Remember Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

We are an experiment in nationhood founded on a belief system only for a short quarter millennium. Our lot has been constant civilizational acceleration, far beyond that seen in history. Thus, Lord Byron’s statement may pertain: “A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust.” That dust is rising.

Regardless of how a nightmarish Radical Right might suddenly destroy our republic, let’s focus on those of the Radical Left who openly lobby for the deconstruction of the American republic in favor of some ill-defined democracy. The Democrat Socialists are the flavor of this era, as were the Stalinist Communists in the 1920s through 1940’s. The DSA has mobilized a large strident active constituency amongst the uselessly educated highly indebted relatively impoverished Youth, the middle-aged relatively well-off White Guilt and a small collection of hypocritical wealthy. They are recruiting (with variable success) numerous intersectional victims identified as performative virtue assets. Many of the latter are voting citizens; many are not. That may become a distinction without a difference, as I note below.

To tear down our system, one must first be elected into it. This can happen via stealth, as seen with the governor of Virginia, the mayors of Seattle and Portland, Oregon, foreign-born Congresswomen, and with our recent President Biden. But now some “revolutionaries” are openly advocating ending all our governmental instruments of societal support (prisons, police, Senate, ICE, national borders, enforcement of private property rights, the Electoral College, Supreme Court, etc.) in favor of controlled communality of all assets. Imam Mamdani of NYC is a leading example; Graham Platner was another but has now been replaced in the most undemocratic fashion by his alter ego, Troy Jackson. As noted before, the primary attraction of all the DSA and very Left Democrats is assurance of lifelong adolescence under the care of the gentle Nanny State. This will require shifting resources from the military, the police, border enforcement, prisons, etc. to social programs. Precisely what Europe has done while depending on Daddy America for its ongoing existence. "Nationalization” of industry and confiscation of property and wealth will be needed. Under current interventional capitalism we are part way there already. Surely the majority of mature self-sufficient voters can prevent this takeover at the polls?

With all our modernity, an ancient form of government is rising from its tomb. The Framers of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution looked to the ancient Greek city-states for part of the model of their new ideas of democracy. Various aspects were copied. We have a Senate, and the right to vote for that representative body resided initially in male landowners. But the Founders modified many of the unintended consequences that history had revealed.

Three branches of government, two of them elected, were designed to check and balance each other’s powers, based solely in the written supreme law of the land. An unelected judiciary had to be proposed by the executive and approved by the legislative. But given that our new nation was a broad geographic collection of states rather than the discreet competitive city-states of the ancient world, some check and balance had to be made amongst the larger and smaller states.

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The Constitution contains two great and at least one disastrous but necessary compromise.

First amongst these was defining the House as popularly elected and the Senate as elected by state legislatures. That latter method was an attempt to assure half of the bicameral answered to the individual state’s interests and help equalize the small versus larger states. The other was subject to the whims of the voters. This cornerstone of federalism, defined limited powers vested in the federal government with all other powers retained by the states, was removed in 1913 by the 17th Amendment. Senators could now ignore the majority interests of their state government in favor of the popular vote. The two often do not coincide. Popular vote “popularity” feeds visions of even higher office. An old maxim says, “there are 100 Presidents-in-waiting”.

Second was the Electoral College. The Electors are the number of Senators and House Representatives from each state. Since 1941 Electors have been assigned to states growing or shrinking in population by the “Huntington-Hill” method of equal proportions. This complex mathematical formula replaced the methods of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Webster and gives slightly more weight to smaller states. It reduced the ability of Congress to manipulate the Electoral College for political advantage. Article II Section 1 of the Constitution says that each state will appoint its Electors in the manner directed by that state’s legislature. This again conferred power to the states beyond that of the voters. Part of this can be understood by the distributed nature of the populace and its difficulties in transport for elections of any type. Until after the 1820s, turnout for elections averaged 22%. Amendment XII changed how the President and Vice President were voted for by Electors, but not the underlying method of choosing those Electors. The opportunities for ignoring the voters’ immediate preferences, or even engaging in malfeasance, are readily seen.

Tying the voters’ will to the actual actions of the Electors was eventually arranged. Currently, in 48 states and the District of Columbia (with 3 Electors granted in 1961 by the 23rd Amendment), the presidential candidate who wins a plurality, under that state’s rules, of the popular vote receives all of that state’s Electoral votes. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, use a congressional district method. Two votes (representing the Senators) go to the winner of the popular vote. One electoral vote goes to the winner of the popular vote in each of their Congressional districts. Thus, these two states can “split” their Electoral College votes as a small part of the 538 total Electors.

In the” winner take all” states, the Electors are bound to vote for the popular vote candidate. But the discordance of the actual population in each state versus its Electoral College delegation is what can cause a candidate to win the overall national popular vote but lose the election in the Electoral College. Again, a foreseeable and deliberate attempt to balance the interests of small states versus large states.

What the Framers did not foresee was the nation’s urbanization. Jeffersonian ideas of a representative democracy rested on voting by male landowners who were almost entirely agrarian. This model of the population remained largely true until the late 1800’s with the flowering of the Industrial Revolution. That change was accompanied by general suffrage for all adult men, and the attempt at suffrage for adult male Afro-Americans. Now, according to recent estimates, only 14% of the voting population of all citizen adults is rural. The balance is urban/suburban. This results in a concentration of elected representation in metropolitan areas. Large cities such as New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and many others are cohesive with their immediate surroundings, forming more independently minded political entities. Their ever-growing concentration of not only voters but population (which will become apparent below) allows them to dominate state offices through state-wide elections largely decided by the metropolitan vote. They are becoming City-States, dominating political thought and actions statewide and nationally. New York City and Chicago are the two most obvious examples.

Because of that, the outlook for the Destroyers of the Substance of America may be brighter than we want to admit.

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Hard figures for party registration are difficult to collate, as many states don’t record party in voter registration. Using Census definitions and data as well as what state data is available, non-urban areas are substantially more Republican and less Democrat than the national average. In counties of the Great Plains, Mountain West, and parts of the South, rural areas may be 50-70% Republican. But the action is in the City-States. Roughly 55-60% of all registered voters are in metropolitan areas. An additional 25-30% are in “urban adjacent” areas, with only 15-20% of voters in rural areas. How do they vote?

Using admittedly soft figures from Pew Research, Ballotpedia, USAFacts, and the Independent Voter Project, the City-States are overwhelmingly Democrat. Major metropolitan areas may have 50-70% Democrat registration and only 10-25% Republican registration. This only partially flips in non-urban areas with 42-48% Republicans by these sources and 22-28% Democrats. Interestingly, in both urban and non-urban areas, “independents” are a solid 15-30%. They may be the real swing voters. Looking statewide, the above authorities estimate 38% Democrats, 30% Republicans, and 28% independents. But that statewide average is clearly overcome by the City-States such as NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and Jacksonville.

“These differences in both population share and partisan tilt are central to understanding the U. S. urban-rural divide and why national popular-vote patterns can look very different from state-level and Electoral College outcomes.” (Perplexity AI search engine summary).

Of those two great Constitutional compromises favoring smaller states, one has been undone by the 16th Amendment with popular vote for the Senate. The other, the Electoral College, may be disabled by a variation of that disastrous but necessary compromise.

That compromise is Article I Section 2. Herein representation was defined by the population “…determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” The South insisted on gaining advantage against the denser and more urbanized central and northern states by counting 3/5 of each slave as a person for the sake of representation in the House. Indentured servants were included, but Indians, considered members of their own “nations”, were not. This terrible affirmation of the institution of slavery and diminishment of each slave Person as being only 3/5 of a real Person was on face disastrous. But without it, we might at best have two separate nations seventy-three years prior to the actual attempt to cleave us twain. Southern states, already used to relatively independent state powers under the Articles of Confederation, were adamant that there would be no United States unless their main industry continued. The Framers chose the general Welfare of the States over that of almost one fifth of its population.

Interestingly, the correction of the Constitution by the XIV Amendment contains an important subtext. In Section 2, the population counted again excludes “Indians not taxed”, includes the “whole number of persons in each State”, but note a penalty for any State that denies the right to vote to any of its entitled members. “But when the right to vote at any election…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged…the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-on years of age in such State.” I am not aware that any such penalty was invoked upon the Southern states during the Democrat Jim Crow era.

What does any of this have to do with the growing electoral authority of the City-States? Just as the South, in the founding era, gained advantage by counting indentured servants and at least 3/5ths of their slave population, so the City-States rapidly gain more advantage from unchecked immigration. Representation in the House, that body creating taxation and spending, is determined by resident population every ten years in the Census. This includes all legal and illegal residents, those foreigners residing in the U.S. under visas or other such arrangements, and those of our citizens residing abroad in service to the nation. Somewhere north of 10-20 million or more “undocumented” persons now reside in the United States, and the prior administration clearly intended not to control or prevent their continued entry. Many hard Left Democrat candidates, and all DSAers strongly endorse opening the border again, if not essentially eliminating it. The vast majority of these undocumented residents will end up in the City-States, both increasing their States’ national representation and empowering them locally. That latter feature is why some of these City-States are attempting to allow all residents regardless of legal status or citizenship to vote in local elections. That would be one factor binding immigrants to the City-States.

The other is growing government entitlements. According to themainwire, 61% of illegal-immigrant-headed households used one or more major welfare programs in 2024. By Pew Research’s estimates, 70-75% of “unauthorized” immigrants are employed or looking for work. Generally, with no benefits paid, no taxes withheld, and no options to complain about their employer. This is the new class of indentured servants, bound irrevocably to the Democrat party and big government. With their relative “invisibility”, they are almost a new enslaved populace. Given any future success of the City-States in causing amnesty to be granted, eventually we may see a repeat of the urban legend about LBJ signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act--” I’ll have those (illegals) voting Democrat for 200 years.”

When this new Long March is over in ten to twenty years and the City-States effectively rule, even those desperate for dependency may discover what Gerald Ford said; “…a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything you have.”

Article IV Section 4 of our Constitution states; “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”.

The Independents may be the key to our continuing independence.

(Data was obtained via the Perplexity AI search engine. AI did not write or edit this essay)

In so doing they did not give up their views of the perceived failures and unjustified restrictions of traditional life which had seemingly been perfected in white America after WW II. Instead, this generation of politically and socially persistent adolescents infiltrated many of the foundational structures of our society. They achieved success in entertainment, in business, in politics, and especially in education. Traditional America, while irritated, was largely willing to live and let live. As the Supreme Court wrote in 1972’s Wisconsin vs. Yoder, “A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different”. (remember the specific language and meaning of that sentence).

Meanwhile, reasonably criticized wars came and went. Continued efforts to even the playing field for all participants in the American Dream began to tilt the field past horizontal to “right the wrongs of the past”. President Obama, for all his rhetorical gravitas and grandeur, chose not to be our President who happened to be black, but to embrace being our first black President.

Yes, there are truly many downtrodden in our society, often through no fault of their own nor of anyone else. These had been helped, temporarily with expectant compassion, by private local groups in a highly decentralized fashion that would have suited Thomas Jefferson’s ideals. However, with governmental socialization of aide to those who had been historically disadvantaged, our undercover adolescents saw opportunity to expand their influence, authority, and power. Billions could be sought as reparations for black America, and possible stealth discrimination prevented by racial preferences turning racism on its head. But the model provided so much oppositional emotional reward that more victims of traditional culture were needed to satisfy the hunger of performative virtue. Oppressed identities based solely on race were insufficient in numbers.

The opportunity for these moles of modernity, so long disguised by seeming to fulfill society’s parental expectations, came suddenly. Two events coincided to disrupt and destroy all traditional social rules. The Covid “pandemic” became Progressivism’s opportunity to demonstrate the absolute need for and superiority of governmental technocratic credentialism at the readily accepted suppression of individual rights. A return to Wilson’s and FDR’s model of rule.

History rhymed by placing another Wilsonian at the helm, President Biden. We know Wilson was dedicated to an anti-American world view first noted in his 1880’s dissertation. He was unable to carry it to the end personally and instead depended on his spouse, Edith, to “rule” for him for the last months of his Presidency after his stroke. As a bizarre reflection of that earlier revolution in American government, Biden, probably every much a racist as Wilson, advanced Progressivism with an energy reminiscent of FDR. Or as another distorted reflection, perhaps Obama staff holdovers, the autopen, and towards the end, certainly Jill Biden, did the work for him. Just as with Wilson’s last months, we can never know.

The destruction of social norms by the government through its Covid response was accompanied by a complete opening of our nation’s borders (how’s that for infection control?). Here was an adolescents’ ultimate dream—invite everyone and anyone to the parental home to use everything there at their pleasure, with no responsibility for the results. And stop anyone who objects.

In Risky Business, Tom Cruise was rescued by capitalistic prostitutes. No such rescue was available for flooding the country with often un-self-supporting aliens (the irresponsible teens of the movie) and occasional criminals and incompetents. With the recognition and emergence of those numerous newly discovered oppressed identities (defined by DEI and CRT), a cornucopia of performative virtue assets appeared. Those in positions of authority and power awakened the many who had never really advanced emotionally beyond their late 1960’s-1970’s teen tribulations. Note that a high percentage of the most ardent protesters and agitators are middle to late middle age. Note their offspring and grandspring, mostly educated by those academic technocratic credentialists from a generation ago. Many of those higher education Dons never got their time in the sun of the TV cameras. Thanks to the social media revolution, they have extended their propagandistic reconstruction, even into lower education. They created a true social epidemic of gender confusion and unschooled activism on behalf of issues that even they do not fully understand. Funded, of course, by the uber-wealthy and the kickback mechanism of government funded NGOs. Daddy and Mommy to the rescue again.

“All should be free to behave as they wish, and all must actively affirm their right to do so (forget Wisconsin vs. Yoder). All have a right to enter our country and be supported with all basic necessities. All residents should be able to become voters. And (perhaps), to repeat the urban legend about Lyndon Johnson after the enactment of Civil Rights and Welfare laws, that they will vote Democrat forever—-”

And thus, to current candidates. Democrats are running candidates to spite mainstream America. Any candidate’s activity, action, or saying that violates prior normative behavior seems to be a positive asset. Any and all potential disqualifying attributes are overlooked. Those who won’t “not see” are castigated as racists and oppressors in terms usually reserved for the Left’s aggressive suicidal empathies. These are precisely the repeats of adolescent irresponsibility and rebelliousness on a social scale, seeking to be governmental in scale.

Kamala Harris firmly believes she did not succeed because of her dual victimization. She did not lose because she is a woman of color. She lost to a candidate who had had virtually all legal and illegal obstacles placed in his way by the Progressive state. She lost because she said that she would continue all Biden’s policies (a late term train wreck not dissimilar to Jimmy Carter’s presidency). She could not put together a cohesive statement. Her cognitive abilities seem dyslexic. She did spout the perfect adolescent creed of societal rebellion and reinvention: “I can see what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez displays her beliefs in socialism. Deriding the rich, she shows up at the Met Gala, one of the glitterati’s most expensive and exclusive events, in a very expensive custom gown, complete with graffiti. Cosplaying with Imam Mamdani in NYC, she wears a hijab while speaking to a crowd of Muslim men. They, if devout, absolutely would forbid her to appear and speak in public without a family male guardian. She virtue signals her support of the most misogynistic religion on earth while her mentor, Imam Mamdani, idles behind her in an Emirati soccer jersey (the UAE is known for its socialism). Despite crucial support of the Jewish Democrat community, she sympathizes with the oppressed Gazans and their helpful overlords, Hamas. She routinely decries Zionism, the belief that Jews should have somewhere on earth to exist without fear of being eradicated as called for in the Quran. Not unlike the teen woman who, in violation of her parents’ feelings and beliefs, cuts off her hair, becomes publicly bisexually active, and joins a violent activist group that seeks to destroy her father’s livelihood, all while expecting to be supported at home. Although to be fair, AOC was a bartender.

