media less? Globally, total user numbers are still rising, around 5.24 billion as of early 2025. But raw headcount hides a darker story. Engagement, whether people are actually paying attention, is falling sharply. Instagram’s engagement rate collapsed from 2.94% in January 2024 to 0.61% in January 2025. X (formerly Twitter) saw its engagement rate drop 48% year-over-year, the steepest decline of any major platform. Facebook organic reach has fallen so far that fewer than 5% of a page’s followers now see any given post.

X is the starkest case. Since Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022, it has lost an estimated $5.9 billion in advertising revenue. Only 4% of marketers now consider it. In January 2026, Meta’s Threads surpassed X in daily mobile active users for the first time. X is the only major platform experiencing outright audience contraction, down 5.5% year-over-year. Deloitte found a measurable drop in social media engagement explicitly linked to low-quality AI content, with global data suggesting social media time peaked around 2022.

What Is a Bot Created by AI?

Today’s bots are AI-powered, using the same technology that drives ChatGPT to generate responses that sound genuinely human. A bot is a software program that holds conversations, adjust their tone, and mimic writing styles. One person can now run thousands of these AI-powered fake accounts at once. By some estimates, bots account for more than half of all internet traffic and around 20% of all online chatter about major world events.

The AI Fake Content Problem

AI is also polluting social media. Fake accounts created by AI bots make up between 5% and 15% of all accounts on major platforms. Facebook deleted 3.3 billion fake accounts in a single year. Deepfake videos are projected to reach 8 million shared online by 2025, up from 500,000 just two years earlier, a 16-fold increase.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted he can no longer tell human posts from AI bots while scrolling Reddit. If he can’t tell, the rest of us have little chance. When users can’t trust what they’re reading, they engage less. When they engage less, advertisers get less return.

Is AI Actually Cleaner Than Social Media?

Social media are designed to push content that provokes reaction, which means outrage, hate speech, and misinformation travel fast and far. AI chatbots do not work that way. They do not have a feed designed to keep you angry and scrolling. They do not route you down rabbit holes toward increasingly extreme content. For many people, asking ChatGPT a question and getting a calm, sourced answer is a genuinely better experience than wading through a social media comment section.

But AI is not clean either. Chatbots have been found to spread false information 35% of the time on controversial topics. They carry hidden biases baked into their training data. Grok, X’s AI tool, has produced outright hate speech and fabricated images. And because AI delivers one confident answer rather than a range of sources, it can be more subtly misleading than a messy social media feed where at least you can see the debate. Doctored photos and deepfake videos are also an AI product, the same technology that answers your questions can put words in anyone’s mouth or put anyone anywhere.

So where does it net out? AI is probably less likely to radicalize you than a social media algorithm. But it is not a neutral truth machine. The difference is this: social media amplifies human ugliness, while AI can contain it, it does not amplify.

What Young People Are Using

Young people have not abandoned social media. But they are increasingly splitting their attention. A December 2025 Pew Research survey of 1,458 U.S. teens found two-thirds report using AI chatbots, with one in three doing so every single day. Most use AI for schoolwork. But 12% have used chatbots for emotional support, and a Brown University study found one in eight adolescents used AI for mental health advice, rising to one in five among 18 to 21-year-olds. A Common Sense Media study found one in three teens now prefer talking to AI over a real person for serious conversations. That is time and emotional energy that used to go into social media interactions. Parents are largely unaware: Pew found a 13-point gap between teens who admit using AI chatbots (64%) and parents who think their child does (51%).

Is Anyone Doing Anything?

Lawmakers are moving regarding AI and bot. As of 2026, there are 98 chatbot-specific bills across 34 U.S. states and three federal proposals. California now requires developers to disclose when users are talking to a machine, with extra safeguards for minors. Tennessee banned AI from claiming to be a licensed mental health professional. The federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, passed in 2025, requires platforms to remove non-consensual deepfake imagery within 48 hours. These are steps. But the technology is moving faster than the law.

End Note

Social media is under pressure. From inside, AI chatbots are pulling users away entirely or being used in tandem with social media, giving faster, cleaner, more direct answers than any social feed ever could.

Meanwhile advertisers are noticing social media engagement is falling. Users, especially young ones, are dividing their attention between social platforms and AI tools, and AI is getting a bigger share every year. The platforms that thrived on human curiosity and human connection now face a rival that is available 24 hours a day, never argues, and always has an answer.

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“AI isn’t just the future of social media; it’s the engine driving today’s content, strategy, and daily workflows.”

— Metricool, State of AI in Social Media 2025 Report

Volume 12 Number 576

Any other person facing four separate criminal indictments, a civil finding of sexual abuse, a $364 million fraud judgment, and a years-long IRS audit would be destroyed. professionally, financially, and personally. Donald Trump is not any other person. One by one, the charges have been dropped, the cases dismissed, and the lawsuits settled. The question people are left asking is whether there is any accountability left at all?

The Supreme Court Hands Trump a Shield

In July 2024, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that changed the legal landscape for any sitting or future president. In Trump v. United States, the Court held by a 6-3 majority that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a president must be free to act without fear of criminal punishment for decisions made in carrying out presidential duties.

The ruling was a direct lifeline for Trump. His federal criminal cases, particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case, relied in part on actions he took while president. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a blistering dissent, wrote that the majority had effectively created a law-free zone around the presidency.

For Trump’s critics, the immunity ruling was a turning point. Courts would now have to spend months, perhaps years, sorting out what was an official act and what was not. That process alone was enough to stall the federal cases indefinitely.

Winning the Election Cleared Every Federal Charge

At the time of the 2024 election, Trump faced four separate criminal indictments: two federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, a Georgia state racketeering case, and a New York state case involving falsified business records and hush money payments. No major-party presidential candidate in American history had faced anything close to that kind of legal exposure.

When Trump won, the federal cases collapsed almost immediately. Justice Department policy holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted or prosecuted. Jack Smith moved to dismiss both federal cases, and the courts agreed. Trump was vindicated, not by acquittal, not by a finding of innocence, but simply by winning enough votes.

The Georgia case stalled due to legal proceedings challenging the conduct of the district attorney. The New York hush money case, the one that had produced a conviction on 34 felony counts, saw sentencing repeatedly delayed. The judge ultimately imposed no jail time and no fine, citing the unique circumstances of a president-elect. The conviction stands but means almost nothing in practical terms.

The only thing in the world that could simultaneously wipe out four criminal indictments, charges that would have sent an ordinary citizen to prison, was winning a presidential election. Trump found it and did it.

Suing Media Companies Into Silence

Beyond the criminal cases and the IRS, Trump has pursued an aggressive legal strategy against media organizations, and it has worked.

In December 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential foundation and museum, along with $1 million in legal fees, to settle a defamation lawsuit. The suit arose from anchor George Stephanopoulos stating on air that Trump had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll civil case. Stephanopoulos was technically inaccurate. The jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape as defined under New York law. Many media law experts considered the original lawsuit weak, but ABC settled anyway. Forgotten along the way is that he is still a sexual predator.

Trump also pursued a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News over its 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, claiming the network had doctored the segment. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, settled. Critics noted that Paramount was seeking government approval for a major business transaction at the time, raising questions about whether the settlement was driven by legal merit or corporate survival instincts.

Legal scholars and press freedom advocates warned that these settlements would have a chilling effect on journalists

The Civil Cases That Stuck

Not every case has been dismissed or settled in Trump’s favor. A federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages. In a second Carroll case, he was found liable for defamation and ordered to pay an additional $83 million. A New York civil fraud judgment required him to pay approximately $364 million in a case brought by the state attorney general over inflated property valuations.

He appealed, he raised money off the verdicts, and he won the presidency. A president who has just permanently shielded his tax history from the IRS and had four criminal indictments dissolved seems unlikely to find the payments particularly sobering.

Bending the Institutions

Within weeks of returning to office, Trump moved to install loyalists at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS. He replaced career officials who resisted his directives with appointees whose primary qualification was personal loyalty. Agency heads learned quickly that independence carried a cost.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party had spent nearly a decade reshaping the federal judiciary. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination in 2016, and then to accelerate Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation days before the 2020 election, delivered a 6-3 conservative supermajority. That majority produced the presidential immunity ruling that now shields Trump from criminal accountability for official acts.

What Accountability Looks Like Now

Those who believe Trump has acted wrongly face a shrinking set of options. Congress retains investigative powers, but both chambers are in Republican hands. State-level cases in New York and Georgia remain technically alive but have stalled. The courts can still hear civil cases, but the presidency provides enormous practical insulation.

The tools that a democratic society normally uses to hold powerful people accountable have each in their turn been blunted, settled with, rewritten, or turned into instruments of the president’s own protection.

Taken individually, any one of these outcomes could be explained away. The immunity ruling applies to all presidents. Taken together, the pattern is hard to ignore. Every significant legal threat Trump has faced has either collapsed, been dismissed, been settled, or been rendered toothless. The mechanisms are different each time, +but the result is always the same.

End Note

Every time a new case emerged, a new charge was filed, a new jury returned a verdict, there was the hope that this would finally be the moment. It never happened. The system has failed to judge Trump, nor can it. It is sad to say that in a country that prides itself on the idea that no man is above the law, it may be up to the Almighty One to render a final judgment.

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“This is not a legal settlement — it is a shakedown of the American taxpayer by a president who has placed himself permanently beyond the reach of the law.”

--Nancy Pelosi, on the IRS settlement

Volume 12 Number 575

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Image by Martella

Bike lanes were designed for someone pedaling at a comfortable 10 to 15 miles per hour. Today, the same narrow strips of pavement are shared by electric bikes capable of hitting 28 miles per hour or more, often ridden by people with little experience and no helmet. The danger spills beyond riders to pedestrians who have no idea a fast-moving machine is bearing down on them until it is too late. The result is a quiet but growing public safety crisis that cities and lawmakers are only beginning to address.

From a Curiosity to City Staple

The electric bicycle is far older than most people realize. The first patents date to the 1890s. In 1895, American inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. filed a patent for a battery-powered rear-wheel-drive bicycle, a concept strikingly similar motors still used

These early machines were heavy and limited by crude battery technology. The rise of the gasoline engine pushed electric bikes to the sidelines for most of the 20th century. Interest returned in the 1990s when better electronics made them practical. In 1993 Yamaha introduced the first commercially successful pedal-assist model. By the early 2000s, lighter and longer-lasting lithium-ion batteries transformed the market entirely.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the e-bike’s breakout moment in the United States. With public transit seen as risky, e-bike sales surged 240 percent between 2019 and 2021. The technology that had spent a century on the margins of transportation suddenly became mainstream, and the rules meant to govern it have not kept pace.