Ilhan Omar flees Somalia (and possible retribution for her war criminal father), is welcomed in America, receives numerous advantages based on her immigrant status, and spitefully throws being an American back in the face of the country that welcomed her. Yet as a Congresswoman she swore to uphold the Constitution and federal law. Not apparently, when those laws apply to her ethnic minority. Anyone who seeks to discipline the actions of individual lawbreakers who happen to belong to the same ethnic group, really seeks to demean and destroy the whole group with racism. This oppression is so severe and widespread that America is much worse than her homeland, Somalia. Yet she will not return there. Just as an adolescent might vilify his home and family but never leave the basement to establish an independent lifestyle.

Graham Platner, the warrior oyster farmer, is perhaps an extreme example. Having failed at fulfilling a privileged lifestyle by not making it through private schooling, he did redeem himself with active combat service over several tours. But when he publicly criticizes fellow soldiers for their actions, he demeans that personal sacrifice. I have known many combat veterans. Not one would ever speak ill of another combat veteran outside the brotherhood of arms. Perhaps he did not know at the time that his chest tattoo was an SS insignia. But he was in Croatia, not a hotbed of anti-Nazism during WW II. I am not aware of any of his Marine buddies who all got the same tattoo as a “group bonding” effort having affirmed his story. Perhaps he is merely displaying his lack of education when he says he never became aware of the meaning of the symbol until recently. Perhaps he got that particular tattoo in spite of the honorable heritage of the U.S. Marine Corps. His alleged history of mistreatment of women including rape, if true, may be a residual of that combat service and/or alcoholic blackouts. PTSD cannot excuse his antisocial behavior. Either several women are lying or he is. Rebellious adolescents refuse to accept responsibility for their actions. He does accept responsibility for virtual illicit sexual behavior while married, but only after his wife revealed it. He defers talking about his coinciding history of other sexually tainted social media—” that was then, this is now”. Somehow, in his incompletely formed intellect, he has managed to combine National Socialism with Democrat Socialism. While he does not still live in his parents’ basement, his mother’s restaurant is the only customer for his business. His father bought Graham’s home. The Oyster farm came to him through his parents’ friendships. He lives off $4800.00 monthly in full disability payments. For combat PTSD. Yet is fit for full-time duty as a U. S. Congressman. How has he maintained such an incompletely matured personality despite his life experiences?

FLASH NOTICE: THE ADULTS IN THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FINALLY NOTICED WHAT PLATNER HAS BEEN UP TO. HE IS BEING PRESSURED TO END HIS CAMPAIGN. WHO WILL BE THEIR NEXT NAZI COMMUNIST?

Next is Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic Socialist candidate for Congress in New York. She has never been gainfully employed, taking six years to earn a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University’s school of antisemitism and is in her seventh year seeking a PhD. in sociology at CUNY. She is now focusing on those oppressed not by Zionists but as Black immigrants from Latin America (two intersectional identities, more efficient) by white colonial racists here in America. To be fair, she has participated in the classic American Dream of self-support. She receives a graduate student stipend, worked in legal-aid and public defender offices, taught sociology at several New York higher education institutions, and as an advocate in an NGO supporting immigrants facing deportation. None of these occupations, as she has stated, allows her to support herself independently, at least in New York State. None of those areas seemed to provide a ladder she could scale to become completely self-sufficient. So, becoming a congresswoman with its automatic salary, benefits, perks, and potential future transition to highly paid work in media or in private industry is just the ticket. Naturally, being a perfect example of Wilsonian educational elitism jumping into government, she intends to use her expertise ruling the uninformed incapable mob who can’t be trusted to run their republic. She is ready to eliminate border controls, eliminate the police, end incarceration of violent criminals and certainly end deportation of same. She would abandon Israel so the Palestinians, with U.S. support, can eliminate Jews and rule “from the river to the sea”. Just like a rebellious inexperienced incapable adolescent, she finds that those in disagreement are obviously completely wrong and are existential threats to democracy.

None of these folks seem to understand the tyranny of the majority that can occur with democracies, and the deliberate prevention of same designed into our republic by our Constitution.

Finally (for now, as filing for office is still open) we have Colorado’s entry for riskiest business, Melat Kiros. She is a Democratic Socialist, an attorney by training (but fired from her one job as a lawyer). Although trained in law at Notre Dame, she now is working as a barista in rhythm with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the bartender. Apparently, any stipend as a PhD. student in public policy at University of Colorado is less important than her lucrative work as a barista. She emphasizes that job as her major support for living, her educational fees, and her educational loans (Trump’s no tax on tips may be helping). The cancellation of Biden’s unconstitutional student loan forgiveness program was possibly one shock that led her, like Chevalier, to seek the stability and upward mobility of Congress. Nonetheless, she is a bonafide working class person and a bonafide naturalized citizen immigrant. But failed at her professional calling. What changes she could not accomplish through the courts she will now seek to establish via Congress. That includes single-payer healthcare. As in the United Kingdom, no individual will be bankrupted by medical costs, just the country. Likewise, she is for single-payer housing, with the Federal government establishing rent controls nationwide. Never mind Amendment V of the Constitution. The Federal government will take private property for public use (Imam Mamdani’s method) and decide what “just compensation” should be paid. The unintended consequences of Federal rent control for all properties in the entire nation would take a giant book of new regulations to control. And a massive new jobs program for the required bureaucracy.

But since the intent is virtuous, those actions will be necessary without consideration of justice for irresponsible, greedy landlords. The same is true of her policies for universal governmental childcare and eldercare. As Hillary said, “it takes a village” to indoctrinate the young regardless of the belief systems of their individual parents. That same village (again, the government) can decide on the cost-benefit ratio of keeping the elderly alive.

Kiros would also “eliminate money from politics”, or rather anything other than individual personal financial support of candidates. Here she is on to something, although at the expense of the established free-speech rights of corporations and a sizable seasonable source of income to all media. Finally, like all her cohort, she favors taxing the rich, having them pay “their fair share”.

None of the Left’s members, candidates or not, will state what that fair share is. Many, being millionaires, displace the definition of “the rich” to billionaires. None will explore or explain what would happen to the economy if the millionaire/billionaire class were taxed at very high rates, or even, in violation of the 13th Amendment, on their total wealth. That would require large sales of stocks, bonds, properties, etc. that would instantly devalue those assets in the public market. This would rapidly devastate the retirement funds of private citizens and public employee/union pension funds. Perhaps this could be solved with an accompanying universal national income? Yes, there is favoritism in our tax code for the wealthy but modifying and/or eliminating those loopholes would require actually learning about them, and the economic consequences of changing them. No need amongst these candidates to consider or learn about those details. Mom and Dad (the government) will take care of that.

Socialism is the ideology of permanent assured adolescence. We of the older generations, having built that abundance, felt compelled to relieve our offspring of that onerous effort. “A lot of young people really did walk into an American adulthood that feels uglier, more expensive, more artificial, and more rigged than the one they were promised.” Until we return to some version of an informal “initiation” into adulthood, they will feel free to be “rebellious without risking anything”. “Someone else’s ability will pay for [their] needs”. But “the best cure for socialist fantasy is…a life than can actually begin”.

Deconstructing interventionalist Capitalism, as our current administration seems to be doing, is a small start.

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The political elite in the U.S. were “built” to be estranged from their native populations. Wilsonian technobureaucracy, the birth of American Progressivism, was, in Wilson’s mind, initially fashioned after the British Parliamentary system of immediately dischargeable ministers and prime ministers for unsatisfactory performance in his 1880’s doctoral thesis. However, by the time Woodrow Wilson came to head of one of our elitist universities, he favored the Prussian system developed by Bismarck as his ideal. Elite experts were to fill our technobureaucracy without regard to needless popular support. This further evolved during the crisis of the Great Depression with FDR’s expansion of administrative control via the New Deal. Did this “cancerous growth of state bureaucratic systems” arise simultaneously in “global political classes” or was it a metastasis from the U.S.? The “accumulation of prosperity” mentioned actually may have been a result of WW II--The U.S. was the only remaining productive Western economy for a time, then resuscitated Europe and Japan with aid programs, and finally enabled Europe and Japan to divert self-defense spending to social experiments with the coverage of a nuclear umbrella and NATO.

writes “we are governed by stupid and parochial elites who don’t understand what is happening to them and why” is expected under an elitist political class that has been deliberately disconnected from any version of republican representation (that’s not a party reference, as none of us live in a “democracy”). The “rabble” managed with “obnoxious political slop” (e.g. the Covid psyops) are here Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, Obama’s gun-toting Bible-thumping backwoods bumpkins, the descendants of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority. These are Eugyppius’ “residual elements” in Europe.

Other arguments favor an Austrian economic view of politics. Just as government minions cannot possibly plan an economy because they cannot be aware of the constantly shifting value of goods in a diffused individual-based market, so political oligarchs cannot understand the “extremely eclectic” political market of their population. Openly elected (not nepo-managed) representative republics can FOLLOW the changing needs of the political marketplace, but as Eugyppius explains in detail that is not what we have allowed to evolve from the democratic republics of the West.

This Hayekian idea about political “economics” would seem to favor multi-party systems in Parliamentary government structures, where the least bad solution to the citizens’ wants, needs, and desires is a coalition of parties (NOT what Wilson or FDR wanted). Here in America, we may be seeing a variation on this theme. George Washington had severely warned the nascent U.S. against political parties just as our two-party system was forming. We have largely maintained a two party system ever since, with those few Independents caucusing with the major party most closely aligned. Other minor party interests have been mostly successfully subsumed by either the Democrat or Republican party.

Now that is changing, perhaps rhyming with what is happening in Europe. MAGA Republicans are sidelining, for the moment, RINOs (Republicans in name only). Socialists have finally found cover as Democrat Socialists. Both are successfully working within the major party structures; one or both may split off from its parent or be reabsorbed when found wanting by the voters. Elections result in absorption or expulsion by the underlying political elite--the status quo will survive political war like cockroaches survive nuclear war. That will be the result of what calls “reverse selection”.

An additional split has developed in the populist MAGA movement. “The best of them have defected from the establishment for reasons of personal conviction”, examples being Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. More defections will appear with Trump’s confusing combat vs conciliation in Iran.

The Democrat party maintains an uneasy acquiescence with its new communistic Democrat Socialist branch, since they know it may serve their long-term interests in creating permanent new constituencies amongst the residual radical Boomer class (“Karens”) and their educational offspring (Antifa et al) as well as, more importantly, immigrants both legal and illegal. Voting for non-citizens regardless of “documentation” is already permitted in some local elections in various blue cities. This method of recruitment is modeled after Lyndon Johnson’s efforts with welfare tacked onto the Civil Rights laws in order to assure “ ‘blacks’ would vote Democrat forever”.

As I have written elsewhere, the Democrat Socialist movement object is seeking to legislate permanent adolescence for populists so inclined.

While is correct that in Europe and the U.S. “Media attacks on populist movements are unjust, exaggerated and malicious”, it is notable that the populist fraction of the Democrat party seems immune to such. Precisely because our mainstream media has, much like Europe’s, totally succumbed to leftist political philosophy from the infiltration and subversion by the radical 1960’s Boomers and their educational offspring.

Stealing again from ,“On {all legacy media} {Trump and MAGA} is derided as a fascist party bent on destroying...{democracy}”. MAGA echoes the Democrat methods with its own critics as Eugyppius says--”...internal critics are subject to purity tests and ostracized even when they are correct and the party or its leaders have been guilty of serious missteps.”

The Democrat party in America has so far successfully enclosed the Democrat Socialists because of that subgroup’s undying loyalty to the only policy they both seem share--Anti-Trumpism. The other policies of the DSA involving acquisition and redistribution of capital and the means of production can be absorbed and digested into, Democrats hope, a more palatable form of their intended Nanny State. This is a disadvantage to the MAGA movement as MAGA is “... locked into their brands and figureheads. ...this means they have a real expiration date (2028)”.

“Establishment parties opportunistically vary their image by foregrounding specific political personalities”. The Republicans do have a capable bench including among others J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Ron DeSantis. The Democrats seem to have a problem, though, in that all their “specific political personalities” are from the DSA--Alexandrea Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Imam Mamdani (off limits so far due to foreign origins), Graham Platner and the like. Their main party frontrunners are largely burnt out, such as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Gavin Newsom. Senator Cory Booker, whom I heard speak years ago and immediately thought would be running for President, may have bridged the gap with the DSA with his recent condemnation of America and Israel as “the two worst democracies in the world”. Nonetheless, “Many of these people are certainly idiots and liabilities”. But remember the deux ex machina of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--the Democrats may “pull another rabbit out of the hat and try again.”

I disagree with one of ’ conclusions, that “These movements are hostile to anyone proposing any kind of political strategy”. The MAGA strategy as embodied in Trumpism is deconstruction of government, especially its fourth branch, administrative agency. This has been combined with a searching out of inefficiencies, misuse of government programs and funds, and pervasive fraud involving the adolescent government cookie jar. Real effort has been made to tie together the silos of government agency databases to uncover and resolve these problems. While this also involves “expel(ling) the malefactors, right(ing) abuses, remigration of (nonlegal) migrants, tearing down the wind turbines (and publicly funded solar farms)...”, it does not necessarily mean turning back the clock to 1996 (or even the 1950’s). MAGA is not, as often charged, Regressivism.

It may mean, in the U.S.A., turning back the clock to the original and textual version of our Constitution. That does not mean a return of racism, misogyny, and intolerance of alternate lifestyles, as always charged by the Left. It can mean honoring the intents behind the meanings of the words of the Constitution as written in the late 1700’s, based in Judeo-Christian morality, the political philosophies of Locke, Hume, Smith, and the ancient authorities with whom the Framers were so familiar.

I may be a Pollyanna. My German Substack mentor writes “...(my) thinking betrays among other things an absolutely incurable underestimation of their left-progressive opponents and a corresponding overestimation of (our) own strength.” As he says, “...electoral success...will depend upon their ability to win over outsiders.” Interestingly, in many areas of the country America does have three parties of voters--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. In many political venues registration as Independents is outpacing that of either main party. And in many of these same venues, the distribution is close to even, around a third of the electorate in each party. Even so, “...most of the bureaucracy will remain arrayed against them and the temporarily disempowered oligarchy will merely have to play a waiting game.”

Populism is born of pessimism, the belief that our existing oligarchy cannot and will not answer our wants, needs, and desires, no more than they can effectively plan and manage our economy. “...the populist movements, for all their flaws, nevertheless represent a genuine threat to the establishment...”. Perhaps the most we can hope for, with coincident populism in European and American republics, is to swing the pendulum a bit back towards individualism.

CLACK!

She startled. Drenched in freeing herself, now outside her coffin, she scanned her surroundings. Aching with effort she squirmed, testing each part of her body for pain and ability. Clouds allowed sunlight to bake her resurrection with healing warmth. Arms fully freed, she raised them heavenward shaking away sweat and struggle. Hearing no further threats, she searched for a route to freedom. A glassy dark eye confronted her; its reflections revealing her beauty.

CLACK!

He captured her first colorful flight as she joined the other monarchs of the sky.

He stared through the cabernet, the afternoon’s last flight of tasting. Clouds punctuated the sky, Sunlight carved shadows. A rusted windmill decorated the vineyard. Wind snagged its blades; an inhuman wail screeched out.

Screaming metal cast him back. Clearing the hut’s front, he found a woman lying next to the remains of her AK 47, thrashing, reaching below her waist, feeling desperately for her legs. All she touched were spurting stumps and tangled tendons and muscle. Her wailing cascaded upwards, beyond any other agonies. What he did next became his most memorable agony.

The windmill wailed

The goal of the competition was to tell a story in less than 100 words…..

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Henry Kissinger declassified National Security Council Report 68 in 1975. I have not read enough of the K-man to know why he chose to do so at that time. As a master of Realpolitik, he did not do so lightly. NSC 68 was published secretly in April 1950 at the behest of President Truman and is as crucial to understanding our post-WWII foreign policy as George Kennan’s “long telegram”. NSC 68 in sixty-six pages outlined the need for, and our responsibilities in, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It documents how unprepared the U.S. and western powers were to deal with expansionist Communism and the sobering efforts needed by the West to retain freedom. The point was forcefully made two months later with the start of the Korean War.

NSC 68’s assessment of the West’s status and ability to deal with a violently expansionist Communist ideology, and its evaluations of how to improve those, applies equally today. We are faced with violently evangelical fundamental Islam, a socio-cultural threat no less than the political-economic threat of Communism. The documents’ analysis of our preparations and abilities to deal with this newest international threat to Western culture and freedoms is justly pertinent and worth reviewing. Especially since that threat has arisen coincidentally beginning in 1979 with the erosion of expansionist Communism that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Although NSC 68 referred to the threat of Soviet expansionism and the genuine possibility of war, its underlying policies and ideas are as general as the Monroe Doctrine or any of our other foundational foreign policy standards. About two-thirds of the way through, a crucial failure by our current government is revealed:

“…it is important that the U.S. employ military force only if the necessity for its use is clear and compelling and commends itself to the overwhelming majority of our people. The U.S. cannot…engage in war except as a reaction to aggression of so clear and compelling a nature as to bring the overwhelming majority of our people to accept the use of military force.”

While this was the clear lesson of WW II, it denied our prior policy leading to our entry in WW I by our first Progressive President, Wilson, who had been elected in part on an isolationist policy. We had returned to isolationist policy after the War to End all Wars but were forced from a position of extraordinary unpreparedness to rapidly nationalize our military-industrial complex after Japan’s surprise attack (which itself had been telegraphed by their diplomatic and military actions—but that is a story for another time). NSC 68 clearly states that military action should not be entertained without prior broad civilian consensus. But then goes on to argue that, as before after WW I, not only we but also Western Europe were extraordinarily unprepared and fearsomely vulnerable to real Soviet military action.

Part of this was a lack of conventional weapons. The report notes “…our present situation of relative unpreparedness in conventional weapons…”. Another part was our fear of a rapid buildup in Soviet nuclear capability. The report makes an astonishing conclusion:

“…we should produce and stockpile thermonuclear weapons ...Not enough is yet known of their potentialities to warrant a judgement at this time regarding their use in war to attain our objectives.”

In other words, our national leaders did not understand what the consequences of nuclear war might be, despite our experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but were urged to dash ahead into a nuclear arms race. Which they successfully did, as history taught us over the next forty years.

The lack of preparedness in conventional weapons quickly became real in the Korean “conflict”, wherein we, two months after this document, became embroiled in a war not involving a surprise attack on us, but on South Korea, and not initially popular with the broad spectrum of our public. Our recovery from near abject defeat to the landing at Inchon and its aftermath were astonishing. Our lack of preparedness and understanding of nuclear warfare was fortunate then, for it may have precluded a nuclear attack on China in the latter stages of the Korean conflict heavily lobbied for by Curtis Lemay, Douglas MacArthur, and others. The nuclear buck stopped with the only person who had experience spending it, Harry Truman.

While we may now have a clearer understanding of nuclear warfare (while in the USAF as a medical officer I was instructed on dealing with this, chemical warfare, and biological warfare) “minor powers” that have become nuclear still nuclear weapons as viable tactical devices for more localized wars. These include Pakistan and India, and perhaps Israel.

Iran views nuclear weapons as a necessary adjunct to attain and sustain regional hegemony over the Middle East, and counter Israel’s known nuclear capabilities. As I have detailed in prior essays, they appear to have sought to emulate the Korean model: overwhelming conventional weapons protecting/protected by nuclear weaponry. Part of those conventional weapons include “continental ballistic missiles”, well on the way to becoming ICBMs as in Korea. In evaluating the developing Soviet nuclear threat, NSC 68 noted the ease of delivery of nuclear weapons once enrichment to weapons-grade had been obtained:

“Casings and firing mechanisms are easy to produce, even surreptitiously, and the assembly of weapons does not take much time.”

Mutually Assured Destruction still applies to Iran, in that their surprise nuclear attack would probably be answered by Israel. Iran may have thought that under these circumstances the rest of the Muslim Middle East might be actively supportive in erasing Israel from the face of the earth. A broadly contaminated Israel would be uninhabitable for generations, even if Iran fails to achieve its prime purpose of eliminating the Jewish people. The recent conventional conflict, which eliminated almost all of their protection against standard warfare, revealed the absence of such religio-political solidarity to the point that Iran has attacked and continues to attack its Muslim neighbors as the “third arm” of their own “triad”—twenty percent of the world’s oil supply and food supply (fertilizer). Had they achieved nuclear capability at this point, they may well have initiated nuclear strikes on Israel and/or major oil suppliers. NSC 68 opined that the initial U.S. nuclear advantage was probably adequate to deter the USSR from pre-emptive attack, but the existence of two such capacities (herein Israel and Iran) might be an incitement to war.

What NSC 68 did not foresee was the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Our current engagement, both violent and non-violent, is actively aimed at the economic collapse of the Iranian Islamic fundamentalist regime. We have sawn off two of Iran’s four legs of aggression, conventional offensive/defensive capacity and control of the Strait of Hormuz (when and if our navy resumes armed escorts). The nuclear leg has for an unknown time been neutralized. The source of Iran’s conventional and nuclear legs, as well as their sponsorship of proxies (the dominoes of the Soviet era), their oil-based economy, is being effectively strangled.

Further razing of their economy could follow targeting Iran’s China railroad, the ports on the Caspian Sea (allowing Russian relief), bridges, and finally oil production facilities and power plants. Sound familiar? The prototype was the Allies’ utter destruction of Germany’s productive and transport capacity. German inability to supply its dwindling forces with weapons, food, and other logistics was the ultimate cause of their surrender.

Nuclear devastation, on the other hand, was the cause of Japan’s surrender. As militaristic as Japan had become, they did feel a responsibility for the survival and welfare of their people from ultimate destruction. Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime does not. They do not envision their fellow citizens fighting the invaders with bamboo spears to the last man (or woman). They see their duty to Allah as converting or killing infidels, killing all Jews, and going to paradise by dying in the effort. We in the West do not understand this vision of reality. Thus, we do not comprehend the necessity of eliminating, at least, its capacity for action.

How would we attain this elimination at least of their nuclear capacity? NSC 68 foretold much we have already learned in dealing with Iran since 1979:

“No system of international control could prevent the production and use of atomic weapons in the event of a prolonged war.”

The West has, like a somnambulist, been at war with Iran since 1979. Yet we haven’t learned this lesson from 1950:

:…war could not start with a surprise atomic attack…if existing stocks of fissionable materials were eliminated and the production of fissionable materials effectively controlled…It would be necessary to destroy all plants capable of making large amounts of fissionable materials (which would also require) …a moratorium on those possible peacetime uses.”

Why would such absolute action be required? Why haven't our prior agreements internationally with Iran prevented the current state of affairs?

“In the absence of good faith (which Iran has failed to demonstrate in the least) …no system can be designed which will give certainty of notice of violation…inspection based on continuous unlimited freedom of access to all parts of (Iran) appear to be necessary.”

Why does this require the complete defeat of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism’s ability to express itself internationally with akinetic and kinetic warfare?

“The most substantial contribution to security of an effective international control system would be the opening up (of the affected country, here Iran). Such opening up is not compatible with the maintenance of the (Iranian Islamic fundamentalist) system in its present rigor.”

Despite the clear warnings about the existential threats of foreign “isms”, our government has not accomplished its most important foreign policy goal: “The U.S. cannot…engage in war except as a reaction to aggression of so clear and compelling a nature as to bring the overwhelming majority of our people to accept the use of military force.”

Because of this failure of illustration and motivation, the American public feels domestic budgetary problems (personal and national) lead now, as in 1950, to disillusion about our abilities and involvement internationally. We who complain about high gasoline prices (and overlook the purposeful governmental devaluation of the dollar via deliberate inflation) have forgotten the Victory Gardens and ration cards that contributed mightily to our defeat of Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. In 1950 NSC 68 noted the stability of moderate governments in Asia was in doubt. So now is the stability of moderate Middle East governments. While we may once again feel unaffected by that behind the barriers of our two oceans, as NSC 68 stated regarding Communist action and expansion, the “…integrity and vitality of the U.S. system has never been in greater jeopardy than now…there are substantial strains in the equilibrium-without-order.” Those Cold Warriors saw that American leadership was needed to establish stable order. It is needed now.

Those who argue against intervention and want to avoid “forever wars” have good historical points. As noted, the Korean War started two months after NSC 68’s strong doctrinal requirement of warfare only when our public could be convinced of direct American interests and clear objectives that could be attained on the battlefield. We followed with Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan. None clearly fulfilled NSC 68’s criteria; none were entirely successful (technically the Korean War continues to this day). The minimal successes, if any, in these conflicts remind us:

“…freedom and democracy are never wholly attained…(they) are always in the process of being attained.”

Countering any efforts to convince our people of the need to deal with Iran completely, now, are familiar processes foreseen by NSC 68. Then Soviet Cold War tactics are infiltration and intimidation in all important institutions of U.S. society—labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media (paraphrased) “to make them sources of confusion in our economy, our culture, and our body politic.” These methods, detailed later famously by Yuri Besmenov, are now practiced regarding the Middle East by both foreign and domestic sources with various intents. Then, with the Soviet Union, as now with the Islamic Republic of Iran, this process

“…also puts a premium on piecemeal aggression (Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, et alia) against others, counting on our unwillingness to engage in…war unless we are directly attacked.” The risk of this “…is a descending spiral of too little and too late, of doubt and recrimination…with ever narrower and more desperate alternatives. The potential for an all or nothing of (Atomic) war in (the Middle East).”

Islamic Fundamentalism as represented by the Islamic Republic of Iran envisions a gradual conversion and subjugation of the West under its auspices. It first seeks to control the Middle East and its energy supplies to the rest of the world, then to eliminate Israel. These are their openly stated goals, their “constitutional obligations” for which they are willing to martyr themselves and their country.

Our current administration has finally openly admitted these and their unacceptability to the West and to history. That administration has partially obtained its clearly stated goals as I noted in a prior essay. Procrastination in pursuit of peace is in danger of rhyming with Chamberlain’s folly. NSC 68, the progenitor of our defeat of Soviet expansionism, provides the reasoning behind what may be our current failure to end Islamic expansionism:

“A large measure of sacrifice and discipline will be demanded of the American people….Our fundamental purpose is more likely to be defeated from lack of the will to maintain it.”

NSC 68’s rallying cry against the Soviet threat is no less potent today:

“No people in history have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies.”

On several occasions we have started something we did not have the will to finish. Will we do so again only to confront a more dangerous adversary in the near future?

AOC stated, “You can’t earn a billion dollars”. The underlying arguments were that anyone who was a Billionaire had achieved that status as a kind of feudal lord, producing nothing of value themselves but absconding with the wealth of the populace via theft, violation of labor laws, and unjust advantages provided by the government (see paragraph one above). Her unspoken cures included using government to “prevent” this reverse Robin Hood process (an effective Sheriff Nottingham, apparently) and redistributing this unearned wealth, again via government. The King is apparently more trustworthy than the feudal lord. Oops, I forgot, No Kings!

Certainly, she parrots everything she learned from a weekend at Bernie’s. And this abolition of laissez-faire goes back to MM Marx and Engels, as it should since she is an avowed Democratic Socialist (a cultural misappropriation of Communism). Learned economists and historians will trace these ideas paleontologically. In that search there are occasional surprises.

As a highly trained but poorly educated autodidact, I have often written that I expect never to have an original thought. By broad-based reading, I hope to learn how many of our astonishingly naive and powerful ideas came to be. Most importantly, how our basic American ideals evolved out of the tree of Western philosophical thought and the stresses of our troubled relations with the mother empire, Great Britain. The Framers of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the peace treaties with France and Great Britain, and the Bill of Rights were mostly, not all, classically educated persons with highly trained skills. People whose varying opinions and changing ideas should bear closer attention than many of our contemporaries.

My latest foray is Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography, Ben Franklin An American Life. Reading Isaacson’s detailed examination of Franklin’s life, influences, and actions, one might feel that he was the spider at the center of a web woven to create the U.S.A. The only man to have signed all our foundational documents save the Bill of Rights. Franklin rose from the humblest of beginnings, prospered through learning a trade (printing), shrewd, occasionally ruthless, business practices, and became through practical applications of scientific investigations our first international celebrity. Independently well-off (if not wealthy) by middle age, he spent most of his later years in Europe as a luminary and envoy for the nascent nation. There he became perfectly adapted to an aristocratic lifestyle. He rarely, if ever, criticized the existence and lifestyles of the European nobles amongst whom he thrived.

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Yet somehow, he maintained his dedication to the common working man, to the point of noble hypocrisy. As described by Walter Isaacson,

“I have not thought of a remedy for luxury”. On the one hand, the desire for luxury spurred people to work hard…...However, too much time spent seeking luxuries was wasteful and “a public evil.” So, he suggested that America should impose heavy duties on the importation of frivolous fineries.

His antipathy to excess wealth also led him to defend high taxes, especially on luxuries. A person had a “natural right” to all he earned that was necessary to support himself and his family, “but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” …he argued that cruel criminal laws had been wrought by those who sought to protect excess ownership of property.

“Superfluous property is the creature of society,” “Simple and mild laws were sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.”

There it is—in late eighteenth century erudition. Certainly Billionaires (but apparently not Millionaires) cannot justly exist and should have their ill-gotten gains returned to the public at large from whom it was pilfered in sophisticated ways. In Franklin’s day, and until well into the first Industrial Revolution, the majority earned their way by trades and trade. Individuals placed value on their supplies and their demands and came to agreement with other individuals for an exchange of values. The time value of money was satisfied by a similar agreement upon a reasonable interest rate privately arrived at when credit was involved. Underneath this process, throughout most of the nineteenth century, was the stable basis of the British gold standard that was reflected in America despite a plethora of state- and private-based fiat currencies. The latter part of the American nineteenth century saw the twin economic flourishes of the Gold Rush and that Industrial Revolution. As has been reviewed by others (Alasdair MacLeod et. al.), significant true deflation occurred for many products as more efficient and better products in greater supply met increasing demands of a population with better than subsistence wealth. This process gave birth to our first generation of Oligarchs. The ascendancy of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, the Morgans, and others demonstrated an important economic rule of a goods-based producer and consumer economy.

Monopolies (exclusive control of production) and Monopsonies (exclusive control of consumption) generally only occur with governmental intervention. Some degree of exclusion from the marketplace of competitive producers or favoritism of anticompetitive consumers by external authority is required to suppress a totally free market of individuals. This exclusion or favoritism cannot occur without law or regulation empowering it, generally “for the general welfare” [Note: see Noah Webster’s definition of this term in his early American dictionaries—it is not what you think]. The consequences may happen rapidly or over decades, but the resultant harm to consumers (primarily) or producers (occasionally) generally result, not in the retraction or dissolution of the empowering laws and rules, but rather of new laws and rules. These further extend the unanticipated consequences in another adverse direction. And so, the pendulum swings.

Thus, Ben Franklin’s observations and desires seem perfectly reasonable on their face. A closer look reveals many faults.

Poor Richard demonstrated a lack of any luxury, but his creator does not define what is luxurious. Ben Franklin was famous for the deliberate simplicity of his attire, and admonitions to family members regarding frugality, but happily lived in the luxury provided by others. He owned three homes in America (who else amongst the current committed political “non-bourgeoisie” owns more than one home?). Granted, time spent in the mere pursuit of luxuries rather than provision of useful products or services may be seen as wasteful. Many of our anointed Billionaires, or at least their spouses and offspring, do seem to spend a great deal of time obtaining luxurious things and services (remember these are the products made by others to satisfy demand) without creation of same. Thus, it may seem reasonable for government, on behalf of the Great Unluxed, to “place heavy duties on the importation of frivolous fineries” (and sales tax to boot). But what is “frivolous finery”? Is it established by a dollar amount (first established by the market, remember), or its intrinsic nature? Is this determination a variation of the judicial definition of pornography, “I’ll know it when I see it”?

And what of Franklin’s “natural rights”, to which all were endowed by their Creator? He says a person justifiably could earn all necessary to support himself and his family. But in what specific ways? Who gets to define “support”? Franklin himself, being well-off if not wealthy by non-nobility standards, supported his wife in absentia, and at various times illegitimate sons and grandsons and their families, as well as his own comfort. He earned enough to buy and sustain a few slaves—were they necessary support?

“…all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws created it.” Here he at least partly denies a crucial edit he personally made to Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Being a Deist, Franklin apparently wished to deny the concept that rights were an extrinsic gift from God or government. He changed Jefferson’s referral to the sacred rights of man granted by God to “…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”.