How Many E-Bikes Are Out There?

The numbers are striking. In 2022, more than 1.1 million e-bikes were sold in the United States, nearly four times as many as in 2019. By 2024, an estimated 1.7 million units were imported. E-bikes now account for about 30 percent of total US bicycle market share. About 15 percent of the US population now owns one.

Globally, the e-bike market was valued at roughly $32 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $120 billion by 2030. Over 130 million units were sold worldwide between 2020 and 2023 alone.

In the United States, e-bikes fall into three classes. Class 1 offers pedal-assist only, up to 20 mph. Class 2 adds a throttle, also capped at 20 mph. Class 3 reaches 28 mph with pedal assist. This classification system is supposed to determine where bikes can legally ride, but enforcement is patchy. Many bikes, especially cheaper imports, are modified to blow past their rated speeds.

The Accident Numbers Story

As e-bike sales have surged, so have injuries, and the trend is alarming. According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, e-bicycle injuries nearly doubled every single year from 2017 to 2022. In 2017, only 751 e-bike injuries were recorded in US emergency rooms. By 2022, that number had climbed to more than 23,000. Research published in 2024 found that head trauma from e-bike accidents increased 49-fold nationally over just five years.

The consequences are often fatal. In California, e-bike incidents rose 19 times as much between 2018 and 2023. A study in Marin County found that nearly one in eight e-bike trauma patients brought to the emergency room by ambulance died from their injuries. The death rate for e-bike accidents was 37 times higher than for crashes involving traditional pedal bicycles. New York City saw bicycle deaths reach a 24-year high in 2023, with 30 fatalities.

The danger does not stop with riders. Pedestrians are paying a price too. In New York City alone, three pedestrians were killed by e-bike riders in 2023. Children under 14 accounted for 36 percent of all micromobility-related emergency room injuries. In cities where delivery workers ride hard on crowded sidewalks and crosswalks, the threat to people on foot has become a daily reality.

Speed is the core problem. A traditional cyclist might be moving at 12 mph when a car door swings open or a pedestrian step off the curb. An e-bike rider in the same space could be doing 25 to 28 mph. Reaction time drops sharply, and the force of impact, which increases with the square of speed, rises dramatically.

E-bikes are also heavier than conventional bicycles, adding to the crash energy. And because many riders do not think of their machine as a vehicle requiring real safety precautions, they ride without helmets, without attention, and without the skills the speeds demand.

What Other Countries Have Done

Other countries with deeper cycling cultures have taken a more structured approach, and their experience is instructive. The European Union draws a firm line between standard e-bikes and high-speed ones. Standard pedelecs, limited to 250 watts and 15.5 mph, are treated like regular bicycles: no license, no registration, no insurance required. Faster machines, known as S-Pedelecs, which can reach 28 mph, are classified as mopeds. They require registration, insurance, a helmet, and are banned from bike lanes in most countries.

Germany enforces this split strictly, keeping faster e-bikes off bike paths and on roads with motor traffic. France treats illegal tampering with a speed limiter as a serious criminal offense, with fines reaching 30,000 euros and potential jail time. China, home to over 200 million registered e-bikes, requires registration for all of them and caps motor power nationally.

At home, New Jersey became one of the first US states to act decisively. In January 2026, Governor Phil Murphy signed a law requiring all e-bike riders to be licensed and insured, with riders passing a written test and a road test before getting on a Class 2 or Class 3 machine.

A Path Forward

Some focused changes could make a significant difference.

Enforce the class system and close the loopholes. Class 3 e-bikes do not belong is shared bike lanes alongside slow-moving conventional cyclists. Several states already restrict them from standard bike paths. That needs to become the national norm, with real enforcement against tampered bikes that exceed their rated speeds.

Require licensing and insurance for Class 2 and Class 3 . A machine capable of 28 mph is not a bicycle in any practical safety sense. Riders should pass a basic road test, demonstrate knowledge of traffic laws, and carry liability insurance. Insurance also gives pedestrians and other victims a realistic path to compensation when they are hurt. New Jersey has already shown this can be done.

Make helmets mandatory: The 49-fold rise in head trauma is a direct result of riders going faster without protection. Requiring helmets for Class 2 and Class 3 riders is a simple, immediate step.

Standardize crash reporting. Most cities lump e-bike and conventional bike crashes together, hiding the true scale of the problem. Separate reporting, including crashes involving pedestrians, would give policymakers the data they need.

Invest in rider education. Short, accessible training programs, especially for delivery workers, could close the gap between the casual attitude many people bring to e-biking and the skills the speeds actually require.

End Note

E-bikes are not going away, and there is no reason they should. At their best, they reduce car trips, cut emissions, and extend cycling to people who could not otherwise manage it. But the benefits come with responsibilities the US has been slow to take seriously. Smart regulation will not kill the e-bike market; it will mature it.

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“The possibilities seem rather endless in terms of all the ways e-bikes could be harnessed to solve social and environmental problems.”

-- Ash Lovell, PeopleForBikes

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Volume 12 Number 574

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Image by kropekkpl from Pixabay

Living in Uncertainty

We have never, in our lifetimes, lived in what might be called “certain times.” The truth of the matter is the notion of a stable, predictable America that existed before is fiction. Uncertainty has been the defining condition of American life for nearly a century, and we have survived it. We will probably survive this one too.

The temptation is to believe that something has now fundamentally broken, that the anxiety people feel today is different in kind from anything experienced before. But a look at the last hundred years suggests otherwise. What has changed is not the presence of uncertainty but our memory of it. Every generation forgets how frightened the previous one was.

So let us stroll through those uncertain phases, highlighting what happened and how we endured.

The Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was not just a rough patch. It was shock. At its worst, a quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. Banks failed by the thousands. Men who had worked their entire lives stood in bread lines. Families lost farms that had been in their families for generations. Hoovervilles, shantytowns named with bitter irony for the sitting president, appeared on the edges of major cities.

The psychological damage was as real as the economic damage. People genuinely did not know whether capitalism itself had failed. People panicked after reading about Wall Street traders jumping out of windows. Learned people wrote that the American system was finished. And yet the country came through it, battered and changed, but intact.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he moved swiftly, declaring a national bank holiday. He pushed sweeping legislation through Congress in what became known as the Hundred Days. His New Deal created Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Works Progress Administration as well as many positions that have endured. He stabilized the banking system and laid a social safety net that defined American economic life for generations.

World Wat II

The 1940s brought a different, frightening kind of uncertainty. Millions of American families sent their husbands, sons, and brothers across oceans, not knowing whether they would return. The outcome of the war itself was uncertain, particularly in the early years. The Axis powers had conquered most of Europe and a vast stretch of Asia. The idea that the Allies would prevail, which now seems inevitable, in hindsight, was anything but certain at the time.

On the home front, rationing, sacrifice, and constant anxiety were the call of daily life. Wives of servicemen dreaded a knock at the door, fearing terrible news. Women entered factories they had never set foot in before. Children collected scrap metal. Families gathered around radios for news that in the early year of the war was often grim. And yet the country was bound together by an enormous sense of common purpose, united in the fight to protect the free world and bring our men home.

The Cold War

The postwar years, often romanticized as a golden age of American confidence and prosperity, were shadowed by a fear unprecedented in history: the genuine possibility of nuclear annihilation. The Cold War lasted roughly four decades. During that time, American schoolchildren practiced getting under a school desk when there was a flash of blinding light, called “duck-and-cover drills.” Families built bomb shelters in their backyards.

In between came Korea, then Vietnam, with the universal draft casting a shadow over every young man’s future.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world to the very edge of catastrophe. There was collective relief when the threat receded. The social upheaval of the 1960s, assassinations, riots, a counterculture that seemed to many to signal the unraveling of society, gave way to the 1970s and its own catalogue of miseries: Watergate, stagflation, gasoline lines, and a pervasive national malaise – another uncertain time.

And yet the United States won the Cold War. NATO held. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved two years later, it was because America had endured..

Recent Decades

The fall of the Soviet Union briefly felt like the end of uncertainty. It was not to be. The 1990s brought the Oklahoma City bombing, the first World Trade Center attack. There was growing realization that terrorism was not going away. Then came September 11, 2001, which reshaped American life and launched two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out retirement savings and collapsed the housing market. A worldwide pandemic arrived in 2020 and killed more than a million Americans.

Now we face other pressures: an administration that is taking apart our nation’s historic legislative system, military tensions with Iran, the continuing threat of war spreading across Europe from Ukraine, economic disruption from artificial intelligence transforming the labor market, the destabilizing spread of misinformation through social media.

Each of these feels unprecedented. They all generate the conviction that this time is different, that the old certainties are gone for good. And most likely our society will reorganize itself around the new reality and continue forward.

The Birth Rate: A Misread Story

One of the more persistent pieces of doom-talk concerns the declining birth rate. American women are having fewer children than they were a generation ago. But the decline is the product of largely positive trends happening simultaneously.

Teenagers are having far fewer children out of wedlock than in previous decades, a development that is all good. Unwed teen birth rates have fallen by more than eighty percent since the early 1990s. Women who once would have started families in their early twenties are now finishing college, establishing careers, and choosing partners more deliberately.

The children being born today are, on the whole, more planned for, more wanted, and born into more stable circumstances than children of earlier eras. A lower birth rate produced this way is a very different thing from one produced by poverty or hopelessness.

Our Current Lives in Perspective

Viewed against the full sweep of history, our current standard of living stands at an all-time high. Extreme poverty has fallen to its lowest recorded level. Medical science continues to achieve breakthroughs that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations; diseases once considered death sentences are now manageable conditions. Access to information and education is greater than at any point in human history. Measured in life expectancy, literacy, safety, and opportunity, all of this turns toward a better life for more people than ever before.

End Note

None of this is an argument that everything is fine, or that the problems of the present moment are trivial. Political polarization and inertia, economic inequality, climate change, the threat of war, and the effects of rapid technological change, are real and serious. The point is this: we have always had things to worry about, and uncertainty is not new.

Americans who came through the Depression did so in spite of great uncertainty. The same is true of those who survived the war years, the Cold War decades, and everything that followed. We must resist the temptation to mistake our anxiety for reality, to confuse the feeling of crisis with the action of collapse.