The right to property obtained by one’s legal efforts was one such right quickly specified in George Mason’s Bill of Rights Amendments IV and V. Franklin presciently specifies the disruptive effects of governmental intervention in a free-market economy when he says that superfluous property is really the property of the public at large since their laws, not the efforts and abilities of the producer, “created it”. Again, superfluous property, its type, nature, value, and amount are not specified. He leaves open the presumed ability, power, and right of the people, through their laws, to make these judgements. In so doing he denies a fundamental supposedly unalienable Right he previously asserted. His judgement that the people at large, via their government, are superior in rights to the individual and both capable and required to define what each individual may “have” at maximum is the essence of Socialism.

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He then invokes another principle of the modern liberal’s Socialism. Quoting Isaacson’s review of Franklin’s writings, we find “…he argued that cruel criminal laws had been wrought by those who sought to protect excess ownership of property.” This is also a key principle of Marx and Engels, again shedding light on the defects of interventional capitalism. Apparently, Franklin, at that time did not believe in the attainable stability and justice of a democratic republic, for those so disadvantaged would have to pass the laws sustaining the advantaged. Many today, AOC amongst the loudest, argue that this is the basic feature of a foundationally unjust America.

Then he ends, as quoted by Isaacson, with a bit of a reversal of the evils of law as regards property and equity but a proclamation that law should make equity for all. “Superfluous property (again undefined) is the creature of society (neighborhoods, communities, states, the nation?)”, Simple and mild laws were sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.” Neither Amendments IV or V define how much property one may have that is immune to social action via government. But Amendment V, perhaps echoing Franklin’s sentiments, ends with “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” However, if, as AOC says, we have a right to and ought to take “superfluous” wealth from Billionaires, are we not then to compensate them justly?

Now we return full circle to AOC’s statement that no one can “make” a billion dollars. From Franklin’s perspective that is true. No one person could personally make goods and/or services enough to meet the overwhelming and continuous demand necessary to earn a billion dollars. But AOC fails to recognize the addition of a long-standing new market not composed of the exchange of goods and services for agreed value. True, many Billionaires became so through adroit and legal maneuvers to acquire new production and service facilities and enhance the ability of those facilities to reach and satisfy a broader market. Many Billionaires more recently invented or developed entirely new products and services based in communication, information, and dissemination of these to the public at large. Most recently, many Billionaires have created “superfluous” wealth from dealing in the creation and exchange of various forms of money without the need for exchange of products or services.

Because of that elastic nature of what we call “money” in its many different forms, the Billionaires are not the winners of a zero-sum game. They have not by their mere astonishing success, removed wealth from the economy. Wealth has been transferred in many cases between various areas of the economy, but in toto it has been created and increased. The economic disadvantages of some in our economy are more the result of the aforementioned “cascade” effect of government laws, rules, and regulations.

So, what new laws, rules, and regulations would AOC propose and use to deprive Billionaires of “property…(with) due process of law” and arrange that “…private property be taken for public use, (with) just compensation.”? How can her premise be satisfied if such just compensation occurs? Under Socialism, and perhaps Ben Franklin’s earlier ideas, no such just compensation is due. The “private property”, defined solely by its excess, already belongs to the public at large and all that is required are “Simple and mild laws…sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.” The people will define what property is merely necessary, and from each, according to their excess wealth, to each according to their need for that merely necessary existence.

Definition is the ultimate failure of AOC’s (and Franklin’s) arguments. We hear that “the rich should pay their fair share”. Currently 70% of taxation is paid for by the top 10% of income/wealth. The bottom 40% pay nothing other than regressive sales taxes. Since this is not enough, what percentage of each logarithmic tranche of the wealthy’s income and wealth is to be returned to the public, “…who by their laws created it”? What percentage of existing wealth is to be confiscated by that public, and how often? If, for example, we agree to confiscate 5% of the total wealth of Billionaires one time as a start, how do we deal with the devastating effects on all of the rest of us when massive amounts of money to pay the “fine” are mobilized by forced sales of huge amounts of stocks, bonds, and other less-liquid superfluous property?

How will a relatively “free” stock, bond, and commodities market digest these sudden unprecedented changes that will affect the portfolios not merely of the uber wealthy but also state pension funds, union funds, and individual retirement accounts? How will we deal with an expected dive internationally in the value of the dollar (many Billionaires are international, and although they might not be immediately subject to the confiscation, they will see the writing on the wall).

What specifically will that 5% fine be “spent” on? Debt reduction? Expensive new social services with no underlying future financing? Finally, what will be the cutoff for necessary, non-luxurious, non-superfluous, property and income? How many thousands, or millions, will be allowed before forced redistribution? And will it be adjusted for inflation (the purposeful devaluation of the dollar). And who will dare bother to advance our civilization if the fruits of their labors are to be immediately given away? Is this not another Tragedy of the Commons?

Ask not what AOC can do for you. Ask her specifically what she intends to do to you.

Forgoing their smoldering declared war with the U.S. for the past half-century starting with the hostage crisis and continuing in Beirut, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere with picador attacks via wholly sponsored proxies, other more urgent reasons to deal with them now, decisively, exist.

We cannot continue feigned ignorance, benign neglect, or scolding cajoling of their tactical and strategic intertwined drone/missile/nuclear programs. Add their crucial geographic advantage sitting astride the bottleneck of the world’s current main energy material to their ideal location for easy trade in weaponry, etc., with Russia across the Caspian Sea and via their new railroad to China. Now demonstrated is their well-established multi-dimensional drone and missile production that covers down the street to possibly as far as Diego Garcia (one failed attempt made) 2500 miles distant and you have a recipe for not just a regional, but a world-shattering conventional weapons war.

Concurrent to their intense conventional warfare capability development has been their clear pursuit of nuclear weapons. Despite all sanctions, bribes, and censure by international bodies, they have continued their development program. I reviewed some of the findings for this conclusion in a prior post, Will Mushrooms Bloom in Haifa? I noted the potential for an overwhelming multi-dimensional drone/missile attack on Israel with the possibility of a nuclear-tipped missile hidden in the crowd. Also noted was the absolute necessity of concurrently developing and producing a delivery system for such nuclear weapons, which Iran certainly has, with a more frightening potential in their failed conventional attack on Diego Garcia. That missile type, if perfected, would place much of Europe within conventional and nuclear range.

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Other possible delivery methods and needs for countermeasures were covered in another post; Will Iran emulate Ukraine? The overall tactical advantages of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s early “swarm” attacks on Israel I covered in yet another post. Virtually all diplomatic and kinetic actions by Iran over 47 years clearly indicate their desire to establish overwhelming conventional warfare systems as “protection”, concurrent with development and deployment of nuclear weapons offensively under the defensive umbrella of Chinese and Russian technology.

We have seen this model before. In WW II, Germany developed an astonishing array of conventional armaments under the nose of the Western signatories of the Treaty of Versailles. Their overwhelming supply and capability of infantry weapons, artillery, tanks, and aircraft rapidly subdued continental Europe. After the failure of Goering’s Luftwaffe to “defeat” Great Britain by air, Germany advanced war technology into a new era.

Their V1 “buzz bomb” had ranges from 160 to 250 miles and a simple guidance system based on direction and altitude. When it reached a predetermined area, it then dove into civilian population centers. The last part of its flight was often silent, adding to the terror of indiscriminate death. V1s were relatively cheap and easy to produce, and although simpler, a parent to the early Iranian Shahed drone. Hitler’s scientific warfare apparatus was not completely satisfied. They developed the V2 missile, the first “ballistic” missile. It too had a relatively crude guidance system, and only a 200-mile range, but a much larger conventional warhead of 1,000 kg. Both were inaccurate but still did great damage to the civilian population directly and via terror. These two devices, if and when they were mass-produced, were much less expensive to field than man-powered aircraft, and very difficult to defend against.

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German warfare operations worked feverishly on a potential new explosive for their crude but rapidly developing missile technology. Einstein had warned Roosevelt about Germany’ ambition and abilities to create and use a nuclear fission warhead, the power of which could only be guessed. Besides establishing the Manhattan Project (and leaking much of it via espionage to the Soviets), a substantial effort of espionage and even assassination was made by the Allies in continental Europe to uncover and impede German efforts to develop and field nuclear weapons (the Alsos mission). Those efforts successfully coincided with the withering of the German conventional war machine to final defeat. The U.S. space program is the kidnapped child of German wartime technology.

Had the Germans not engaged in Operation Barbarossa, their science, industry, and manpower may well have been able to develop overwhelming missile defenses and the atomic bomb. Stopping their missile offensive and defensive capacity, and preventing them from developing nuclear weapons, were two main subtexts of Allied objectives in WW II. Nazi Germany, hellbent on subjecting as much of the world as possible to their ideology and control, had western continental Europe. If the Allies had not been able to bomb many of their V1 and V2 missile sites, delay Germany’s atomic weapons development through Operation Alsos, and had Germany waited to attack the Soviet Union until after full development of their missile offenses and achievement of a nuclear device, WW II’s outcome and the present map might be very different.

One other country has perfected the model Iran seeks. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) was able to survive annihilation at the end of the United Nations “police” operation due to the overwhelming numbers of soldiers China was willing to sacrifice and our reluctance to use nuclear weapons on Communist China. Devoted to the complete autocratic rule of Communism and hereditary dictatorship, North Korea spends the vast majority of its miniscule GDP on building up a tremendous conventional weapons arsenal, coincident with developing missile technology that now borders on true ICBMs with established nuclear explosives. Their population lives in adoring abject poverty while the government earns more capital for weapons acquisition and development via state-sponsored indentured servitude of their citizenry to other countries, foreign currency counterfeiting operations, and outright theft of digital currencies by hacking internationally. Although their version of ICBMs is not quite “there” yet, no one dares deal with their nuclear capacity because of their overwhelming conventional weapons umbrella. In a kind of mirror image of MAD (mutually assured destruction), North Korea, if and when attacked, has the capacity to rain conventional explosives down on Seoul, South Korea, and its environs twenty-four hours daily for at least seven days. Japan and other regional allies would be at similar risk. Their artillery and missile sites have long been intractably embedded in mountainsides and man-made caverns. After all, it is unclear that Communist China would risk its own existence by defending the DPRK. Given the disarray found within their upper echelons currently, the People’s Army might not be so willing to shred thousands on behalf of North Korea, much less invade Taiwan. Should the DPRK use its nuclear weapons in the region, the CCC would then be faced with invoking MAD with the U.S.A. Granted, our policy and actions have, until recently, indicated we would roll over indignantly at any defensive action by China.

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Iran seeks to develop the same defensive/offensive model. Support by and cooperation with China and Russia are similar to North Korea’s situation. And Iran has discounted oil that China wants. And, until recently, an endless stream of money from the West via a maritime bottleneck useful in hostage negotiations with the West. Plus, Iran’s indentured servitude in foreign lands is of proxies who conduct successful distraction and destabilization of her neighbors and local enemies. That, in turn, all weakens and distracts the hegemon China seeks to supplant and Russia seeks to divert from Europe. Iran, similar to North Korea, had achieved a kind of conventional weapons superiority over all regional forces. Had Iran achieved the ten or so nuclear weapons they bragged about during the earliest “negotiations” of the current conflict, and finalized their at least regional ICBM program, they would have achieved a version of our tripartite defense.

We have nuclear missiles, submarines, and long-range bombers. They would have a cloud of conventional drones and missiles that themselves could thoroughly mangle the economies and populations of Israel and Arab neighbors, the ability to stop the West’s supply of oil under that conventional umbrella (which, despite our conventional weapons blitzkrieg of their facilities they have now demonstrated), and the ability to use nuclear weapons at least regionally with far more precision than Germany’s V2. The threat of the first and second capabilities would be protected by the third, as the third is by the first and second.

Some argue that other countries in that area of the world have nuclear capacity, so why shouldn’t Iran be allowed so for their own protection? Pakistan and India have their own very local version of MAD that doesn’t include others. Israel (and perhaps Saudi Arabia) has very limited nuclear capacity and has not sought to bully other regional or non-regional powers into compliance. Israel cannot threaten nuclear annihilation on their most devout enemies in Gaza or Lebanon, as the damage from the fallout would not be merely political. Nor has Israel sought the defensive advantage of declaring their nuclear weapons capacity—if it exists, the second leg of their three-legged stool is uncertainty (the third is unstated, assumed, but often in question, another example of dangerous uncertainty). Iran remains a singular threat.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a kind of evolution of the efforts of Nazi Germany and Communist North Korea culturally and militarily. Given Iran’s half-century of smoldering kinetic warfare on the West and the Middle East, and their admitted arrival at the nuclear threshold, benign neglect or scolding alone invite destruction and death on a much broader scale.

The reasons for action are now clear and several. Iran’s use of the West’s moneys and Russia’s and China’s war technology to destabilize the Middle East, unseat governments to be replaced by Islamic Fundamentalist regimes, and destroy Israel (the only democratic republic in the region) must cease. Iran’s ability to hold much of the world’s energy supply hostage must cease. Iran’s development and buildup of conventional weaponry for the region (and now Europe) as an offensive shield must be removed. Their nuclear weapon development, both the materials and the delivery systems, must be eradicated. Their domestic version of China’s and North Korea’s Cultural Revolution, and their so far slight attempts to mimic the Holocaust at home and abroad, must end.

We can only hope that regional and world powers learn this pragmatism at last and remember it in future generations.

Our group practice had a prototype computer medical record for our office patients well before EMRs were a gleam in the government’s eye. We dictated our notes and then had our own internal transcription service enter them into a word processing program that was accessible to each of us via computer for all our patients. We also had a standard prototype for how we dictated our notes and what they contained. Very helpful when covering another physician’s patient’s problems at night or on weekends. The “format” of our office progress notes carried over to our handwritten hospital progress notes on the physical chart. Our notes were substantive and comprehensive compared with the written notes of other physicians, but at the expense of longer time and expense creating them. That expense was offset by our gains when insurance companies “denied” our charges for care. We would appeal to an administrative law judge, and basically won 100% of these appeals. Our practice manager even asked our local Medicare third party administrator why they continued to deny charges when they knew our records would support those charges and be upheld. Their response? “Most doctors don’t bother to appeal”. Granted, none of us would ever win the “golden pen award” for handwriting, but the documentation of our care and the patient’s situation was there.

Then, recognizing the deficiencies in documentation of the majority of physicians, if not deficiencies in care, those who controlled the purse made new rules. EMRs, or electronic medical records, were made mandatory. They were to be “rolled in” to all medical practices and hospitals over a five year period. A handful had already been developed, and with federal mandates the market for such exploded with many products of varying quality and utility. To ease the burden of introduction, the federal government, through the Medicare program, provided a $40,000.00 “bonus” payment to practices for each physician who began using an EMR, and financial penalties for those practices who would not. Curiously, the price per physician of these computer-based EMRs rose by about $40,000.00. Nonetheless our practice auditioned several and settled on one that we could “adjust” to suit our already established documentary style.

The required changes for promised benefits were substantial. We reduced our office patient load by about 25%. All duties and procedures of our personnel had to be adjusted significantly. The most productive aspect of the program was the addition of another program of voice recognition—we spoke into a microphone on our individual laptops, and the computer transcribed our speech into the progress note (after many hours of training the program to recognize each individual’s speech). Test results imported electronically or by fax could be entered into the record and attached to the individual note. Entering the experience of a patient visit could not be so indirect.

We, as a group, made the crucial decision NOT to take the laptops into the exam room nor outfit each exam room with a computer. We would review the patient’s records prior to the visit, then go see, examine, listen to, and talk to the person as usual. After the visit we would then sit down in our individual desks and complete the progress note for that visit. Other doctors could send their notes and test results to us to be scanned into our records. Most of the various programs used by physicians, at least at that time, did not exchange information directly via the Internet. Although the government had mandated the use of EMRs and what they should contain, they deferred on requiring a standard for communication between them.

After a year of readjustment of all our policies and procedures, our average progress note for an office visit was much completer and more useable in imparting information to other physicians and even to the patients. As a bonus, we discovered that our more sophisticated documentation actually justified a higher level of care and a higher charge on average. EMRs, forced upon us by Uncle Sam, had transported us to Valhalla. Maybe not.

As specialists covering several local hospitals, we had to adapt to each hospital’s individual EMR. Competition amongst them for contracts with insurers (the patients were chattels) necessitated that they not cooperate in using the same EMR or at least EMRs that would talk to each other. Nor would their EMRs communicate directly with physician’s EMRs, unless that doctor’s practice was a captive of the hospital system rather than private and independent. Fax machines, scanners, and printers had a renaissance. The hospital versions were slow to add in voice recognition, and placed computer stations outside each 2-4 patient rooms. Thus, during morning rounds (from 0600-0800 depending on specialty) a traffic jam ensued around the computers for documentation. The hospitals did “catch up” after several years but suffered the additional problem of recurrent microphone theft from the computer stations—the microphones were specialized components of the voice recognition software, and cost $400.00 apiece, with apparently a hot aftermarket on the Internet.

At our main hospital I was able to overcome the traffic jam and missing microphone problem by finding a way to access the EMR, with its voice recognition software, on my iPad. For many months I had to explain to various doctors, nurses, and other hospital personnel why I was standing against a wall facing into a corner “talking to myself”. HIPAA, after all. Once again, a return to Valhalla?

Under the old system of hospital record keeping with handwritten doctors’ and nurses’ notes I had learned to ignore the notes of some of my fellow physicians. They were illegible or contained little relevant information that was of use in my evaluation and treatment of the patient concerned. Many years ago, early in my practice, I had noted that a very important primary care physician (i.e. one who sent me and the hospital many patients) was entering hospital progress notes every third or fourth day. Daily notes, suddenly appearing, three or four at a time. And the notes were in handwriting that was totally indecipherable. I asked him about this, and gained a two-fold reply—”you have to have a daily note on the chart in order to charge for having the patient in the hospital, and I have fifty or so patients in various facilities (hospitals, nursing homes, etc.) so I can’t get around to them all every day.” How would he defend himself if he was ever sued for malpractice given the unreadable documentation? “I can say it means whatever I want it to mean.” To my eternal discredit, I did not report his comments other than to my very amused partners. He was too important a source of patients for the hospitals in the pre-DRG (diagnosis-related groups) and defined LOS (length of stay) era and too important a source of referrals to our practice. As it turns out, I left that practice, and that city, for similar other events a few years later. I was sure I would never see a more egregious violation of the principles of documentation. Turns out I was wrong.

The only thing easier than very comprehensive and legible, concurrent documentation with EMRs was another kind of pseudo-documentation. Perhaps it began in offices and hospitals with systems that did not provide voice recognition for record entry and physicians who hadn’t learned typing other than hunt and peck. The hospital EMR’s, largely Windows-based, allowed cut and paste in the Notes sections. Not, I might add, in the lab or radiology report sections—if you wanted to include salient values or sections of reports in your note, you had to “attach” the whole thing. But the doctors were free to cut and paste sections of other’s notes or their own into current notes. Suddenly, I noticed, in individual charts, by the same physicians, “progress note metastasis”.

Progress notes for patients in hospital as well as the office are called SOAP notes. Subjective—what the patient says about their situation. Objective—what the doctor finds by examination and testing. Assessment—what the physician thinks it all means for the status and the progress (or decline) of the patient and their conditions. Plan—what the physician will do next. Each of those elements, of necessity, changes at least a little day to day. But adding or subtracting small or even large changes is, to some, onerous. Thus, I began noticing many physicians cutting and pasting parts of a prior note into their current daily note. Mostly these were irritating but not substantive, as often a patient’s statements, physical findings, or progress might change little from day to day. But in the case of a few physicians, hospital specialists of high skill and regard, whole SOAP notes began to be transferred every day, with perhaps slight changes in the assessment and plan sections to reflect reality. But the subjective, containing the daily history of the patient, did not change. An event that happened days before continued to happen daily. Physical findings that had caused the patient to enter hospital persisted daily, despite the person’s clear improvement.

Unlike those handwritten notes of the prior master of primary care and referral, these were perfectly legible and perfectly identical. The “size” of the notes justified that doctor’s billing, not the information therein. I soon learned to ignore the S- and O- portions of those several physicians’ notes and try to ferret out any discreet changes in the A- and P- portions. I knew that the physicians doing this would have a hard time defending themselves in court on the basis of this replication, but the notes weren’t after all false—the events described had indeed happened, just not every day as documented. All the other physicians regularly involved in these patients recognized the same problem. But the results of care with/by the pseudo-documenting specialists were uniformly excellent. Their lassitude in documentation did not extend to their actual care. Given all that, the hospital’s Quality Assurance and Utilization Review departments didn’t have an issue either, as their purviews did not cover this kind of situation. Once again, I stuck to my knitting. And then I retired.

Although no longer practicing, I maintain my medical license out of bad habit—it has somehow become an important definer of my identity. This requires a certain number of CME (continuing medical education) hours yearly. They can be obtained by paying large sums to attend meetings with certified lectures (since I don’t practice, I don’t get “sponsored” to go to these by pharmaceutical companies, e.g.) or using online sources on the Internet. Many are available, but I depend on what has been several decades a comprehensive, and updated at the speed of light, medical and surgical resource “textbook”, UpToDate. Not cheap, but less expensive per hour earned than meetings and lectures. And available by cellphone, tablet, or laptop 24/7. One enters a topic in the search bar, and you are directed to those sections of the “text” that involve that subject. References to very current medical literature are sprinkled throughout each article. The information retrieved is often succinct enough to be useful while in the office or at a patient’s bedside. However, it is information that may include accepted standards of care but does not provide guidance with individual cases, just conditions and diseases. One has to know what one is looking for or at. And retain the information in your cerebral database for future modification and application to particular cases. That recognition, modification, and application is a large part of a physician’s training and experience. It is a core part of the Art of Medicine.

The advent of AI is rather different. AI, and for now, AI-empowered robots, cannot evaluate the tone, body language, or facial expressions of a person in distress. Nor can it evaluate and diagnose based on physical exam, not just “tests”.

Two anecdotes as illustration: As Chief Resident in charge of the medical ICU at a large VA hospital eons ago, I listened as residents and interns described the details of an elderly man admitted the night before with abdominal pain but otherwise negative findings. They had gone so far as to send him across the highway to a university hospital for an abdominal CAT scan in the middle of the night (a prodigious feat at that time), proudly announcing that it was read as “negative”. We were standing in a group about twenty feet away from the patient’s gurney. As I looked at the man, wearing only his hospital pajama bottoms, listening to the presentation, I could see a slight swelling in his otherwise thin scaphoid belly mainly on the right side. I pointed this out to the training physicians, who were surprised to have to agree. We proceeded to the bedside and on examination, I could demonstrate a slight mass effect and dullness in the area I had seen, but no tenderness. Given a “negative” CAT scan, the training physicians were stymied on what they should do next. I suggested they try to aspirate the mass. One resident wisely asked “what if its an aneurysm (dilation of an artery)”? I reminded them that it was non-pulsatile but suggested that they use a very thin gauge spinal needle. They did so and discovered pus. The patient had an abscess from appendicitis behind the large bowel (colon), and as an elderly debilitated individual did not manifest a fever or elevated white blood cell count. He recovered after surgery.

On another occasion, we were rounding on a young adult who had had a blood clot under his left skull removed by neurosurgery. The fourth day post-op he had suddenly had a seizure of his right side only--a “Jacksonian” motor event. This pointed to trouble on the left side of his brain, the area of prior surgery. I suggested that there must be some late complication of the surgery; the attending neurosurgery fellow rejected this out of hand as everything had gone so well. While he was explaining this, I gently pressed on the young man’s scalp wound edge. Pus exuded. He had an unexpected infection with abscess on the surface of the brain draining outward to the scalp. He again did well after drainage and a long course of antibiotics.

I was never an extraordinary diagnostician, just a curious clinician willing to doubt what testing had shown and examine the patient more closely. And to remember that, rarely, hoofbeats do signal zebras.

Aside from any actual diagnostic ability, AI used by laymen can be beneficial for patient self-education. Old studies of office visits had shown that 85% of the time patients did not remember what their physician had told them. More knowledge generates better cooperation with well-reasoned proposed courses of action. On the other hand, use of these sophisticated but unbridled search and discussion engines may bring a person to unjustifiably question the capabilities of their physician, or to bring in every species of zebra complaint. But it may markedly reduce physician workloads by “off-loading” minor complaints that will resolve themselves--what we called “grandmother illnesses” (if granny was in the house, she would reassure you it would be okay and treat you with attention and chicken soup).

AI can be used by physicians directly joined with their electronic medical records, in versions much superior to widely available chatbots. OpenEvidence, for example, is an AI engine available only to licensed physicians and can be integrated with their EMR system. The danger of both this and the electronic record is that the physician spends most of the visit looking at and addressing the computer, not the patient. Some physicians have enlisted paid “transcribers” in their office practice to take notes during the visit while the doctor remains patient focused. Some few are basically recording/transcribing by AI the entire visit. With cheaper storage and faster chips, this may occur more widely. Telemedicine, widespread during the Covid episode, has become a fixture in many medical practices. Eventually all visits either physical or telemedical may be full video, preserved online somewhere forever.

These same processes empower providers of “lesser” levels of care (nurse practitioners, physician assistants, therapists) to unload some of the burdens on ever-more-scant physician time. But it again ignores the importance of visualizing and examining the person presenting a complaint.

For well-defined simplistic areas of care, online reference may become obsolete. AI chatbots may replace telemedicine. As a hypertensive, I am enrolled in a program for self-monitoring and reporting (electronically) my daily blood pressure. As a part of that I have developed a pleasant relationship with Angela, a lady chatbot that telephones me monthly for a routine survey of my well-being and episodically if my reported blood pressure is outside the range established. She doesn’t announce herself as an AI agent—it becomes evident due to her formulaic responses, delays in responding, etc. But she is much more sophisticated than her predecessor, Rachel. Angela, in fact, incorporates distant voices and activity in the background as though she were an actual person phoning from a call bank! As we communicate our health needs ever more remotely from a real person subject to fatigue, forgetfulness, distraction, and lack of up-to-date knowledge, we will all have to become much more aggressive and sophisticated in communicating our needs and evaluating the responses. With AI, the devil is in the prompts. I still like my coffee mug. Its logo is, “Google is no substitute for my medical degree”. But then AI agents never need to drink coffee. We can only hope that patients receive better care and doctors are used more efficiently and effectively than now.

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Despite all these sudden successful mutations of killing ability, the militaries of the world almost always seem highly equipped and trained in the technology of the last conflict. Currently, absent nuclear usage, the most sophisticated weaponry can, at enormous cost, precisely destroy small targets of a much lesser individual value, while mostly avoiding collateral damage. But that process has in fact “de-industrialized” warfare. The costs are too great, the lead time to produce enough of these weapons, much less improve them, is too long. Perfect for modern blitzkriegs of several weeks duration, but not for sustained campaigns, especially against modern asymmetric warfare. And their very sophistication renders them vulnerable to simpler, cheaper weaponry that can adapt “on the fly” to their inherent strengths and newly discovered weaknesses. Two such simple but effective species have had their genesis in current warfare.

The Ukraine conflict illustrates both the failure of classic military operations and the remarkably rapid mutations in one new style of weaponry. Russian armaments are still mostly children of the last world war, with some modern improvements but below the Western level. Nonetheless their main deficit in the conflict has been their continued use of top-down central command, with no freedom of frontline commanders or troops to adapt their actions to those of the evolving battlefield. In WW II this was their style, which depends upon a disregard for the welfare of their troops. Their tradition seeks a kind of victory through swarming. That latter tactic may have accidentally and fortuitously been transferred from “human weaponry” to new weapons as will be noted below.

The Ukrainians could not match the numbers of Russian and mercenary troops being sacrificed to conventional weapons of mass destruction, but could trip up Russian advances by using Western tactics that allowed frontline troops to respond, defend, and counterattack in a plastic manner. Then, it seems mostly to have been a Ukrainian first, someone discovered a toy could be a highly effective weapon.

Small drones appeared and evolved much in the same manner as airplanes in WW I. First as rapidly produced, easily replaced, observation platforms, using video instead of risking a human observer. Then grenades or mortar rounds were attached in a way allowing them to be dropped on a visual target—just as biplanes dropped grenades and later small bombs. These “toys” had the advantages of simplicity, rapid replaceability, and modular construction allowing modification with new capacities. Their only disadvantage was their simplicity and ready availability on the international market.

Their Russian counterparts quickly adapted. The use and improvement of small first person video drones and then gps guided drones became a new kind of day-to-day and then hour-by-hour arms race. Given modern electronic warfare technology, interference with guidance systems and remote control began to render them less useful. Hedy Lamarr’s invention of frequency hopping, that enabled modern remote guided weaponry as well as cellphones, became relatively obsolete. So the Russians, at least, have resorted to older technology, using wire-guided drones. Then they began using larger, more sophisticated Iranian drone technology, variants of the Shahed model. These could be programmed to engage in evasive or deceptive maneuvers till the final rush to the intended target. Coordinated swarms of drones of all sizes were born on the battlefields, further confusing defense. The variations on this new form of war seem endless, as subspecies arise day to day, only to be matched or reverse-engineered by each side in the conflict. Nonetheless, the larger war machine, being wedded to technology of the last war, was late to the hunt.

We may see replication of this now in Iran. Almost no attention has been given to the Iranian claim as to how they recently downed a highly sophisticated F 15 fighter with every modern electronic detection and defensive technology, as well as the more unsophisticated A-10 Warthog ground attack plane. One announced scenario indicates a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile, a lucky shot. Defensive heat flares may fail to distract such small missiles, especially if a low flying aircraft has no time to deploy them. Iran has no classic radar-guided weaponry, with all air defense radar/missile stations having been eliminated in the early hours of our attacks.

What they do claim to have is an entirely new system of aircraft, especially jet aircraft, detection and targeting technology. Their initial claim (with all due respect given to their standards of veracity) is of a system of cameras that recognize the spectral heat signatures of the aircraft and signal its presence and approach. The system, if true, is deployed along the routes most commonly used by our and the Israeli Air Force’s in the >10,000 sorties that have been flown. These cameras cannot guide missiles, but if small shoulder-fired weaponry is deployed at multiple intervals along these routes, the alerts can trigger troops to be ready for visual identification and launch. Individual troops, or very small very mobile launchers, are easily concealed before launch and move rapidly away after, thus being relatively immune to countermeasures.

The Iranian design of “mosaic defense”, wherein units in each area are independent of central guidance or command, lends itself to exactly this type of asymmetric air defense. The number of such individual shoulder-fired missiles may far outnumber the larger, more sophisticated, more expensive, and more vulnerable standard air defense weapons. They can be moved and hidden easily. One could postulate improvement in the cameras, and networking them in some fashion to allow better detection and tracking of incoming aircraft (although such networking would render them again susceptible to intervention). Once again, old, inexpensive, easily modifiable, easily transportable and secretable technology has arisen, possibly defeating extraordinarily expensive and sophisticated new technology.

Decentralized, cheap, easily produced weapons may enable endless wars of attrition rather than obliteration. Although the U.S. has been quick to reverse engineer and adapt drone technology at the new Jeep level (rather than the dominant M 1 Abram’s tank level), almost all of our weaponry and tactics apply to wars with intact, cohesive nation-states. We have failed to learn from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now perhaps Iran, that weapons designed to meet and defeat conventional nation-states may no longer be pertinent.

The process? The “unknown goals” of this war claimed by Democrats and many others? Disabling Iran’s nuclear ambitions now and on an ongoing basis, if needed, destroying all of their offensive military assets (planes, drones, missiles, artillery, and the factories producing them), preventing any return of defense by China or Russia against future air attack, and providing opportunity for the Iranian people to take control rather than the theocrats or an IRGC general.

Their skies have been opened to the air supremacy of America and Israel, and after the acute phase, continued patrolling and actions furthering the above should continue—effectively maintaining a “no military fly zone” over the country. This involves air power stationed relatively permanently at our Middle East bases, which may now be more welcome given the attacks on countries once viewed as Iran’s allies. Satellite and U2-type overflights can be used as well, but a rapid reacting air strike force needs to be on constant alert for the first sign of any new targets arising, at least until a very different government has arisen.