Uncertainty is a backdrop against which a good life has always been built. We are not the first generation to live without guarantees, nor will we be the last. We are simply the latest one. And if history is any guide, we will find our way through this chapter too.

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“The future no longer arrives gradually; it crashes into breakfast”.

Ernest Hemingway

Volume 12 Number 573

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Image by Martella

The original Les Misérables is the story of an innocent man, Jean Valjean, pursued relentlessly by an obsessed official, Inspector Javert. The real-life pair are Kilmar Abrego Garcia and, by proxy, Donald Trump.

Who Is Abrego Garcia?

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in 1995 in San Salvador, El Salvador, the youngest of four children. His mother ran a small tortilla business out of their home. The family’s life was shadowed by the menace of criminal gangs, and by the time he was sixteen the danger had grown intolerable.

In 2011, Abrego escaped and came to the United States as an undocumented person. Joining his brother Cesar in Maryland, he found work in construction. In 2018 he met Jennifer Vasquez Sura; they married in June 2019 and together raised three children.

Following a Legal Existence

As required by law, he maintained regular contact with immigration authorities. In October 2019, a U.S. immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal” status, finding that he faced credible threats of gang persecution if he were returned to El Salvador. This status allowed him to live and work legally in the United States, checking in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) annually, which he did without fail. In those years Garcia was complying with the law, working hard, raising a family with serious medical needs, and pursuing an education.

The Arrest and the Administrative Error

On March 12, 2025, ICE agents picked up Abrego Garcia near an IKEA in College Park, Maryland. Three days later he was deported to El Salvador, in direct violation of the 2019 court order barring his removal to that country.

The Trump administration quickly acknowledged what it called an “administrative error.” That might have been the end of it — a simple mistake, remedied by his release and return to his family. Instead, the administration chose a prolonged legal and political battle, one that would expose something far darker about how Inspector Trump and his administration handle their blunders.

What Happened When He Got to El Salvador

Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison notorious for brutal conditions, built to house tens of thousands of suspected gang members. That weekend El Salvador’s president posted a video on social media showing Garcia being frog-marched by guards through the prison. His wife had no idea he had even been deported — she thought he was in detention in Maryland — until she saw his face on a TV screen.

The image of a man with U.S.-government-protected legal status being paraded through a foreign mega-prison shocked the public. Fourteen Maryland legislators wrote to President Trump demanding his return, noting that he had no criminal record and had been lawfully living in Maryland with his American citizen family.

Courts Order His Return — Administration Resists

His wife, with sympathetic aid, filed suit in Maryland, and the case moved with speed. A federal district judge ordered the government to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The government appealed. On April 10, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the administration must “facilitate” his release from custody in El Salvador. The administration’s response was to redefine the word: “facilitate” did not obligate them to actually seek his release — that was up to El Salvador.

Eventually, facing mounting legal and public scrutiny, the administration brought him back to the United States in June 2025. But not freely.

False Allegations and a Manufactured Case

The moment Abrego Garcia landed back on American soil, he was arrested again. The administration unveiled a human smuggling indictment in Tennessee, based on a November 2022 traffic stop with nine passengers in the car. Officers discussed their suspicions among themselves, but Garcia drove away with nothing more than a warning. No charges were filed. The investigation was closed.

Once he was on U.S. soil, the Department of Homeland Security also mounted a social media campaign labeling him an MS-13 gang member, a “human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator” — claims he denied and his lawyers vigorously disputed. These allegations had never existed before, and the government offered no proof of them.

A closed investigation was reopened specifically after a federal judge ordered his return. A DHS agent testified that he did not begin investigating the 2022 traffic stop until after the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling. Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly stated that the executive branch had begun “investigating” Abrego Garcia after a judge “questioned” the decision to deport him. Garcia pleaded not guilty and rejected a plea deal.

Never Admit a Mistake, Never Apologize

The Abrego Garcia case is a textbook illustration of a pattern that has defined the Trump administration. Since he, and by extension his administration, don’t make mistakes, they find a reason — any reason — using every available instrument of government power to justify doing what they want to do.

Rather than return a wrongly deported man to his family and quietly settle the case, the administration pursued him criminally, labeled him a gang member and trafficker on official government accounts without any proof, attempted to deport him to a series of African countries, and fought every court order requiring his release. Pride and politics surpassed any obligation for justice. The administration that never apologizes found in Abrego Garcia a convenient target.

The First Finding of Vindictive Prosecution

On May 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., an Obama appointee on the federal bench in Nashville, dismissed all criminal charges against Abrego Garcia. His ruling went further than finding the evidence insufficient. He found that the prosecution itself was the problem.

“The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” Crenshaw wrote. He concluded that the government had failed to rebut a presumption of vindictiveness — a legally demanding standard — and that Blanche’s public statements linking the reopened investigation to the court challenge “tainted the investigation with a vindictive motive.”

“The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecutorial power,” Crenshaw wrote. It was the first time in this entire saga that a federal court formally cited the government for being vindictive — not merely wrong, but retaliatory. The Department of Homeland Security called the decision “naked judicial activism,” vowing that Abrego Garcia would not remain in the country.

Where Things Stand

Abrego Garcia is free but in a still-unsettled situation. The May 22 ruling removed the criminal case entirely. On the immigration side, a federal judge has ruled that ICE cannot re-detain him because a 90-day detention period has expired. The government has no viable plan for deporting him. Again out of pure vindictiveness, on Aug. 18 they asked an appeals court to reinstate the “human smuggling” case.

The 2019 order protecting him from removal to El Salvador remains in place. A judge blocked the administration’s bid to deport him to Liberia, though government lawyers say they still intend to send him there — despite an agreement allowing him to go to Costa Rica, where he’d prefer to go and which has already agreed to grant him refugee status. As of late July 2026, the bar against his deportation remains in place, though it could be lifted by Judge Xinis. For now, the courts have blocked every removal attempt, and he has no pending charges.

End Note

What began as an admitted administrative error has consumed more than 18 months, multiple Supreme Court interventions, and countless hearings across two states, ending in a formal federal finding of prosecutorial vindictiveness. The administration that made the mistake has never apologized. It has only attacked — and probably will as long as Trump sits in the Oval Office.

It is unlikely that Trump will jump in the river, like Inspector Javert, but maybe he should look at his sad immigration situation and ease his foot on the accelerator.

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“Vindictiveness is the child of vanity and the parent of misery.” — François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), French writer.

Volume 12 Number 572

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The Ruling on A Personal Atomic Bomb

In an expected decision, on April Fool’s Day, the Supreme Court ruled: “It is within the boundaries of the Second Constitutional Amendment for a person to own their very own atomic bomb.”

Image by Martella

In the majority ruling, the new Chief Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “After all, with the failure of our government to protect its citizens, then everyone is entitled to have their own atomic bomb for self-defense. This is in case of an attack on their home, just as our pioneers had a rifle to protect themselves against Indians. Besides, it is a personal bomb that will only destroy a radius of one mile.”

New Chief Justice Alito had declined to recuse himself from the case, even though neighbors had complained about the upside-down atomic cloud flag flying outside his home. (Prior Chief Justice John Roberts had resigned in a pique because the Congressional Ethics Committee had ruled that he couldn’t accept the gift of a gold toilet seat from the defendant in a pending case.) Chief Justice Alito explained that “my wife, Martha flew the flag, and I didn’t notice it. And we are truly sorry that Martha had to shoot that complaining neighbor about 30 times with her bump gun, in self-defense.”

Comments by the Justices:

• Justice Clarence Thomas had also declined to recuse himself from the case because he owns shares in the Make Your Own Bang Atomizer Company, that is marketing the device here in the United States. These shares were gifted to him by Harlan Crow, his billionaire friend, and previously unreported. Justice Thomas said, “I don’t see any conflict here.” He had amended his statements to the Ethics Committee for the 45^th time when the stock ownership was revealed by a whistleblower, who was thought to be Senator Bernie Sanders.

• Justice Rudy Guiliani, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump. Rudy said, “I would like to set off a bomb at the home of those two poll workers in Georgia, but I don’t have the money to buy one since I owe them $148 million.”

• Justice Jim Jordan, who refuses to wear a black robe and is conspicuous with his rolled-up sleeves, wants to have an investigation into whether Mickey Mouse is really part of an attempt to weaponize the Disney characters.

• Justice Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has shown herself to be the most liberal of the recent Trump appointees, said,” I should have used one of those bombs to blow up the pizza joint that QAnon had revealed Hiliary Clinton, and her evil followers, were using to kidnap and molest kids.”

So, the Court is now comprised of three factions: our conservative justices: Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch; sexual predators: Thomas and Kavanaugh; and wackos: Guiliani, Greene, and Jordan, plus one spot to be filled, presumably by young ultra right-winger and racist Nick Fuente, who Trump has labeled “a great American.”

Why the New Justices Were Needed: Right after his second swearing in, first thing, Trump proceeded to order ICE agents to arrest the left-leaning Supreme Court justices. An incident began when the Justices refused to take their robes off while they were being interrogated. The official Justice Department report says they attacked the ICE agents in protest, and for this violent behavior they were removed from the Court. The Trumped-up case is closed and there will be no further investigation.

Just to make sure, Trump then pardoned all the ICE agents involved in the phony arrest of the SCOTUS judges. At the same time, he pardoned all those who had been convicted of trying to overthrow the government in 2020 and gave them all key jobs in his new administration. Trump also pardoned all federal convicts who said they had voted for him.

Backlash From the SCOTUS Decision: Meanwhile, the nation was in an uproar over the Supreme Court ruling that permitted an atomic bomb in the home, not to mention the shooting of the Justices.

• The NRA encouraged all bomb owners to have it locked up so kids wouldn’t unwittingly play with the bomb.

• A protest that was planned by Mothers Against the Bomb was expected to draw up to three million to the Capital. But it was called off because President Trump threatened to call out the National Guard with one of their own Make Your Own Bang Atomizers to end the demonstration. In his usual polite and understated way, Trump said, “I’ll show those ‘father f-----s” who the boss is.”

• The ACLU was expected to bring a suit to prevent Trump from using the bomb without consent of the Congress.

• SCOTUS on receiving notice of the charge, responded, “We will hear the case in 120 years from now as our calendar is loaded and this is a low priority.”

• Secretary of Defense Barron Trump, fresh out of college and on his first job said, “Whatever Pop says is OK with me.”

• Thereupon, the Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that demanded every bomb purchase be reported and only “licensed dealers in death” be allowed to sell the bombs. The Republicans defeated the bill, saying it was an encroachment on civil liberties.