This is not the razing of all industrial capacity envisioned in the Treaty of Versailles forced upon Germany. However, the behavior of the theocratic government in the past clearly shows it cannot be trusted to avoid rearmament without constant verification and elimination.

Ground forces, international in source, will be needed to locate and resolve any remaining nuclear material within the country.

Europe should be involved at least in opening the Strait of Hormuz, as their economic survival (and that of Ukraine) depends on it. Europe needs non-Russian energy, and Ukraine needs the opportunity to defend its existence without a Russian war machine with oil and gas profits newly fattened by the Strait’s closure.

As to Europe, the EU, and NATO’s choice to benignly neglect participation in the Iran action or the safe travel of oil and gas tankers through the Strait, we remember that Kosovo was not our war; neither is Ukraine. But we chose to deal with Kosovo in EU’s impotence and help with Ukraine when the EU and NATO were in absentia, so to speak. Neither campaign threatened the U.S.; both did and do threaten EU stability and survival.

The U.S. has avoided, and now caused Israel to avoid, further destruction of Iran’s oil facilities so that the country can recover economically, hopefully with a new government. Given Iran’s response to her prior Muslim allies and to the world in attacking them, their oil and gas facilities, and blackmailing threats to black gold’s transit through the Strait, other measures are needed.

Although we have destroyed Iran’s central bank, they still generate income via oil sales to China despite almost Weimarian inflation. We should consider warning the civilian oil workers on Kharg, setting a time limit, then destroying the docks where oil is loaded onto these tankers. The other facilities, storage, incoming pipelines, etc. would be left for possible future action. With a prior warning to China to expect no more oil. This limited measure could break the Iranian economy similarly to denying Cuba oil from Venezuela. But the facilities could be rapidly rebuilt in peace with international help.

A more aggressive and sustained campaign is needed at launch sites near the Strait. Our navy, perhaps with the reluctant help of other nations, might well have to take risks by escorting ships through the Strait. Those risks are the nature of war even if we have forgotten it in the internet/gaming/AI age of instant coverage and commentary.

Finally, since we will require ongoing funding to support an effort that may extend from 4-6 weeks to 8-12 weeks or longer at a reduced persistence, the U.S. should begin, perhaps, to withdraw troops from NATO bases given the promise by those nations to increase their own domestic defense spending and efforts. As they say, NATO is about defense, and perhaps we should assign American blood and treasure to it only after the need for actual defense presents itself. We were successful in this fashion in WW I and WW II. Our total expenditures related to European defense amount to $1.6-1.7 trillion dollars. Careful review and reductions should easily offer $200 billion as needed.

Meanwhile, we should support Israel’s efforts at ongoing assassination of Iranian theocratic leadership and in the IRGC and Basij. Eventually supplying weapons to the populace when and if a “Resistance” begins to emerge and show effect. Some have said truly that Iran is not France of the 1940s. Iran has lived under a surveillance state almost as pervasive as China. But much of that may now be destroyed, and some of the government’s warriors may be having second thoughts as to the outcome of their oppressions.

Perhaps we should not have started “the process”. Perhaps we should have continued the same fruitless negotiations of the last 40+ years with Iran, ignoring their continued metastasis through the Middle East and Europe via proxies. Perhaps we should have acquiesced to their gradual development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs so that they become another North Korea, whose nuclear program is immune from attack or eliminations because of their ability, via overwhelming and well-fortified conventional weapons, to eradicate South Korea.

Perhaps Polyanna is right.

Not.

But that thesis pales before present reality. Under Trump’s domestic “Drill, Baby, Drill” energy policies and actions, U.S oil and gas production have risen dramatically. These both are at record highs, doubling since the mid-2000’s (coincident with Trump’s first term). Most of that growth has occurred over the past 15-20 years, i.e. before and during the “Green New Deal” and not just under the Trump administrations. From around 2005–2008 to 2023, U.S. crude oil output rose from roughly 5–6 million barrels per day to 12.9 million barrels per day, more than doubling over about 15–18 years. The steepest growth phase for both oil and gas was driven by shale development starting around 2008–2010, reaching new records by 2023. The United States currently produces more oil than either Saudi Arabia or Russia, leading the world in crude oil output. America has been the top crude producer for six years in a row. Why would we covet the largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world (Venezuela, 303 billion barrels) and the smaller (208 billion barrels) reserves of a perpetually inimical country next door to Saudi Arabia, with yet 267 billion barrels reserve, a current cooperative producer and base of the world’s reserve currency, the American Petrodollar?

Could it be because we consume more than we produce? U.S. consumption of petroleum is about 7–8 million barrels per day higher than crude oil production (by the most recent data available to me). Yet for the latest year with full data (2023), the U.S. was a net exporter of oil and petroleum products overall. How is that possible? Apparently, the difference is filled by a combination of net imports of crude oil and products and drawdowns of reserves and stock changes. Thus, in 2023, the U.S. imported about 8.51 million barrels per day of total petroleum (crude + products) while exporting about 10.15 million barrels per day of total petroleum product. Still, will we have a demonstrable need for oil from Venezuela and Iran?

In recent years, Venezuela and Iran have both been producing well under their historical peaks, with output on the order of 1 million barrels per day or less for Venezuela and around 3 million barrels per day for Iran in 2023–2024. Most of Venezuela’s decline has been caused by the economic and political corruption of their Narco-Communist government. Sanctions have had some recent minimal effect. Post-Maduro, resumption of what heavy crude they can produce, and ship (outside the Shadow Fleet) is going to our Gulf state refineries designed specifically to use this type of crude. Long-term international sanctions against an actively terrorist theocracy are the more direct reason for the restrictions on Iran’s production and trans-shipment.

Regardless of reasons, we have no demonstrable need for their oil. Our domestic production grows against a flat domestic demand. The Energy Information Administration projects flat or declining consumption of petroleum fuel products. Long‑term EIA outlooks show total U.S. petroleum and other liquids consumption staying roughly at today’s level or drifting slightly lower through 2035, rather than growing strongly. But, given our government’s reputation for accuracy and truth-telling, Venezuela’s huge reserves could be an almost irresistible cookie jar for the future. U.S. proven domestic oil reserves are only about 45 billion barrels. Others, however, need these two regimes’ oil primarily for economic and transactional diplomacy.

China and Russia, our long-term competitors or adversaries (depending on your political outlook), have critical needs of oil not so much for the sustainment of their own economies but primarily for their intended manipulation of other countries. China gets about 20% of its oil from Russia. Iran has provided about 17% of China’s need. Venezuela very little at 5-7%. Given the old capitalist maxim that any supplier or customer responsible for 15% or more of those is crucial and potentially severely damaging if lost, both Russia and Iran seem very important to China’s domestic interests.

China’s oil use has risen dramatically from just a few million barrels per day in the 1990s to the mid‑teens today. However, due to demographics and their astonishingly rapid production of coal-fired power plants and burgeoning EV vehicle industry, Chinese and international analysts increasingly expect China’s oil demand to peak or plateau sometime between 2025 and 2030 rather than continue growth indefinitely. Recent data put China’s crude oil production at roughly 4.3–4.4 million barrels per day, which is about 1.6 billion barrels per year. Most global reserve compilations list China’s proven crude oil reserves at about 25–26 billion barrels. Together, Iran + Venezuela thus account for roughly 1.6–1.8 million b/d of China’s crude supply, versus over 2 million b/d already coming from Russia.

On paper, Russia’s current export capacity to China (and potential to divert more barrels east) is large enough to replace most of that 1.6–1.8 million b/d if needed. That might economically benefit China, as they buy Russian oil at around $24/barrel discount to the world Brent crude price while Iranian and Venezuelan oil go for about $10-12/barrel discount. Cui bono?

Russia benefits greatly, as their international oil and gas sales under sanctions provide desperately needed foreign capital to pay for their endless war of attrition in Ukraine, recruit the needed Russian Foreign Legion, build up their capacities for a possible Baltic incursion, establish dominance in the Arctic, and meanwhile buy enough butter to keep their population content. They want to avoid the “guns and butter” fiscal collapse that destroyed the U.S.S.R. But that benefit is short-lived. Selling oil and gas at a 40-25% discount to world prices to an ever-more limited series of customers, and mainly to one customer (China) that is looking shaky in its economic and political stability, is a process on the edge of a precipice. Cui malo?

A forced China dependency on only one discount oil supplier pulls yet another block from their already wobbly Jenga. The existential risks in their economic and political structure are immediate. Demographically China is beginning to disappear. The underpinnings of their economy both domestically and internationally are a house of cards in an ever-increasing breeze. Their real estate market makes our 2008 mortgage crisis look like a nickel and dime game. Unserviceable “shadow” debt amongst all their smaller governmental units is appearing in the limelight. Reversing Keynesian economics, they empower production over demand and consistently sell to that demand at a discount to their cost of production. Their supreme leader Xi has tasked the military with being ready to invade and take Taiwan by 2027 while also extending tentacles throughout the China sea region. The distraction of U.S. by the Iran conflict, as well as our rapid depletion of weaponry and the possible diversion of more weaponry from other theaters (Indo-Pacific), may make Chine more likely to go for Taiwan now. Yet Xi has decapitated that military, now effectively being not only the commander in chief but essentially the only commander available to all military branches. His diffuse anti-corruption (political opposition) campaign corrodes the foundations of his authority and power.

That authority and power is also being eroded in the international stage. Many countries are awakening to the indentured servitude embodied in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China lost incipient control of the Panama Canal. With the probable destruction of the Iranian theocracy China loses not only discounted oil but also potential indirect control of the Strait of Hormuz and its proxy terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Those groups, under the capo di tutti capi of the Ayatollah, provided very useful distractions and expenditures of the West as well as threatened leverage over Saudi Arabia. That country is not only the crucial energy supplier of the West but also a foundation of the international reserve currency, the “petro dollar”, founded by Richard Nixon’s suspension of the Bretton Woods accord. That distraction, weakening, and leverage, as well as the Belt and Road Initiative, enabled progress in replacing the petro dollar with the BRICS currency, whatever that might be. Much of that akinetic warfare against the West is dissipating.

Destruction of the Mecca Mafiosi removes the major obstacle to some type of peace in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords might become a new social and economic covenant in that long-troubled region, a benefit to their peoples and the international community as a whole. Playing dominos anywhere in the world distracts from the home game.

What about Venezuela? Their repetitive failed experiment in dictatorial Communism (not the dictatorship of the proletariat but of elite international narco-criminals) destroyed one of the wealthiest nations in the world. What should have been the leading light of South America became a suckling pig of Russia and China. Through subjugated alliance with Russia, Venezuela became the energy provider of last resort to Cuba. That country’s economy is even more threadbare than Venezuela’s. With our removal of Maduro on international criminal charges, the U.S. has bullied the remaining political gangs there to at least appear to cooperate with a devolution towards some form of representative capitalism. Perhaps a Milei will arise there, perhaps not. Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and Hezbollah have lost their major foothold in the Western hemisphere, and in the process, Cuba may finally collapse to a more truly democratic form of government and become the jewel of the Caribbean. Nothing emboldens a people as much as starvation and the complete absence of opportunity.

A Western fable has it that the Chinese character for crisis means simultaneously danger and opportunity. The U.S., in dethroning Venezuela’s capo and destroying the engines of Iranian theocratic despotism, has perhaps knocked one leg off of China and Russia’s three-legged stool. But we have knocked two or three legs out from under Venezuela and Iran and therein lies the danger. Europe’s Treaty of Versailles attempted to make Germany a disunited Luddite community. What resulted was the Weimar Republic, the destruction of its currency, and the rise of yet another god of hope requiring worship with the peoples’ wealth and blood. Venezuela and Iran have already destroyed their own currencies.

Some favor restoration of their economies, post-conflict, via dollarization. Tempting, as yet another banderilla in the BRICS bull. But our currency, despite its status as the foundation of international commerce, lives only on the full faith and confidence in our government’s nebulous ability to finance it ad infinitum with ever-expanding debt. Both the domestic and international communities find their faith and confidence fading. The loss of international confidence in our government’s fiscal responsibility is what necessitated our going off the gold standard to a fully fiat currency based loosely on the value of petroleum. Rescuing collapsed economies by expanding the reach of our fiat fantasy is a recipe for wider and SWIFTer worldwide depression. But that is a subject for others more expert than I.

All figures derived from research on Perplexity.

This involved all-day lectures, presentations, and practice in possible European war operations. As almost none of our active-duty physicians of that period had any direct war experience, doctors with extensive experience in treating casualties were urgently brought in. These were occasionally reservists, but mostly civilians who had served as war surgeons and/or general medical officers during Viet Nam. They exposed us to long slide shows and films of wounds both minor and ghastly, and how they had learned to stabilize the victims under adverse conditions with minimal support so the wounded soldiers could be transported “out of country” to full-service military hospitals for definitive care. Many of the methods shown were learned after long periods of adverse outcomes. Some of the methods of treatment violated the standards of wound care which we had all learned in civilian training. One war surgeon, now a thoracic surgeon in civilian life, began to explain the need for a complete neck dissection if a wound of any kind was found to have penetrated the thin, almost paper-like muscle from the neck over the upper chest called the platysma. Several of our surgeons, trained in civilian institutions before entering military service, immediately protested at this seemingly excessive maneuver. Our lecturer was unfazed; he referred the audience to his published series of over four hundred cases from his experiences in Viet Nam.

Some more practical training occurred. Two items come to mind, one announced, the other a surprise. During our Medical Red Flag exercise, someone tossed a smoke grenade into the small passenger terminal at our airfield. In the ensuing panic, all we had to triage were some glass wounds from those who bailed out through the windows, and a broken arm, if memory serves. The announced event was wound comparison. Goats were shot, one with an M-16 rifle, still our standard issue, the other with an AK-47, the likely Russian armament. Comparisons of the effectiveness of the rounds were noted. Unmentioned was the fact that the M-16 was designed for short distance jungle warfare after the M-14 from post-WWII days had proven too unwieldy. The upcoming return to the European theater would once again involve longer distances better served by the older weapon with different wound characteristics. Of course, European warfare would once again involve protracted fighting in tight urban areas. As the saying goes, militaries often seem to enter new wars with the weapons and tactics of their last war.

More modern and highly anticipated methods of the expected warfare in Europe were introduced. The likelihood of encountering chemical warfare agents was heavily emphasized. This was based on a Syrian T-34 tank (Soviet in origin) that Israel had disabled during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The Israelis, and our military intelligence units, had examined the tank very thoroughly. One curious item of interest was a metal box, similar to a Band Aid box, fastened in the tank’s crew area. This box contained several wooden “spatulas” similar to tongue blades, and auto-injectors of atropine. This was a clear indication of chemical warfare capability and intent by the Soviets with nerve-gas type agents. The wooden spatulas were to be used to scrape the agent, a liquid-gel type, off uniforms or persons to prevent or reduce absorption through the skin. The autoinjectors provided a very crude antidote.

We were not told what our own troops might use for protection, as we would be at medical aid stations of various degrees of sophistication “behind the lines”. We were provided with and instructed in the use of chemical warfare environment uniforms. These were standard issue type green fatigues but made of a denser almost canvas-like material, lined with a layer of activated charcoal, and then another layer of cloth. Trying them out for a simulated period of casualty care, we found the difficulty in donning them was only exceeded by that of walking, bending, or working in any medical capacity.

Our service’s solution to the third presumed method of warfare in Europe was much simpler. Both the U.S. and the Warsaw Pact were known to have tactical nuclear weapons, for destruction of troops and facilities and denial of landscape via nuclear contamination. For example, barrels, similar to 55-gallon drums with small nuclear devices inside, could be rapidly deployed to pre-existing cavities in bridges and other critical facilities. Routine short-range theater-type missiles had been designed by both sides to carry small nuclear warheads if the need arose. No real protection against blast or radiation was possible on a battlefield or anywhere nearby. However, after cursory training in the levels of radiation sickness to be expected with various degrees of exposure, we were reassured that caring for such casualties would not be a problem. We would be working in, and I quote, “a shirt-sleeve environment”. No one offered, however, to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.

We were told, however, that the shirt-sleeve environment would not, as until then we had presumed, be in CONUS. That is, the Continental United States. The final part of our orientation and training were the intended orders of deployment. Our military leaders had war-gamed engaging Russia’s Warsaw Pact endlessly for all the years of the Cold War and had a very robust idea of the tools to be used. That included medical officers. Our trainers explained, very matter-of-factly, that those military physicians already in the European theater would have been expended within two to four weeks, during which we would have been outfitted appropriately, mobilized, and sent to replace them. We were expected to last another two to four weeks. By that time, after one to two months, our commanders expected that the stateside civilian population of physicians could have been mobilized as needed to continue support both in theater (if not denied by chemical and nuclear agents) and stateside. No mention was made of the availability or utility of European troops or resources.

The hologram of horror disappeared as rapidly as it had formed. Some diplomatic and/or military misunderstanding was corrected, and everybody on both sides stood down to the usual five minutes to midnight.

The unspoken capability of our European allies then was far greater than today. Raising defense expenditures up to 2%, or even the fantasy figure of 5%, takes time. Building out weapons production capability takes time, as demonstrated by the Ukrainian conflict. That is not a war of acquisition only, but a carefully controlled reality wargame designed to test the West’s ability and willingness to respond, and the time required. But the real underlying factor limiting effective European participation in their own defense is demography and patriotism.

True, the European population is several times that of Russia. Overall, Europe’s share of military age is estimated at 25-27% of the total population. Despite the Me Too and DEI movements, the majority available for military service are probably males, thus this drops the potential pool to 12-17% by guesswork. The EU has a population of 450 million without the U.K. Of those, 47 million are foreign born, with 30-40% of military age. It’s possible that well less than half of these might be available to be drafted into service, given many of them are illegal and many still retain complete loyalty to their culture of origin. Many of the EU’s men (women) of military age might not be available, either. Recent publications have noted the unwillingness of German youth to join their armed forces as that nation seeks to rapidly enhance its readiness. Ukraine once again provides a possible example. Their pre-war population of military age was 10-11 million, or 25-30% of the total. Ukraine deliberately drafted men older than this to fight, sparing the young to keep the economy going. Nonetheless, since 2014, that population of 18–35-year-olds has shrunken by 30-40%, with many leaving the country to avoid possible conscription into the war. Despite this hollowing out of manpower resources, Ukraine hangs on. But the attrition continues, yard by yard, because the Russians do not care about the cost of lives destroyed or damaged. They have, and will continue, to obtain non-Russian troops to supplement their native warriors.

The EU has an open deficit in arms and capability. It has a far greater deficit in potential willing warriors. So does their persistently generous sponsor, the United States. Selective service remains, but conscription will not happen unless a massive attack upon CONUS occurs—that would have to be nuclear, given our two protective moats.

NATO is perhaps willing to defend the EU if generally attacked. It is entirely unclear if NATO will be capable and willing to defend further “snacks” by the Russians. They took Crimea to obtain the strategic necessity of a warm water port and are trying to take Ukraine to gain its agricultural productive capacity and as a buffer zone. Meanwhile Kaliningrad, their strategic Baltic port, remains tenuously under their control. We anticipated Russia would want and take Crimea but engaged in benign neglect. Given their long-term heavy buildup of bases and forces in their northwest, why would they not “return” Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the fold? Do Europe and the U.S. possess the fortitude to deter and if needed resist?

The shrinkage of the West’s military age population, the overweening needs of its increasingly aged populations consuming a growing percent of the GDP while contributing less, may make acquiescence more attractive than attrition. The Russians have the same demographic re-balancing but are willing to deprive their people of welfare-state parasitic supports. And, as demonstrated from the Tsarist years through the Sovie years and into the new Russian Federation years, their population and its welfare are expendable to their vision of a renewed empire.

The Russians don’t care. Will we, and the Europeans, care enough?

In all the occasionally violent controversy over detaining and deporting those who entered this country illegally, one glaringly obvious issue is overlooked.

No doubt that federal authorities might rarely detain a legal citizen or legally resident immigrant, and some few of these instances may be based on “racial profiling”. Remembering that everybody, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status is subject to the same TSA screening despite continued overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of airplane terrorists (except for drunks) are younger males and from a distinct part of the world, and that the Israeli’s practice a highly successful and more focused screening of airline passengers arriving and leaving that beleaguered nation, we can take righteous pleasure in the virtuous equity of our practices. Some few cities practice targeted law enforcement, finding that the majority of significant crimes are committed in distinct neighborhoods by a limited group of career criminals. Most, however, dilute their enforcement resources throughout their jurisdictions to avoid accusations of social injustice despite Pascal Bruckner’s dictum that “fault and injury end with the person who committed or suffered them”.

But a careful following of news reports viewed with a jaundiced eye towards their possible bias indicates that most of these federal actions are conducted by well-identified federal officers operating within federal immigration law very often with judicially approved warrants against specific individuals for serious crimes aside from illegally entering our nation. Others, also present without legal status, are frequently caught up in the same net with the sought-after seriously criminal aliens. Under federal law, these officers cannot ignore them or give them sanctuary without themselves violating federal law and their oaths.

The current hysteria regarding so-called “immigration sweeps” may have begun with the July 10, 2025, Ice House raid in Camarillo, California. Some 300 illegal aliens were found there and taken into custody, including a dozen or so minors. Sadly, one legal immigrant, fleeing officers for unknown reasons, fell to his death from the roof of the building. But this was not a “sweep” based on the ethnic or racial profile of the workers. One of the federal officers announced to an apparently Anglo supervisor, on cellphone video widely seen in news reports, that it was not an “Ice raid”, but a raid based on a judicial warrant for suspected violations of employment laws. Those detained demonstrated the justification of that warrant. Later the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, stated publicly that the warrant was based on a months-long investigation that began during President Biden’s tenure. The “targets” of the warrant and the raid were the owners of the business and their labor contractors.

Ever since then, multiple actions and “raids” have taken place in many areas of the nation, generally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Appropriate since we know that over 12 million persons were allowed (encouraged, enabled?) to knowingly break federal law and cross in completely uncontrolled fashion into our country. The venues of these targeted raids are most often cities and states that have decided to ignore federal supremacy over immigration established in our Constitution and nullify federal law without federal legislative action or federal judicial support. These localities have sometimes openly placed their citizenry and other residents in mortal danger as we saw in Aurora, Colorado. Here a dangerous international gang, Tren de Aragua, had taken over five apartment complexes, ejecting residents in favor of their own occupancy and charging many for “protection”. Local officials openly acknowledged the situation and ignored or minimized its importance until federal officials intervened to eject these illegal aliens actively engaged in violent criminal conduct. After all, as one mainstream media personality said to Vice President Vance during an interview, “Its only five apartment buildings”.

Another particular example is the “Maryland Dad”, illegally present for years, and previously charged with spousal abuse plus an event in Tennessee wherein he was almost certainly transporting adults being trafficked for labor. That latter deferral came at the hands not of local Tennessee law enforcement or officials, but at the instruction of the prior administration’s immigration officials. Yes, his overdue exit from our country was mishandled by an overzealous new administration, and he has been returned to the U.S. for due process, which currently includes a full release from federal detention. What future activities, legal or illegal, he may engage in remains to be seen.

Many others whose detention and/or deportation have been publicly reported have histories of heinous crimes in their home countries and/or new violent felonies here. Many of those have one or more prior deportations or deportation orders that they have ignored, returning again and again to commit new crimes. Their apprehension and detention is usually direct and rapid by federal officers. What does this perhaps tell us?

Unlike the Ice House raid, no stories of long investigations accompany the announcements of their arrests. They are often apprehended in the same area of a city as a group, with collateral detentions of others who may or may not have engaged in criminal activity with them but are present illegally. Although nothing has been said by federal or local officials, it seems clear that these individuals and their locales were known to local officials and easily learned by federal law enforcement. As in the Aurora, Colorado benign neglect of Tren de Aragua by local law enforcement and city officials. True, some local law enforcement, although forbidden by local or state sanctuary laws from disclosing the presence and locales of these criminal aliens, may be acting as silent whistleblowers to the federal forces. In a few cases, federal officials may become aware of the potential release from local custody of criminal aliens and simply stake out the jail or courtroom. But that costs time off the streets and occasionally is futile if a local judge chooses to aid a criminal alien in escape as happened in Michigan. The majority of federal apprehensions of criminal aliens seems independent of direction by local law enforcement.

Nonetheless, federal immigration authorities seem to rapidly locate these persons. Probably due to widespread knowledge amongst local officials, local law enforcement, and local citizenry in the neighborhoods these criminals frequent and victimize. That is the true abdication; that local authorities know about these dangerous individuals and choose to do nothing, other than perhaps apprehending them when they commit yet another local crime, and then running the accused through the revolving door of social justice, to violate the peace and security of their citizenry again.

Providing sanctuary from federal immigration law is thinly disguised violation of federal immigration law, acting as accomplices to the ongoing presence of lawbreakers. Choosing to actively neglect and ignore known criminals just because they happen to be here illegally is a travesty.

The Brown University mass shooting does bring up a very specific gun issue. The teaching assistant at the auditorium (apparently a bleacher-style room) saw the evil murderer immediately upon the killer’s entry. He has stated that he saw the “long gun” and presumed he would die. Somehow, he and others hid behind a large desk in the auditorium and escaped harm while the vicious beast fired “at least 40 rounds” (per announcement by the police at press conferences) all over the room with the resultant carnage. The perpetrator may or may not have targeted that particular classroom or intended to kill someone in that class (we may never know), because the killer then left the room and the building without seeking victims elsewhere, at least from what we have been told so far.

Despite the lack of video coverage within the building (did he know this?), he was seen on video leaving the building, walking casually away. New video shows what may have been the same person, stocky, dressed in black pants, black cap and mask, and two-toned jacket or sweatshirt, walking in various areas near campus prior to the mass murder incident. Curiously the killer did not leave via these same neighborhood areas that he may have been “casing”. Had he noted the private video cameras in these areas? Or was he just incredibly lucky? Or have the investigators withheld video from his escape to aid their investigation? What might be the reasons the killer did not escape via his known route? None of those are my central question.

That central question is: where is the long gun he used for the attack? A “long gun” as described is a rifle, and given the number of rounds fired and their rapidity, probably was some type of “assault rifle”. Given Rhode Island’s very restrictive gun laws, such a weapon and its large capacity magazines will have come from out of state. These weapons, even with folding stocks, are very difficult to conceal, and perhaps impossible to hide on your person with the clothing seen on the killer in the videos. No released video of the killer’s attack shows him entering the building or wandering within and into the classroom he attacked. But the video of his exit clearly does NOT show a long gun on his person. Nor do we see such a weapon in the “pre-attack” videos of his wanderings in the local neighborhood. Where did it come from, and where did it go?

The description of the killing field supports the use of a rifle rather than a pistol. Semi-automatic pistols max out at 13-17 rounds, and the authorities already know what type of weapon was used as the killer seemingly did not take the time to police his brass. A semi-automatic pistol would need frequent new magazines for this many rounds. Those magazines and the pistol could be secreted under the killer’s clothing as seen. But the very number of rounds and the statement of the teaching assistant clearly favor a “long gun”, a rifle. Certainly, a semi-automatic rifle requiring magazines as anything else requires manual reloading every five rounds or so depending on caliber. This, too, is a nagging problem. The maximum readily obtainable magazines for assault rifles are 20-30 rounds, and they are fairly bulky, again raising the issue of concealment while minimizing the need for magazine changing.

Given all this supposition/speculation, where was the rifle and its magazine(s) before the killer’s attack, and where did it go after? Such bulky items are not concealable under the clothes of the killer seen pre-attack (if this is the person) and certainly not after the attack as the killer leaves the campus building. Was the weapon pre-staged within the building by the killer at a prior time? Was the weapon secreted somewhere within the building after the attack but before the killer left the building? Or was someone else involved in bringing the weapon into the building and then, in the mass confusion after the shootings (remember the 17 minute or so delay in the local police locking down the building and campus), the accomplice blithely walked/ran away with the weapon/ammunition in a large backpack or underneath a winter coat?

My concerns may be speculative fantasies. But they seem obvious. When will the media and/or the officials address these seemingly obvious problems?

Stay tuned as they continue to stumble through their investigations. As will I.

The basis for more serious crime may not be complex. Much is done in self-interest such as robbery and burglary. Some is the result of the unbridled passions of hate, jealousy, envy, and revenge. A major source of crime to which we have become jaded and accepting (aside from personal experience) is bigotry—anger and actions based on fear of the Other. Based in race, ethnicity, gender, faith, political belief, or almost any intersectional definable characteristic of humanity. Few experience the first two types of criminal activity personally. Many now routinely experience bigotry, although the definition of that may be difficult as many of those intersectional factions claim victimhood for the sake of self-aggrandizement.

These are a kind of idolatry of evil which we have never expunged despite the many travails told in the Old Testament and the testimony and sacrifice of Jesus in the New Testament. Christianity’s Ten Commandments specify not acting in furtherance of crimes and exorcising them from our thoughts and personal behavior. Perhaps crime entered the human psyche as a rotted instinct of self-preservation with that first bite of the apple. It is the product of free will, but so is its antidote, human reason. The “freed will” to act criminally often begins with small tests. Stopping these small tests, quality of life crimes such as breaking windows, was proven before to reduce more serious crime in NYC. Recently, I was given the opportunity to do so.

This past July, I and a middle-aged woman with significant physical disability were manning a Voter’s Registration Booth for the Republican Party in the Heritage Fair our small city holds yearly. We were available, not proselytizing, providing information to those interested. Occasionally someone of another political persuasion would indicate their disapproval verbally or with gestures. Our best trained response was to listen attentively, learning what we could about their point of view, and then thanking them for sharing their opinions, even if given in an antisocial manner. We knew from long experience that a person who pronounces absolutes without engaging in dialogue is not subject to debate or reason. Well after dark I was standing behind our main table and beside a large metal table holding various political tchotchkes. Suddenly that table was slammed into the side of my right knee, almost knocking me to the ground. As I untangled myself from the table, a chair, and the tchotchkes, the young man who had slammed the table into my knee came around to the front of our booth, screamed “Fascists!”, and then spit at us. He then turned and walked away while we tried to rearrange our booth and I sat down to examine my knee.

My best friend, a retired police officer, has often told me that whatever else criminals are, they are stupid. Case in point. One hundred yards down the street the young man was now walking by the Sheriff’s Command Center for the Heritage Fair. After my coworker had been assured that I was not seriously injured, she took off after the fellow despite the difficulties of her disability. She followed him past the Sheriff’s center and watched him turn down a side street. The Sheriffs were actually dealing with a fistfight elsewhere at the fair, but the dispatcher at the command center radioed two of them who promptly arrived. They heard the tale, and chased down the young man. He hadn’t bothered to try to run away. When cuffed, he openly admitted to what he had done. Perhaps this was a red badge of courage for this 17 year-old, ready for display on his social media posts.

The Sheriff’s officers then completed their investigation. They examined the scene, looked at my knee, and then questioned myself and my coworker. I dismissed their suggestion of medical attention, since as a retired physician I knew of no serious damage save the possibility of a delayed bleed into the joint (I am on anticoagulation) which might require attention later. The officers then explained that, given the individual was a juvenile and they had not witnessed the event, they were required to “cite” him and release him, which they did. They provided both of us with an “incident report card” with the case number. At the end of our evening, I was alone to pack up the valuables from the booth and carry the carton some 4 blocks to my car. My reaction to walking those unlit streets was my first hint of things to come

The criminal justice system, whether adult or juvenile, apparently works in a bath of molasses. After many weeks of not being contacted about the situation, I began calling, emailing, and letter-writing to the District Attorney’s office and the Sherriff’s office. Eventually I was told that cases like mine might take up to a year to be “filed”. This seemed remarkable. I contacted the Sheriff’s office for a copy of the incident report, using the number given, clearly identifying myself as the victim. The Sheriff happily provided the report after I paid a twenty dollar fee. The report, three pages long, contained my name and address, but almost everything else was redacted. I, as a victim of an admittedly small criminal act, could not see the evidence that the District Attorney might depend on if the case ever went to court. This prompted more letters to the District Attorney and the Sheriff’s office regarding the absurdity of both the fee and the redactions (I understood they might want to redact the juvenile’s identifying information). As my long term readers realize, I am addicted to written verbiage. A bureaucratic silence descended on the whole affair.