Musk and the Bomb: The bomb was, of course, developed by Elon Musk. Currently, each bomb will cost $5 million dollars, but Mr. Musk feels that, ultimately, he can make one that will be more affordable. You can now buy one and not have to pay anything for the first year. Then for a measly $500,000 a year, it can be paid off in 10 years.

Because the demand is expected to be so great, Musk is asking his Board to allow him to give himself another 40 percent of the shares of Tesla if sales meet the goals he is setting. If they do not agree, Musk is threatening to leave the company and set up a rival. The Board is expected to meet his demands. If this goes through, if Musk were a country, he would be the third richest country in the world behind the United States and China. Musk says that as a reward he to himself he will buy a U.S. battleship and convert it to a yacht.

Amazon Sells the Bomb Online: Meanwhile, Musk’s good friend, the other trillionaire, Jeffrey Bezos, has been granted an exclusive on delivering the bombs to homes via his Amazon service. However, the Amazon workers are objecting for some reason, despite Bezos’ statement that they are perfectly safe. Bezos said that “the Atomizer Bomb is just as safe as crossing on a green light.”

Conclusion: So now kids in their classrooms are being told something out of the 1950s: “If you see a sudden flash of light hide under your desk and close your eyes.”

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“As the world turns, it makes no sense for contemporary society to pledge allegiance to the founding era’s culture, realities, laws, and understanding of the Constitution. “

--Hawaii State Court.

Volume 12 Number 571

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Image by Martella

A Morning in the Dirksen Building

On Wednesday morning, July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci took a seat in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. He is 85 years old. He retired from government service in December 2022. A subpoena brought him back.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky issued that subpoena. Paul chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci was sworn in and the questions began.

The doctor answered none of them. He invoked his right under the Fifth Amendment. He said the decision pained him after decades of cooperating with Congress. Over and over he told the senators that on the advice of counsel he respectfully declined.

Why the Fifth Amendment

President Biden issued Fauci a pardon covering his years of federal service. That pardon does nothing for testimony given in 2026. A false statement at Wednesday’s hearing would be a fresh crime.

That is the trap. A witness who talks for hours under hostile questioning can be accused of a single inconsistency. The accusation then becomes a criminal referral. Fauci’s attorneys had written to Paul last month describing a years long public crusade. They wrote that the senator had built a personal brand around seeing their client prosecuted. Silence removed the trap.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee on August 6^th, in an unusual move, held Dr. Fauci in contempt for refusing to testify and the committee will be asking the Justice Department to prosecute him. Seems like these Republican folks never heard of the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution, you know, the one about you can’t force a person to testify against himself.

The Real Motive

Six years have passed since the pandemic began. About 400,000 Americans died while Trump was in office. According to Trump someone else has to blamed for that. The president has spent six years working to blame Anthony Fauci.

What Trump Did and Said

The record from 2020 is public. In January the president said the situation was totally under control. In February he said the virus would disappear like a miracle. He told the writer Bob Woodward on February 7 that the disease was deadlier than the flu. He told the public the opposite. He later explained that he wanted to play it down.

The federal testing program failed that same month. Faulty kits went out from the Center for Disease and Prevention. Weeks were lost while the virus spread unseen. He resisted masks and mocked people who wore them. He suggested that doctors look into injecting disinfectant. Trump promoted hydroxychloroquine better known as bleach after his own scientists warned against it.

He held large rallies through the summer and the fall. He said that testing creates cases. Trump asked his staff to slow the testing down. He contradicted his own health officials in public, week after week.

The Death Toll That Followed

Cases surged after each reopening push. A large wave arrived in the fall and ran deep into January 2021.

The comparison with other wealthy nations is telling. Through the main pandemic period the United States recorded about 341 Covid deaths for every 100,000 people. Japan recorded about 58. South Korea, Australia, Germany, and Canada all finished far below the American figure. The American rate ran roughly six times the Japanese rate.

Excess deaths tell the same story. Across 2020 and 2021 the United States lost 283 more people per 100,000 than normal years would predict. That figure topped every comparable nation. Australia and Japan lost fewer people than expected. Researchers publishing in medical journals estimated that 240,000 of American deaths could have been prevented by a response matching that of other industrialized countries.

The Only Thing Worse

One later decision has produced a larger number. In 2025 the Trump administration cut foreign aid funding by 83 percent and then dissolved the United States Agency for International Aid. One year on from dismantling of USAID, a study projects that global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030.” We can expect 4.5 millions of those deaths to be among children under five. That comes to roughly 700,000 dead children every year. American taxpayers had been paying about $64 a year each for the whole program.

The Man They Put on Trial

Anthony Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. He advised seven presidents of both parties across those 38 years. He arrived at the height of the AIDS crisis. He met with activists who had protested outside his office. Fauci then changed the way the government tested experimental drugs. He became one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief under George W. Bush. That program is credited with saving more than 25 million lives in the developing world.

He led federal responses to anthrax, to Ebola, and to Zika. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. Fauci also holds the National Medal of Science and 61 honorary doctorates. He ranks among the most cited scientists alive. Compare those credentials against that of the man who desperately wants him to go to be blamed for Covid 19. It is like comparing Sister Teresa to John Dillinger.

No Evidence

The central charge holds that Fauci funded the research that created the virus and then hid what he knew. The World Health Organization assembled 27 scientists to examine the origin question. They worked for three years. Their report in June 2025 concluded that the weight of the available evidence points to the virus passing from animals to people, either from bats directly or through another animal.

A study in the journal Cell traced the earliest cases to specific stalls in the Wuhan market where wildlife was sold. American agencies remain split. The FBI and the Department of Energy lean toward a laboratory accident. .

No investigation has produced evidence that anything Fauci funded caused the pandemic. Six years of hearings have produced no charge.

A President Who Always Needs a Villain

The pattern runs through the whole presidency. The 2020 loss belongs to poll workers and voting machines. Bad coverage belongs to the media. Adverse rulings belong to judges. Crime belongs to immigrants. Military setbacks belong to generals.

Covid-19 needed an owner in Trump’s world. He sent part of the blame went to China. The rest was directed to a career civil servant, Anthony Fauci, who appeared on television every day and told Americans things the president disliked.

The only reason Trump hasn’t blamed the emerging famine in Third World countries on someone else is because there is no one else to blame. The budget cut was his invention.

What This Does to Science

Public health has been losing people since 2025. State and local health departments report heavy turnover. Federal scientists have faced subpoenas, budget cuts, and personal threats. Recruiting replacements has grown harder. Young researchers watch what happened to the man who ran a federal institute for 38 years. Some choose private industry.

End Note

Senator Paul has said his committee will keep working. A criminal referral to the Justice Department remains possible. The Biden pardon covers conduct through 2024, so any referral would have to rest on something said, or left unsaid, in 2026.

Fauci turns 86 in December. He has testified before Congress hundreds of times over four decades, now he stopped.

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“I fear the intent of this hearing is only meant to fuel a purely partisan agenda.”

-- Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI):

Volume 12 Number 570

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Netanyahu is planning to do this trip for an address to the United Nations in September 2026. But Mamdani dropped the promise, announcing the decision in a video posted late July 21 and widely viewed by over 36 million.

Mamdani concluded the city lacks the independent legal authority to enforce the warrant. He further said the federal government does hold that authority. Mamdani called on Washington to join (ICC) and execute the warrant. He also said Netanyahu is a war criminal who is unwelcome in New York City.

Trump responded on social media. He told Netanyahu he will face no arrest in any way, shape, or form while in the United States.

The Accusation

The ICC issued the arrest warrants that Mamdani spoke about for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024. Gallant served as his defense minister. The court charged both men with war crimes. The charges include starvation as a method of warfare. They also include intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population. The court added crimes against humanity. Those counts cover murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

The warrants cover conduct from at least October 8, 2023, through at least May 20, 2024. The judges found reasonable grounds to believe both men bear responsibility for these crimes. It is believed that the accusation sits far below the proof required for a conviction at trial. But it is still an outstanding warrant.

The ICC and the ICJ Are Different Courts

The ICC is a permanent international criminal court. It sits in The Hague. A treaty called the Rome Statute created it in 2002. It prosecutes individual people. Countries themselves stay outside its reach. The crimes it covers are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. The court has 125 member states. Israel stayed out of the treaty. The United States, Russia, and China stayed out as well. The court steps in only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute.

People often confuse the ICC with the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Both courts sit in The Hague. Their work differs greatly. The ICJ is the main court of the United Nations. It opened in 1945. It settles legal disputes between countries. The ICC tries individual human beings. The ICJ can declare a country responsible for breaking international law. Only the ICC can send a person to prison.

The two Gaza cases follow this split. The arrest warrant for Netanyahu is an ICC matter. The genocide case against Israel as a state is an ICJ matter.

Genocide Verdicts in Past Tribunals

In the past the ICC has brought genocide charges. Two landmark genocide convictions came from two earlier UN tribunals. One covered the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda. The other covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Jean-Paul Akayesu was a Rwandan mayor. In 1998 he became the first person ever convicted of genocide by an international court. He received a life sentence. Jean Kambanda was the prime minister of Rwanda during the killings. He became the first head of government convicted of genocide. He also received a life sentence.

The Yugoslavia tribunal focused on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Muslim men and boys there. General Radislav Krstic was convicted for his role. He received 35 years. Radovan Karadzic was the top Bosnian Serb political leader. His 40-year sentence was raised to life on appeal. Ratko Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serb army. He was convicted of genocide over Srebrenica. He received a life sentence.

Genocide Acquittals

Genocide has proven very hard to establish in court. The crime requires specific intent to destroy a group as such. Several defendants beat the genocide charge while losing on other counts.

The ICJ has also faced the genocide question too. In 2007 it ruled that Serbia bore no state responsibility for committing genocide in Bosnia. The court did find that Serbia failed to prevent the Srebrenica genocide.

What the Warrant Means

Netanyahu is now a fugitive from the ICC. He remains presumed innocent unless tried and convicted. All 125 member states are obligated to arrest him if he enters their territory. Enforcement has been weak. Hungary hosted him in April 2025 without arresting him. ICC judges later found Hungary violated its duty to cooperate. The United States sits outside the court. Israel rejects the court’s jurisdiction entirely. It denies committing war crimes in Gaza.