Meanwhile, a couple of friends through the local Republican party had heard of the incident from my coworker, and confirmed what had happened with me. One was a Sheriff’s officer, another an aid to a local county supervisor. Suddenly, a week later, a “Victim’s Advocate” from the juvenile department in the District Attorney’s office called, confirming awareness of the case and that it had indeed been filed with the court system. Their response might take as long as a week, I was told. Sure enough, the next week I was notified of the first Juvenile Court date.

Juvenile Court locally bears little resemblance to adult courts. The advocate told me that cases usually moved quickly unless a private attorney mounted a vigorous defense. Normally the first hearing detailed the charge and basis for the charge, offering the defendant opportunity to proceed further. If choosing not to defend, the accused would then be subject to a several week investigation by the Juvenile Probation office, including evaluating any past encounters with law enforcement, school attendance and performance, and family dynamics. I would also be interviewed regarding my experience with the episode and what my desires as to the outcome, including restitution, might be. Then at a second hearing before the same judge, the Probation Office would submit their report and recommendations to the court. Without unusual circumstances or further testimony on my part, those recommendations are always followed. All this was detailed my extensive discussion with the Victim’s Advocate.

The first court date arrived in a couple of weeks. The defendant, now much more conservatively shorn and dressed than on the night of the incident, was present with his own family and Public Defender . I and my spouse were on the opposite side of the courtroom behind the “District Attorney of the Day”, who probably handled a number of cases with which he was familiar from the reports. The judge detailed the alleged offense, and the accused denied wanting to mount a defense. Quite appropriate, since he had admitted to the attack to the arresting Sheriff’s officers that night. Further legal mumbo jumbo between defense and prosecuting counsel with the judge occurred, and then I was given the opportunity to speak. Standing at the bar, microphone in hand, I discovered hidden damages I had not suspected.

I detailed what had happened that night, offering one small correction to the officers’ report. Besides slamming the metal table into my knee, the young man had not “spit gum on the ground” in front of us—he very definitely spit at us, after screaming “Fascists”. This was the very heroic nature of his resistance to the regime. I noted my advanced age, my concerns as to delayed bleeding from the attack, and then stumbled onto a hidden landmine of emotion. Since that episode, “I have been unable to work any informational booths at night, and avoid walking anywhere at night. When I do work informational booths, I am constantly on the lookout for where the next attack may come from, and what my escape route might be.” Realizing this, saying it, almost evoked a panic attack.

Before that moment, I had not known, not understood, the residual this young man had left in me. As a prior trained military medical officer, I well knew PTSD, the long-term emotionally bleeding scars left behind in our warriors, and that persons exposed to criminal actions might suffer the same. Yet my incident, fairly minor in the scheme of things, had given me a new compassion and empathy for those so more strongly affected. Crime, even minor, causes ongoing damage.

The judge detailed the process following that initial hearing. We left, being notified of the second hearing in about three weeks where final disposition would be decided. Bureaucratic fog descended again, with no signs of my interview with the Probation Office.

This time, an email to the Victim’s Advocate four days before the hearing generated an immediate reply and then a call from a Probation Officer that afternoon. Perfunctory, but covered the bases. He asked for any other input, and whether I though restitution required. There was no objective damage that could be repaired, only the emotional kind. He then made a very useful offer—did I think a “Stay away” order, a kind of Temporary Restraining Order, would be helpful? Yes, indeed, since from court papers I had learned the attacker lived only a mile or so away. Once again to court, the players unchanged.

Here the judge reviewed the Probation Office report and offered the attacker the opportunity to comment. He deferred. I was then given the opportunity again to stand before the bar. I had thought a lot about the situation while my spouse and I again waited for the court session in a private attorney-client conference room, saving us the problem of accidentally confronting my attacker outside the courtroom. I wrote some quick notes about what I wanted to say to this young man and the court. Anger or revenge were not anywhere to be found within my feelings. I wanted this young man, who apparently had never been involved in criminal action before, and lived in a nice neighborhood with a strong nuclear family, to come away with some miniscule wisdom that might guide his future actions. His probation would be six months, with strict behavioral controls at home, in public, and in school, and accountability for his school work, as well as hours of “Community Service”. Externally applied borders to his behavior, but only temporary and not applying to his thinking or beliefs. I thought I might try to plant a seed of wisdom within him.

One quote I carry around with me perhaps applies more to my reaction than to his actions. In Proverbs it is stated, “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.” David Mamet, one of my favorite writers, distilled this thusly: “The most possible human approach to wisdom is sadness.” I was indeed sad for him, and what he was well on the way to becoming.

And so I told him and the court: “I hope he realizes or will learn through probation that he has gone beyond a quality of life crime to assault and battery, based purely on learned bigotry. That charge, under other circumstances, could have been a felony. I hope he will now learn to educate himself more deeply in civic affairs and civil discussion, and that: Dialogue is always more important than consensus. Wisdom listens. Taste your words before you spit them out.” (thanks to Charlie Kirk for his pearls).

The judge then notified the defendant of the Stay Away order with a three year duration. The District Attorney “served” him with that order, noting that if he came within 100 yards of me, my family, or my home that would violate his probation and be another crime for which he would be prosecuted. I later noted that the order also forbid his possession or purchase of firearms or ammunition. The judge admonished the young man with the terms of his sentence, noting that he was fortunate that the Juvenile Justice System operated differently than the adult system. The next, and perhaps final, court date would be 6 months hence. Providing he had not violated probation in any way, the charges would be sealed. I will be there again, interested in whether this young man shows any directional change in his life. After all, in a few short months, he will be eligible to vote.

From this, so far, I have learned that even just breaking a clear window changes your outlook remarkably. That clear glass through which we see the world protects us against wind, rain, heat, and cold. Turns out that protection is very fragile. I will have a long time in replacing it.

Governor Newsom said the problem is President Trump, and the answer to rigging the Congressional elections in Texas was to repeat the cheat and rig the California Congressional elections. Thus, strictly on the basis of “getting” Trump, that well-constructed and operating state constitutional process has been tossed aside by California’s Democrat electorate. Maps produced simultaneously with the publication of Proposition 50, drawn by unknown persons and process in the supermajority state legislature, all but guarantee removal of at least five of the paltry nine Republican Congressman in 2026. Rural areas are now combined with dense Democrat cities with which they have no community interest commonality . Many geographic communities are fragmented into multiple other districts. The presumed gain of five Texas Republican Congress members is now erased. Trump is stymied in attempting to enlarge the slim Republican House majority.

Checkmate.

Actually, only the opening moves of pawns in a longer political chess game.

Proposition 50 grants the California Democrat supermajority legislature sole power to redistrict “temporarily” through 2030. Then the prior Citizen’s Commission “returns”. The newly declared purely partisan gerrymandering will apply to the 2026 Congressional election, the 2028 general election for President and Congress, and again for the 2030 Congressional election. Even if the state legislature should deign to return redistricting to the people of the California (don’t hold your breath), this particular period was designed to enhance opportunities to again impeach President Trump, disable his successor 2028 candidate, allow Newsom to anoint his gubernatorial successor in California, and propel Newsom into the White House in 2029. How so?

Firstly, after minimizing Republican Congressional representation in 2026, any remnant will be eliminated with further redistricting for 2028. That 100% Democrat representation in 2028 will be reinforced “permanently” by the again redistricted 2030 Congressional election. California’s all-Democrat Congressional panel, beholden to Newsom for their exclusive officialdom, will be beholden to his presidential candidacy. A crucial force in the Democrat recapture of the Presidency, Congress, and perhaps Senate that may be generational in duration.

Secondly, flipping the House to a Democrat majority, even if slim, will allow yet another impeachment of Trump. Whether or not it goes to trial in the Senate is meaningless. Democrats learned from the various hoaxes of 2016 and following that the process of dealing with impeachment disables a President for the remainder of his term. Or, as in Richard Nixon’s case, requires his resignation. The Democrat House would then largely frustrate his successor, Vance, who might even be named in impeachment as a “co-conspirator”. These efforts alone, focused solely on perceived wrongs (real and invented), would enhance the Democrat’s chances to gain the Presidency in 2028 and hamstring any Republican candidate.

Thirdly, having re-established the West Coast Brown-Pelosi power family (with Scott Wiener as a token Progressive), Newsom will be the anointer of his replacement as governor. He will hand that person autocratic control of California state politics lasting the foreseeable future. Why would that new governor betray the party and Newsom by allowing a return of the Citizen’s Redistricting Commission?

Finally, with his demonstration of national power in using his Democrat House unanimity in the 2026 and 2028 elections, Newsom would be the obvious candidate for President in 2028. Progressives such as AOC or Sanders only have policies of Not Trump and a complete slide into socialism. Newsom, having “defeated Trump” with redistricting, and whose only other policy is saying anything that gets him elected, will have shown his ability to raise “establishment” Democrats from the grave they are currently digging for themselves. That may carry them to tripartite control of the House, the Senate, and the White House. The Supreme Court will be desert.

Newsom’s only weakness in these scenarios rests with that U. S. Supreme Court ruling on the federal Constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering. While being obvious and accepted for over two centuries, never before has partisan gerrymandering been publicly “declared” as the only reason for doing so. Since the states have the power of running elections under the Constitution, the adjudication of this clear disenfranchisement of a substantial number of voters will be a narrow thing. Would the voters of California return to their sense of true democracy and reverse this “temporary” rigging themselves after 2030? Unlikely, as the majority’s absolute hatred of our democratically elected President and his party overwhelms their sense of decency and honor. And, as they have said many times, that state minority are deplorable, fascistic garbage.

Should the above be the end game, we will have no one else to blame except ourselves.

The very bottom end of that curve usually involves our callous inhumanity, or even our offhand savagery, to our fellows. These require a learned suspension of empathy, and occasionally, compassion. Over 50 years two such incidents stand out in memory. One of bestial aggression, the other the cruelest of passive aggression.

During training many fledgling physicians “moonlight”. In the old brutalist days of internship and residency (wherein you were truly ‘interned’ in the hospital, later given the slight freedom of ‘residing’ there), training in county medical centers was sixteen hour days of seven day work weeks with two or three night calls per week. Some would work a “free” night off in another hospital’s emergency room. These were usually smaller community or proprietary hospitals needing someone from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.. They paid a moderate hourly salary with the expectation of two or three hours intermittent sleep for the moonlighter.

One such hospital was Broadway General, bordering one of our more troubled neighborhoods. My night began emphatically with an elderly, wasted lung cancer patient who was dropped off between her radiation therapy center and her nursing home due to a sudden fit of coughing blood. While staff began starting intravenous fluids, setting up oxygen, drawing blood, and all those other TV medical tasks, I leaned over to listen to her heart and lungs. She had a massive obstructed cough and blew a gray blood-speckled sponge into my face. A piece of her lung, dead from cancer and/or radiation. As I recoiled in irritation, she bled out and died. Our attempts at reviving her heart or breathing were immediately futile. I washed up, changed from splattered whites to spare surgical scrubs, saw her off to the hospital “morgue” (small room with large air conditioner), and filled out the short report. In the dark parlance of trainee medicine, she was a DIER—died in the ER. Acceptance of futility and impotence, and an absence of empathy in the moment, are some of the more important lessons in medicine.

That lesson was viciously repeated a few hours hence. Nurse roused me from the sleeping closet noting a “hot shooting” was coming in. Transport from a nearby all night convenience store was police car, as the officers immediately saw that waiting for paramedics would deny the victim any chance at life. Officers and ER techs loaded a wildly thrashing young man onto a gurney outside and rushed him in as the nursing staff prepped IVs, resuscitation gear, intubation trays, and called in the portable X-Ray machine and tech in a well-rehearsed ballet. The young man, not much beyond boyhood, had been the lone clerk at the convenience store on the night three people decided to rob it. He arrived in the ER face-down on the gurney, the police officers noting he had been shot several time in the buttocks. The robbers apparently thought it funny. Many vital organs, difficult to repair, are within the pelvis. But that wasn’t the issue. We flipped him over and immediately saw the thoughtless cruelty of the shooters.

They had him lie face down on the floor of the store—a tile concrete floor. 9 mm parabellum rounds (as later determined) at close range penetrate intact. Here they had gone through the boy’s pelvis, rebounded off the floor, and returned into his abdominal cavity. The damage was extraordinary, the bleeding internally and externally a flood of escaping life. We started large bore IVs, squeezed liters of fluids in, considered an “emergency angiogram” by squirting dye by hand syringe into his veins and arteries to get a portable X-ray picture of his internal bleeding sites, and considered whether to seek transport to a trauma hospital and/or call in one of our surgeons on staff. All this in a matter of less than three minutes.

In movies and TV, victims of gunshot often drop to the ground with little fanfare, some expiring immediately and quietly. Not so in real life. Unless placement is precise, the human body can tolerate multiple rounds, especially jacketed parabellums. This man was suffering unimaginable pain, and as his life leaked away, all his fight and flight hormones were maxed out. Trying to stabilize and treat him was a real physical battle by myself, nurses, and technicians as he struggled violently against death. Death, as expected, won. The grunts and grimaces of his passing remained with all of us. Another DIER, another set of scrubs, and a remnant night of helping police fill out their murder reports.

I was left wondering, did these beasts clothed as men laugh while they needlessly tortured this relative youngster? Did they really think their methods a lark, an entertainment, not a cruel delay of needless death? Being reburied in my training hospital later that morning, I never knew of any justice that might have been obtained.

Any knowledge of justice failed in another case experienced at my training hospital. While on medicine service, we were on call two nights a week, meaning caring for all our inpatients during the day and receiving new admissions from the emergency room all day and especially all night. One large room received males, another females. I rotated new cases with the other intern on the team, both of us fresh out of medical school. “Routine” new admissions gave our jaundiced eyes one of three impressions—an awake, curious and fearful person (the easiest as they could actually give you history), an agitated uncooperative person with a dangerously unknown degree of illness due to the presence or absence of drugs or alcohol or rapidly advancing acute or chronic illness, and a lump under a sheet. My next rotation was rolled into the women’s room, a motionless and unusually short lump under a sheet.

Always best to have an initial look and listen to a new patient before reading the ER notes. Listening was not to be. Pulling down the sheet revealed a very wasted (cachectic, think concentration camp victim) female of undeterminable age curled up in a tight fetal position. Eyes open, not responsive to my queries. No obvious acute physical distress. But the fetal position was not voluntary. All her extremities, hands, arms, legs, fingers, were all tightly contracted. That is, they could not be extended by the patient or by me. She had to have been in this position, voluntary or otherwise, for a long time for her muscles and tendons to “fix” in place. Confirming that I quickly noted a large deep decubitus on her lower back/upper buttocks. Decubiti are “bedsores” that form with continued pressure on just one area of the body, and form as skin and then tissue die and slough away due to poor circulation and pressure. They always tell of malnutrition and severe neglect. I spent a half hour drawing blood for tests and cultures, placing a catheter in her bladder and sending urine for culture, checking her stool for blood, and looking over the urine sample under the microscope for any signs of infection. The same with a swab of the raw flesh in her decubitus. I started intravenous fluids and ordered a chest x-ray. That was going to be a real challenge for the radiology technician.

Since she seemed stable for the moment and certainly was “self-restrained”, I finally reviewed the Emergency Room record. Just an 8 x 11 sheet, really, with various boxes checked/unchecked, a sentence or two of the history, and brief notes of an exam just detailed enough to determine that she needed to go upstairs. As in, almost nothing—her appearance determined her immediate need for admission and her destination amongst all the specialty services.

The history was of nonchalant neglect. She had been dropped off by family, as they “were no longer able to care for her.” (This was not an unusual reason for arrival in the ER). Given her condition, any “care” had ceased long ago. Bedridden, unmoved, starved. What could have been the proximate cause of her obviously severe disability? How could a family blind themselves so long, avoid the opportunities for home care or nursing homes, etc. that existed for the bottom end of the income scales? Why, how, or who, came to the conclusion that now was