The Genocide Question Is Separate

The ICC warrant charges war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charge sheet stops there. Claims of a second genocide warrant spread online in 2026. Fact checkers found them false. It is well known that Israel bombed schools, hospitals and residential areas, which normally would be considered genocide. But Israel contends that military facilities and troops were headquartered in the basements of these structures and therefore, by United Nation articles, they can be considered as legal targets, not acts of genocide. This, is however, a major contention of advocates for trying Netanyahu and Israel for genocide in Gaza.

The genocide question does sit before the ICJ, however. South Africa brought that case in December 2023. It accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention of 1948.

Where the ICJ Case Stands

The ICJ has issued binding interim orders three times. The court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts. It ordered Israel to allow humanitarian aid without obstruction. It stopped short of ordering a ceasefire.

The court found Palestinians in Gaza face a serious risk regarding their right to protection from genocide. Joan Donoghue led the court when the first order came down. She later explained a common misreading. The court found Palestinians had a plausible right to protection from genocide. The question of whether the genocide claim itself is plausible remains open.

The full case will take years. Israel filed its written defense in March 2026. It objected to the court’s jurisdiction in that filing. South Africa must file its reply by November 22, 2027. Israel then has until May 22, 2029, for its own answer. A final judgment lies well beyond those dates.

The Debate Outside the Courts

Several prominent genocide scholars have concluded the conduct in Gaza meets the definition of genocide. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion. So did a UN special committee. They point to the scale of civilian death, destruction, and starvation, but not the bombings.

Other international law experts disagree. Governments including the United States and Germany disagree as well. They argue the evidence falls short of the Genocide Convention’s intent requirement. That rule demands specific intent to destroy a people as such. Israel says its war aims were different. It says its objectives were eliminating the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

Will Netanyahu Ever Stand Trial?

ICC rules require the defendant to be present in court. A trial can begin only after Netanyahu sits in custody in The Hague. The obstacles are large. Israel rejects the court’s jurisdiction. It refuses to surrender its own citizens. Netanyahu can simply avoid the 125 countries bound by the warrant. Even those countries can look away. Hungary hosted him in 2025 and let him leave. President Trump has said he will face no arrest on American soil.

History points to one route that has worked. International courts reached powerful men only after they lost power at home. A new government in Belgrade handed over Slobodan Milosevic in 2001 after his fall. A trial would require the same in Israel. It would take Netanyahu losing office. It would then take an Israeli government willing to hand over a former prime minister. The warrant carries no expiration date. It simply waits.

The outcome may be similar to Netanyahu’s bribery case back in Israel. Netanyahu was indicted for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in November 2019. His trial opened in May 2020 and has now run for more than six years, following police investigations that began in 2016. He completed his own testimony in June 2026 after 98 hearings, while the judges have urged prosecutors to consider dropping the bribery count.

Sounds like Netanahu should get together with his buddy Trump and exchange some ideas on how they beat their raps.

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“There are reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

— Karim Khan, ICC Chief Prosecutor

“The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.”

— President Joe Biden

Volume 12 Number 569

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The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is one of the most treasured public spaces in America. Built in the 1920s, it stretches about 2,000 feet between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Generations of Americans have stood at its edge and looked at the still water and surrounding monuments. Trump promised something beautiful. What the country got instead was a green and smelly mess, a parade of excuses, and criminal charges against ordinary citizens.

The story of the pool is worth telling in full, because it tells us something much bigger than a story about water. It shows us, in one small instance, how this president operates. This Reflecting Pool story is actually a reflection on an entire presidency.

The Plan and the Price

The plan sounded simple. Drain the pool, paint the bottom a deep blue color called American Flag Blue, and refill it before the Fourth of July 2026. The price was another matter. Early talk put the cost around $1.5 million. The main contract came in at $13.1 million and grew past $14 million. A separate $1.7 million contract paid for devices called nanobubbles, small machines that push tiny bubbles into the water to keep it oxygenated and hold off algae.

Both contracts were awarded with no bidding, on the grounds that time was short. Both companies had ties to the president. One had done pool work at a Trump club in Virginia. The other is owned by a trust led by a Trump donor. The paint itself raised eyebrows among the people who know about these things. Contractors used products from Rhino Linings, a company known for coating truck beds. Safety sheets for one of its epoxy resins warn that it is toxic to aquatic life, with long lasting effects.

The Algae Takes Over

The deadline drove everything. Crews raced to finish ahead of a birthday event for the president at the White House. In the rush, workers removed the nanobubbles before the job was done. The pool was refilled on June 9. Within days, patches of bright green algae bloomed across the surface, thickest near the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial.

Scientists were unsurprised. The pool is shallow, stagnant, and sits in full sun. Dark paint absorbs heat, and warm water is exactly what algae love. The city tap water used to fill the pool is rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, nutrients that feed the bloom. One ecologist at the University of Maryland put it plainly. “The dark blue bottom absorbs more light and more heat, and extra heat is a benefit for algae growth”. Then the new paint began to peel, floating to the surface in ugly chunks.

Dead ducks were found in the water, and the city opened an investigation into what killed them. A project meant to gleam had turned into a swamp, and the situation became fodder for late night TV.

The Shifting Stories

As usual, the administration’s explanations kept changing. First, a spokesperson called it “residual algae from dormant supply lines” and insisted the president had “permanently resolved” problems that had stumped the Obama and Biden administrations.

When that explanation wore thin, officials began touting high-tech nanobubble ozone technology and dumps of hydrogen peroxide. At one point they declared the water crystal clear, while visitors stood at the edge photographing a murky, fluorescent green pool.

Then came the boldest claim of all. The president announced on Truth Social that vandals had sliced a 250-foot gash in the lining and poured chemicals into the water. The administration offered no proof. Plenty of videos showed the paint peeling all by itself. Fences went up around the pool. Rows of tall security cameras rose along the walkways. National Guard members and Park Police began patrolling around the clock. Each story replaced the one before it, and every one of them failed to hold water.

From Farce to Something Dark

Next, several people were arrested and accused of vandalizing the pool. The circumstances of most of the arrests remain unclear, and the government has produced little public evidence.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, 67, pleaded not guilty in D.C. Superior Court on July 9 to a felony count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after a grand jury indicted him on the charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The judge released him on his own recognizance, with his next hearing scheduled for August 5; prosecutors say park employees saw him ripping up the pool’s sealant, while his attorneys call him a scapegoat for the administration’s own renovation failures.

Think about that for a moment. A botched paint job became the basis for felony prosecutions of ordinary citizens. Legal observers see a pattern here. The same office has brought a string of weak political cases that collapsed in court. Judges tossed them. Grand juries declined to bring them back. But an acquittal comes only after months of fear and legal bills. As one defendant in a similar case put it, “the process is the punishment.” An arrest alone can upend a life, drain a savings account, and frighten everyone else. Federal prosecutors were sent out to defend a paint job. That should worry every American, whatever their politics.

The Trump Pattern

Step back, and the pool incident appears as part of a formula Trump has followed for over forty years. The big promise comes first. Planning is slipshod, if it comes at all. The execution gets botched. A scapegoat appears. The final step is a flat refusal to take responsibility.

His business career ran the gamut on this script. Example follow one after another over the years. Trump University promised the secrets of wealth and ended in a $25 million fraud settlement. The Atlantic City casinos were promised as wonders of the world and collapsed through repeated bankruptcies, with the blame placed on the economy and the banks. Trump Shuttle promised luxury in the air, and sank in debt within three years. A small sample of his dozens of failed business ventures. Big promises, big wrecks, and someone else was always to blame.

The presidency followed the same script on a much grander stage. The border wall was promised, big and beautiful, and Mexico was going to pay for it. Mexico paid nothing, and only a fraction was ever built. Obamacare was going to be repealed and replaced with something far better for everyone. The country is still waiting for the replacement. When COVID arrived, he promised it would disappear like a miracle. More than a million Americans died, and the blame went to China, the governors, and his own health experts.

In the second term, the East Wing of the White House was torn down for a ballroom over the objections of preservationists and historians. And then came the ultimate example, the war with Iran. The promise was a quick and decisive victory. The cost to taxpayers has been estimated at more than $113 billion. Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz and set off a global fuel crisis that has touched every gas pump in America. When allies declined to join the fight, the president blamed them and declared that America needed no one’s help.

The pool and the war are the same story, told at very different scales. One left us with algae. The other left us with failure, lost lives, and the bills we will pay for a generation.

A Mirror After All

A reflecting pool shows you what stands before it. This summer it reflected something else. It reflected rushed work handed to connected contractors. It reflected shifting stories and blame passed down to citizens with no power to fight back. It reflected a government more interested in papering over a problem than fixing it. The water will someday be still and clear again.

On one end of the Reflecting Pool sits Abraham Lincoln, a president who told the country hard truths in its darkest hour. Figuratively, on the other end, sits Trump at the end of a green and a peeling puddle of water.

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“You’re going to end up with a beautiful, beautiful reflecting pool.”

--Donald Trump

Volume 12 Number 565

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Not the kind of trouble that a good summer blockbuster can paper over, but deep, structural, creative trouble that no amount of digital effects or franchise sequels can fix. Hollywood, once the dream factory of the world, has become something closer to a dream recycling plant, endlessly reprocessing old material, written by people it barely pays, and starring faces you can’t either identify with or adore.

The Industry Ate Itself

The first thing to understand is that Hollywood as it once existed is largely gone. The old studio system, for all its factory-like regimentation, produced a remarkable consistency of films. Studios had writers, directors, and actors under contract. They made many films each year, across every genre from screwball comedy to noir to melodrama. They competed for audiences who went to the cinema every week as a matter of habit, not just on occasion.

What replaced it is a corporate entertainment complex driven by portfolio and quarterly earnings reports. The major studios are now divisions of enormous conglomerates, beholden to shareholders who care more about numbers than about whether a film is actually good

The rise of streaming has made things worse, not better. Netflix, Amazon, and Apple have poured billions into production, but they measure success in viewing hours and retention data, not in the impact that a great film creates. A movie that everyone talks about for a year is worth a hundred movies people start and abandon halfway through.

The Writers Have Left the Building

Great films begin with great scripts. This is the most basic truth of the industry. And yet the treatment of writers in Hollywood has become a scandal. The studios, in their wisdom, decided to wait writers out for nearly five months rather than simply pay the people who create the product they sell. The long-term consequences of treating writers as a cost to be minimized are visible on screen every week. Dialogue is just words, rather than memorable. The kind of sharp, surprising, genuinely funny or genuinely moving moment that makes a film live in the memory is becoming rare, because the kind of writer who produces those moments needs time and fair compensation to do so.

Nobody Over Thirty Need Apply

Hollywood has decided, with remarkable stubbornness in the face of contradictory evidence, that its audience is teenagers and young adults, and that everyone else can find something to watch on television. The result is a release slate dominated by superhero films, animated sequels, and horror movies aimed at audiences for whom the 1990s are already history.

This is not simply a matter of taste. That “everyone else” are still the audience that studios claim to want, and precisely the audience they have systematically alienated by making almost nothing for them. The films that do speak to adults, whether Oppenheimer or The Devil Wears Prada 2, routinely overperform expectations, because the audience is hungry. Currently, Chrisopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is soaring at the box office.

The obsession with youth extends to subject matter. Stories about middle age, about marriage, about professional failure or late-in-life reinvention, about the complicated adult experience, have migrated to prestige television. The cinema, which once gave us Kramer vs. Kramer and Terms of Endearment and The Apartment, now regards these subjects as uncommercial. It is wrong.

Where Have the Stars Gone?

There is a particular kind of movie star which Hollywood has not produced in quite some time. They were genuine screen presences, with a quality that the camera loved and audiences could not resist.

The young actors working today are, by and large, technically accomplished. What many of them cannot do is make you feel that watching them is an experience. This is partly because the roles they are given do not require it.

The dashing leading man has become something of an endangered species. Tom Cruise remains, still apparently incapable of not dangling from something at altitude, but he is in his sixties. The younger generation has produced some compelling actors but few genuine movie stars in the old sense: someone whose name alone sells tickets regardless of the material. The same is true of women. Where are the descendants of Bette Davis, of Barbara Stanwyck, of Meryl Streep in her prime?

The Disappearance of the Character Actor

Every great film once had them. Character actors gave movies texture, credibility, and depth, filling the frame even in the smallest roles. Studios kept them under contract and used them constantly. Today they have largely vanished, replaced by performers so anonymous they leave no impression at all. Without strong character actors, film feels thin.

The Death of the Mid-Budget Film

Perhaps the most damaging structural change in Hollywood is the disappearance of the mid-budget film. There was a time when studios regularly made films at a modest cost, films that told adult stories with modest ambition. These were the films that filled out a studio’s annual slate, gave directors room to develop their craft, and provided audiences with a steady supply of entertainment.

Those films now exist almost exclusively on streaming platforms, where they are released without fanfare and discovered, if at all, by recommendation. The theatrical experience has been divided into spectacles that demand to be seen on an enormous screen, and intimate films. The middle ground has been largely abandoned.

How to Fix It

The solutions are not complicated, even if they are not easy. Pay writers properly and give them the time to write well. Invest in developing genuine movie stars rather than simply casting whoever is currently attached to a franchise. Make films for adults. Take chances on original material. Remember that the films people still talk about decades later were almost never the safest commercial bet at the time.

The cinema is not dead. When something extraordinary is released, people still go. They argue about it afterward over dinner. The hunger for an experience that only cinema provides has not gone away. It is simply being underfed. Hollywood has the infrastructure to make great films. What it currently lacks are the courage and the conviction that great films are worth making. That is the thing most urgently in need of repair.

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"Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision and change the way we see things. They take us to other places; they open doors and minds."

— Martin Scorsese

Volume 12 Number 567 B

Image by Martella

Biblical Claims and Their Limits

Religious Zionists call the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” and point to biblical passages promising the land to the descendants of Abraham. If you follow that reasoning, the United States should be returned to its indigenous natives a.k.a the Indians. The reality is that the people who were living in the West Bank in the twentieth century were primarily Muslims and some Christians who had farmed this land and built towns on it for generations.

What the British Did

After World War I, Britain controlled the region under a League of Nations mandate. Jewish immigration accelerated, especially as Hitler’s persecution made Europe lethal for Jews. The Arab population watched their demographic share shrink. Tensions boiled over into riots and conflict. After World War II Britain, unable to manage the situation, handed the crisis it had created to the newly formed United Nations and walked away.

The UN Partition Plan and Its Aftermath

In 1947, the UN proposed splitting the territory roughly in half, 56 percent to the proposed Jewish state, 44 percent to a Palestinian Arab state. This was even though Jews made up only roughly a third of the population and owned about seven percent of the land.

Arab leaders rejected the plan, a decision that proved catastrophic. When Israel declared independence in 1948 and five Arab armies invaded and lost, Israel expanded well beyond the partition lines. Around 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and were never allowed to return. Jordan held the West Bank until 1967, when Israel seized it during the Six-Day War and has controlled it ever since.

Passover 1968: The Settlers Plant Their Flag

Just months after the 1967 war, a rabbi named Moshe Levinger led a group of religious nationalists to Hebron in the Westbank, ostensibly for Passover services. They held their Seder in an abandoned building and refused to leave. Rather than remove them, the Israeli government eventually established a nearby settlement called Kiryat Arba. That moment set the pattern for the next five decades as hundreds of thousands Jews settled in the West bank.

How They Justify It

Settlers offer three main justifications. The religious one holds that God commanded Jews to inhabit the entire Land of Israel. The historical one notes that Jews lived in places like Hebron before being massacred and expelled in 1929. The legal one claims that because Jordan’s annexation was never internationally recognized, the territory has no legitimate sovereign, and Israel’s presence is therefore lawful.

International law disagrees. Israel is, in effect, disputing the creation of the Palestinian West Bank by the United Nations, the same UN resolution that created Israel itself. You cannot pick and choose which parts of the UN Charter you accept. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits an occupying power from moving its civilian population into occupied territory, and the International Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that Israel’s entire occupation is illegal.

The World Pushes Back

Nearly every major human rights organization, and the United Nations have called the settlements illegal. None of them has made any difference on the ground. Israel continues building, expanding, and subsidizing settlements while dismissing international criticism as biased.

Brooklyn Moves

The settler population today is far larger and more varied than Levinger’s original band of true believers. Tens of thousands of American Jews, many from Brooklyn and other Orthodox communities, have been encouraged by the Orthodox establishment in Israel to emigrate and settle in the West Bank. They are drawn by heavily subsidized housing, cheap mortgages, and communities that feel familiar. Many are not religious extremists. More than 700,000 Jews now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s Dangerous Coalition

For years, mainstream Israeli politicians at least paid lip service to a two-state solution. That pretense has largely collapsed. Benjamin Netanyahu, facing serious corruption charges and dependent on the most extreme members of his coalition to stay in power, brought settler ideologues directly into his cabinet. Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both settlers, now control the police and the settlement budget respectively. These are not fringe figures. They are in government, and Netanyahu needs their votes to survive.

Violence the Army Ignores

The daily reality for Palestinians in the West Bank has become increasingly dangerous. Armed settlers, many carrying weapons supplied by the Israeli government after October 7, have burned Palestinian homes, cars, and olive groves, attacked farmers during harvest season, beaten civilians, and in some cases killed Palestinians, with minimal legal consequence. Entire Palestinian communities have been driven from their land. The soldiers tasked with protecting everyone in the territory have made clear, through their actions, whom they are actually there to protect.

Israel’s Latest Push to Expand Settlements

On June 12^th, 2026, it was reported in The New York Times that “Israel’s government is expected to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming days to rapidly expand Jewish settlements across the occupied West Bank.” This will involve placing temporary housing in about 60 sites.

The intention is to make physical changes that it will be difficult to reverse. It is another example of how Israel attitudes toward Palestinians have hardened since October 7, 2023. It is another step to solidifying Israels continued presence in the West Bank that is opposed by most of the world.

The Failed Two-State Solution

The most discussed solution has been two states, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. Most of the world supports this. A majority of Palestinians have historically supported it. But Yasser Arafat foolishly rejected a serious two-state offer at the 2000 Camp David Summit.

A Possible Way Forward: Phased Sovereignty

In light of all the long-standing developments it is apparent that a “two state solution” is out of the realm of possibility. No arrangement can offer a cast-iron guarantee, but a mechanism could give Palestinians the autonomy they need while providing Israel meaningful assurance against violence.

Under what is called a phased sovereignty approach, Palestine would gain full statehood recognition and political rights immediately. Meanwhile Israeli and international security oversight would phase out over years as institutions mature and trust was built. (Germany and Japan followed this path after World War II with U.S. oversight.) A Palestinian state would have police and internal security forces but no army, no air force, no heavy weapons. There is precedent for this. Some other small countries have operated without a military for decades.

A Palestinian state with a functioning economy, trade relationships, and a stake in regional stability would have no incentive for military conflict. The Abraham Accords demonstrated that Arab other states would normalize relations with Israel when it serves their interests.

Gaza is the harder problem. Hamas does not accept Israel’s existence, and any solution must reckon with who governs Gaza. Rebuilding political legitimacy here would take generations and probably should not be part of the current negotiations.

On the 700,000 Settlers

Here is a possibility. Roughly two-thirds of settlers are not ideological extremists. They moved to the West Bank for affordable housing, good schools, and community. Many live in large blocs sitting right on the 1967 border. These blocs would be annexed to Israel. While perhaps distasteful to Palestinians, in reality this would be no great loss because they don’t have that land now anyhow. That would cover perhaps 80 percent of settlers without moving anyone.

There is a possibility of trading parts of Israel adjacent to the West Bank in a swap. The problem is that land is mostly desert and would require a lot of resources from Israel to help make it viable and livable, which was done in Israel in the 20^th century.

The settlers deep inside the West Bank are a different matter. Their settlements are not candidates for annexation. Those settlers would need to relocate. Relocating perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 settlers would take considerable effort, but Israel absorbed 800,000 to a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. They can do it again. Given what the conflict costs in military spending, diplomatic isolation, and periodic wars, it would almost certainly be worth it.

The Bottom Line

What has prevented resolution is a lack of political will, on the Israeli side to stop building settlements and remove the ones that must go, and on the Palestinian side to make the final concessions that a deal requires. Pressure from the United States, which has consistently pulled its punches when Israel says no, would also contribute to such a solution.

The settlers are not an impossible problem. They are an expensive, politically painful, solvable problem. The question is whether any Israeli leader will ever be willing to pay that price?

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“It is the view of the Court that to seek to acquire sovereignty over an occupied territory, as shown by the policies and practices adopted by Israel in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, is contrary to the prohibition of the use of force in international relations and its corollary principle of the non-acquisition of territory by force.”

--International Court of Justice

Volume 12 Number 567 A

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The Scene at Mount Rushmore

Image by Martella

The occasion was the eve of America’s 250th birthday. The setting called for words that would lift every American, red state and blue state alike. Other presidents each spoke, in their own time, to the whole country.

Donald Trump spoke only to his voters. He turned a national birthday into a campaign rally. The country deserved bettter.

What Trump Said

The speech began with praise for America. Trump called the United States “the most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.” He called its birth and survival the best thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands. Better left to others to say, but after all, presidents are supposed to love the country.

The speech soon swerved into darkness. Trump declared that communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. He went further. He called it a greater threat than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11. Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.

Trump told the crowd that a handful of Democratic politicians he dislikes pose a bigger danger than all of that. He aimed the communist label at newcomers to our country and at candidates running against his party in this fall’s elections. He told Americans they could be loyal to Karl Marx or loyal to America, but never both.

The whole idea is ridiculous. Communism is a dying entity. Only three countries in the world still practice it: China, North Korea and Cuba. They have all introduced strong elements of capitalism into their economy. As for the United States, the Communist Party barely exists here with an estimated 11,000-15,000 members, scarcely 0.0001 percent of the population. It’s a gigantic “gaslight” on Trump’s part to treat this as a threat. Probably the only smaller group here is the “Americans for Cannibalism United.”

There was also the matter of vanity. The day before the speech, Trump posted a video showing a gilded Mount Rushmore with his own face carved into the stone next to Lincoln’s. His press office said there would be no better addition to the mountain. In the video, he declares that he will be the greatest president for many, many years to come. The founders feared exactly this kind of man.

What Trump Has Done

This is a president who has demanded loyalty from generals, prosecutors, and civil servants. He has attacked the free press as the enemy of the people. Trump has rolled back civil rights protections and diversity programs in a campaign that echoes the worst habits of the Jim Crow era. He has carried out mass deportations that split families apart. He has used the powers of his office to punish critics and reward friends.

Trump has mused, more than once, about staying in power beyond the limits the Constitution sets. Now he has added a new chapter, a communist scare campaign timed to the midterm elections. Anyone old enough to remember Senator Joseph McCarthy knows how this story goes. McCarthy waved lists of imaginary communists and ruined honest people’s lives. He was eventually asked “if he had no decency?” The same goes for now.

What Other Presidents Said on the Fourth

Compare the record. In his first inaugural address, Washington told the country that the sacred fire of liberty was staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. He put his faith in the people, all of them. Lincoln, standing on the blood soaked ground at Gettysburg, called for a new birth of freedom, and for government of the people, by the people, for the people. He spoke while the country was tearing itself apart, and still he reached for unity.

Franklin Roosevelt, facing the Great Depression, told Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. Ronald Reagan described America as a shining city on a hill, open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. John Kennedy asked Americans what they could do for their country.

Every one of these men understood the assignment. The Fourth of July belongs to everyone. A president speaks for the nation on that day. Trump built his entire speech on fear.

What the Founders Believed

The Declaration of Independence rests on two ideas. “All men are created equal. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Everything else flows from those two sentences. The founders backed up their words with actions. Washington held the most powerful office in the new nation and walked away from it after two terms. Jefferson wrote that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would take the newspapers. And Benjamin Franklin, asked what kind of government the convention had created, gave the answer that still hangs over us. A republic, if you can keep it. Madison built a system of checks and balances because he knew men are not angels.

Trump calls the press the enemy and treats every check on his power as a personal insult

This Year’s Voices That Got It Right

Others found the right words this weekend. Pope Leo XIV, the first American to lead the Catholic Church, urged the country to recommit to human dignity, liberty, and unity. He reminded us that America became a byword for freedom because it opened its doors to immigrants. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the ideals our nation was built on are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them. A pope in Rome and a young mayor in New York both understood the day better than the man at Mount Rushmore.

Keeping the Republic

The granite faces have watched over the Black Hills for nearly a century, and they will watch over it long after this presidency. The words of the founders will outlast Trump’s fear campaign.

At 250 years, America remains what Franklin said it was at the start. It is a republic, if we can keep it. Every voter, every citizen, every person who still believes that this country belongs to all of its people has a job to do. The founders handed us the experiment. The 250th birthday is a fine time to remember that no one man, gets to decide how it ends.

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“Each made full use of his Presidential powers without forgetting that he owed his power and legitimacy to the people.”

--George H.W. Bush, at the 50th anniversary ceremony on July 3, 1991

Volume 12 Number 566

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Image by Martella

There is an old observation about politics that ignorance by itself is rarely the greatest problem. The real danger arises when confident ignorance gains power, when someone dismisses established facts, rejects expert knowledge, and then uses government authority to act on those beliefs.

Trump loves telling people how smart he is. “I have a very good brain,” he once said. “I know words. I have the best words.” That’s a good place to start.

In His Own Words

Trump makes claims unsupported by facts. He has repeatedly claimed the United States is “the only country in the world” that allows mail-in voting. Dozens of other countries use it, including Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia. A quick Google search would have clarified this in seconds.

The man who fancies himself a deal-making genius doesn’t understand how tariffs work. Trump described the US trade deficit as a $2 trillion “loss.” The actual figure was around $920 billion. And a deficit isn’t a loss, as economists will tell you. He also claimed tariffs are paid by foreign countries. They aren’t. US importers pay them.

He makes promises he can’t keep, then pretends he never made them. Trump swore he would end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours.” When a journalist asked about this, months into his term, Trump said the pledge was “said in jest.” It was not a joke.

He denies saying things he said on camera. In 2016, Trump repeatedly said he would jail Hillary Clinton. By 2024, he denied ever having said it. The speeches exist. He just counts on people forgetting.

A computer analysis of Trump’s speeches found their complexity sits at around a fourth-grade level. Yet he ends rallies with: “Trump is never wrong. I am never, ever wrong.” That’s the thing about not knowing what you don’t know. You feel very confident.

When Ignorance Has Consequences: Covid-19

There’s a difference between being wrong and being wrong while in charge. The damage is real, measurable, and in many cases, deadly.

In February 2020, Trump said: “We’re very close to a vaccine.” A vaccine was at minimum a year away. He spent months comparing COVID to the flu, whose mortality rate was estimated to be approximately ten times lower. He pushed back on masks, mocked Biden for wearing one, and when the death toll became undeniable, claimed the numbers were fake.

Researchers at Cornell University found Trump to be the single largest driver of coronavirus misinformation. People in counties that voted heavily for Trump were nearly three times as likely to die from COVID once vaccines were available. According to Brown University, nearly 320,000 lives could have been saved. These weren’t unavoidable deaths. They were the downstream cost of bad information from the top.

RFK Jr.: Putting a Fox in the Henhouse

Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has spent decades spreading vaccine misinformation, to be America’s Secretary of Health. Measles cases hit a 34-year high while Kennedy was rolling back federal vaccine guidance. During an outbreak in Texas, children died, the first measles deaths in America in a decade. Kennedy went on television and claimed the measles vaccine causes “all the illnesses” of the disease. Researchers say this simply isn’t true.

By late 2025, there had been 47 measles outbreaks compared to 16 in all of 2024. The US now risks losing its measles elimination status, held since 2000. A 2024 Lancet study estimated vaccines prevented 93.7 million deaths globally over fifty years. We solved this. And now we’re going backwards.

The Whipping Boy: Immigration

Every bully needs someone to blame. For Trump, that’s immigrants. A National Institute of Justice study found undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes. A Justice Department-backed analysis found they were 26 percent less likely to be convicted of homicide. The research is, in the words of one criminology professor, “absolutely clear.”

What ICE is actually doing bears little resemblance to the public safety operation Trump describes. People with no criminal record are being locked up with no clear path to release. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. Meanwhile, in 2023, undocumented immigrant households paid $89.8 billion in taxes and held $299 billion in spending power. The agricultural industry has already lost 155,000 workers. The bill is coming due.

Elections and Democratic Institutions Endangered

Trump has never accepted that America’s elections don’t belong to him. He lost in 2020 and called it a theft. He won in 2024 and called it proof the system works. That’s not democracy. That’s a man who only accepts results he likes.

Back in power, he escalated from words to actions, pardoning approximately 1,500 January 6 defendants, repealing voter protections, and attempting to seize control of election machinery. He disbanded an FBI unit built specifically to confront foreign election interference. So while Trump claims to protect elections, he stripped away the tools that kept them safe from foreign attack.

Iran: Blustering Is a Dangerous Thing

Up to now his actions have mainly hurt Americans. Now his misguided thinking is endangering the whole world. Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a deal that was actually working. Iran resumed enriching uranium. In his second term, he demanded full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program or face military strikes. The US and Israel struck key Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Iran immediately pulled out of nuclear talks.

Trump accused Iran of building weapons that could “soon” reach the US, a claim directly contradicted by a federal government assessment that said Iran was years away from that capability. He launched strikes anyway, then threatened to destroy power plants and bridges. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely blocked. Gas prices have surged. Thirteen US service members have been killed. Arms control experts warn that Trump’s approach may be creating exactly the nuclear threat he claims to be preventing. Finally, Trump seems to have capitulated to Iran and agreed to a lousy deal with Iran that will weaken our country in the eyes of the world. So much for our peerless leader.

Retribution: Settling Scores

Trump came back to the White House with a list. Not a policy agenda. A list of enemies. He ended the post-Watergate norm of DOJ independence, weaponizing it against people he publicly called “scum.” Targets included New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. The pattern was always the same: Trump demanded prosecution publicly, then the DOJ opened an investigation.

It has largely backfired. A national survey found that 55 percent of Americans, including three in ten Republicans, believe Trump is abusing law enforcement to prosecute his enemies. Nixon kept an enemies list too. He at least had the sense to keep it secret. Retribution without justice isn’t strength. It’s the behavior of someone who never understood the difference between power and legitimacy and never will.

Conclusions

The thread running through all of this is the same. Trump doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And because he’s certain he’s the smartest man in the room, he never asks. He never defers to experts. He never says, “I’ll look into that.” He just talks. And acts. And people suffer.

Being wrong in private is forgivable. Being wrong at this scale, with this much power, is something else entirely. The real danger arises when ignorance is paired with certainty and power. Unfortunately for us, Trump represents the worst of these combined traits. And to our discredit we have sent this ignorant, vicious, unhinged, crude, cunning, lout of a man to the highest position in our land, twice. We deserve what we got.

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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

— Charles Darwin

” And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So, it would be. interesting to check that.”

--- Donald J. Trump on the cure for Covid-19.

Volume 12 Number 565

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Image by Martella

Life moves, shifts, and surprises us, often when we least expect it. Health changes. People lose their jobs or change jobs, get married, become ill, move to a different community, and loose a loved one. The one thing that separates people who manage well through all of this from those who struggle is adaptability. It is not the most glamorous skill. Change is inevitable, we face it continuously as our life evolves. Managing change or adaptability is one of the most important things we do, if not the most important.

What Adaptability Really Means

Adaptability is not about being easy-going or unbothered. It means being able to absorb a new reality and find a way to move forward within it.

Think of it as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. People who have navigated difficult changes in the past are often better equipped to handle new ones because they become more capable. Change and adaptability go hand in hand. Change is the event. Adaptability is the response. And across a life, change is constant.

Two Very Different Kinds of Change

Not all change arrives the same way. Some of it hits suddenly and hard. Some of it creeps in so slowly that you barely notice until you are already in the middle of it. Both demand adaptability but in different ways.

Sudden change is a shock to the system. You did not plan for it. You did not see it coming. Job loss, a health diagnosis, the end of a relationship, these land like a punch. The stress is immediate and intense. Your nervous system treats it as a threat. You may feel panic, grief, or a kind of paralysis. In these moments, adaptability means finding your footing fast enough to avoid decisions made in pure fear and desperation.

Gradual change is quieter but can be just as disorienting. Aging is the clearest example. It does not announce itself one morning. It happens in slow motion, energy levels that shift, a body that works a little differently, roles that evolve as children grow or careers wind down. This kind of change requires a different sort of adaptability. It asks you to notice what is changing, accept it without denial, and adjust your life and expectations accordingly.

The danger with gradual change is that we often resist it long past the point where resistance is useful. We keep trying to live the way we used to. Adaptability here means letting go of an old version of yourself gracefully.

Why Change Creates Stress

Change is stressful because it threatens our sense of stability. Human beings are wired for predictability. We build mental models of how the world works, what our day looks like, what our identity is, who we are to the people around us. Change breaks those models.

When something shifts significantly, we have to rebuild. That takes energy, attention, and emotional labor. It also tends to trigger a sense of loss — even when the change is ultimately positive. Starting a new job you wanted still means letting go of the old one. Moving to a better neighborhood still involves leaving your community behind.

Stress also comes from uncertainty. We can handle difficulty better when we know what is coming. Change, particularly sudden change, removes that certainty. The brain fills the gap with worry.

Two Kinds of Change And How to Transition .

Sudden Change

Sudden change hits without warning. The first response is usually shock, fear, or grief. Your instinct is to try to quickly get past what has happened or shut down completely. Both are traps.

• Don’t panic.

• Let yourself feel the emotions.

• Try to accept the reality of what happened

• Consider seeking professional aid.

• Try and get on with your everyday life and make big decisions slowly

• Think about your options and explore them carefully

• Don’t make big decisions quickly

• Focus on the next step only, not the whole road ahead

Gradual Change

Gradual change creeps in. There is no single moment that triggers it, which makes it easy to ignore. Many people keep living as if things are still the way they were.

What helps:

• Recognizing what is happening and naming what is shifting, even if only to yourself

• Let go of who you used to be without treating it as a loss

• Talk to people a step ahead of you in the same transition

• Plan different steps to adapt. For example: begin to exercise, volunteer at a hospital, join a theater group, search out activities that you used to do and modify them to your current state, reach out to new people. Be proactive and try different activities and keep the ones you like and discard the others.

• Restore basic routines, sleep, food, movement they steady you

• Lean on someone you trust and talk it through.

• Focus on the next step only, not the whole road ahead

Habit of Adaptability

The good news is that adaptability is not a fixed trait. You can build it. People who adapt well tend to share a few habits. They stay curious rather than rigid. They maintain relationships across different parts of their life. They are willing to ask for help. They have a habit of reflection, not dwelling, but processing. And they hold a realistic but fundamentally hopeful view of the future.

The Bottom Line

A successful life is not one without disruption. Adaptability will give you something better, the ability to move through them without losing yourself. Change will keep coming. It always does. The question is how quickly you can find your footing when it arrives. That capacity, to bend without breaking, to pivot without giving up, is what makes a life not just survivable, but genuinely full.

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.”

--Charles Darwin

Volume 12 Number 564

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Image by Martella

The Backdrop

The Western Conference Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs were must-watch television this spring. When the series shifted to San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center, the Spurs organization did something visually spectacular for the home crowd and worldwide TV. The team distributed on each seat teal, pink, and orange tops, by alternating sections. The result was a color blocked mosaic of fans that matched the court design and the team’s City Edition uniforms.

New York tells a different story. As reported on May 17, 2026, in The New York Times, when the Knicks hand out free t-shirts at Madison Square Garden during playoff games, those shirts tend to go home as souvenirs rather than onto backs at the game. The reason is simple: most Knicks game attendees as devoted fans walked in already wearing orange and blue team attire. To their way of thinking a free promotional shirt is a souvenir, not an outfit. In New York, game-day attire is a statement.

A Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry

The global licensed sports merchandise market was valued at approximately $36 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $60 billion by the early 2030s. It is growing at roughly five percent annually. Hidden away are online retail sales, which account for over half of the take, 57.6 percent of all sales. E-commerce channels are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 8.2 percent through 2033, outpacing the overall market.

In North America alone, the figure stood at around $19 billion. Jerseys are the single biggest driver, accounting for more than a third of apparel sales. Now the category now stretches across hats, hoodies, sneakers, collectibles, trading cards, and luxury streetwear.

Nike remains the dominant force, with a brand value approaching $50 billion. The company signed a 12-year extension of its NBA outfitting partnership in late 2024. Fanatics has emerged as the leading digital merchandise platform, operating official stores for the NFL, NBA, and MLB, and recently acquiring Mitchell & Ness to capture the lucrative throwback jersey market. New Era controls fitted caps. And Kith, the New York luxury streetwear brand, has become one of the most coveted collaborators in the sports apparel world.

The House That Michael Built

The story of how sports apparel became a cultural force begins in 1984, when a rookie from North Carolina signed an endorsement deal with Nike. Air Jordan launched in 1985 and generated more than $100 million in its first year. Jordan Brand generated $7 billion in revenue in Nike’s most recent fiscal year. Jordan himself earned an estimated $300 million from the brand in 2024 alone, pushing his lifetime endorsement earnings past $3 billion.

What Jordan demonstrated is that sports apparel is not really about the game. It is about identity, aspiration, and belonging. Wearing a jersey or a signature sneaker is a declaration of who you are and which tribe you claim. That emotional charge is what makes fans willing to pay prices that would have astonished a previous generation.

Shopping at the Garden

On any Knicks game night, Madison Square Garden operates what amounts to a supermarket-sized retail destination in an arena store location. The official MSG Team Store stocks everything from basic tees to items that rival boutique fashion prices. Authentic Nike on-court jerseys run $250 to $350. Kith for Knicks collaboration hoodies and track jackets range from $150 for basics to over $400 for outerwear. Mitchell & Ness throwback jerseys of Ewing, Walt Frazier, and Bernard King sit in the $150–$250 range. Premium Knicks-branded varsity bomber jackets and leather stadium coats can reach $500 to $700, positioned as genuine fashion purchases. And autographed memorabilia — signed jerseys, framed photos, authenticated basketballs, climbs into the thousands.

And then overnight, it is all comparable New York Ranger ice hockey team merchandise if they are playing the next night. More subdued versions of this are going on at baseball, football, hockey rinks, and all over the world at soccer fields.

Plus there is an enormous amount of buying on the internet, where you can buy paraphernalia from all over the world.

The Payout

The NBA pools its licensing revenue and distributes it equally among all 30 franchises, a structure designed to balance large-market teams like the Knicks against small-market clubs. Individual players share in licensing income through the NBA Players Association. Top jersey sellers earn several million dollars annually in royalties on top of personal endorsement contracts.

Stephen Curry’s endorsement earnings are estimated at $100 million per year. LeBron James’ projected total earnings for 2025-26 exceed $137 million. Jersey patch sponsorships, introduced in 2017, have added a quarter-billion dollars in new annual league revenue. NBA team sponsorship reach $1.62 billion in 2024-25, up eight percent in a single year.

Cities Where the Wardrobe Is Big

New York is the supreme example of a city where sports attire is woven into daily urban identity, but it is far from alone. Chicago Bulls fans lead the entire NBA in per-fan merchandise spending, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman jerseys still rank among the best-selling items at national retailers more than 25 years after the last title. Bulls gear is worn as streetwear in Tokyo and Paris. Los Angeles has two franchises and a celebrity culture. Boston wears Celtics green with the particular confidence of 18 championships. Miami’s “White Hot” playoff tradition, in which the entire arena dresses in white, is one of the most visually dramatic home-court advantages in sport. And Oklahoma Ciy the Thunder’s tradition of placing a custom-designed free shirt on every seat for every home playoff game has become one of the most copied traditions in the league.

Spike Lee and Celebrity Row

No individual has elevated the courtside wardrobe into an artistic statement quite like Spike Lee. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has been a Knicks season-ticket holder for decades and appears courtside in curated, coordinated ensembles that are photographed, analyzed, and imitated. At the 2025 Met Gala, Lee wore a custom orange Knicks hat, Air Jordan 3s, orange Louis Vuitton sunglasses, and a Rimowa crossbody bag. He was lightly roasted for attending fashion’s biggest night instead of Game 1 of the Knicks’ playoff series.

The Team as Identity

And basketball isn’t the leader. Soccer dominates globally, accounting for 40 percent of worldwide licensed merchandise; Real Madrid sold over three million jerseys in 2025 alone, while Messi’s World Cup shirts sold at Sotheby’s for $7.8 million. The NFL leads all American sports in merchandise, generating $7.6 billion in 2024-25, with the Super Bowl acting as an annual sales explosion and the signed helmet as the sport’s signature collectible. Baseball lives and dies by the cap, the New Era 59FIFTY fitted is worn in 125 countries. Hockey fans prize the game-used stick, and Formula One’s race-worn gear has exploded into a booming collectible market.

What ties all of this together is the fundamental human desire to declare belonging. Sports paraphernalia is, at its core, a language. It tells the person next to you exactly who you are and what you care about. That signifies fans of a city that takes its team, and its wardrobe, very seriously.

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“When fans declare and support their teams, this is a psychological phenomenon called ‘Basking in Reflected Glory”.

--The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology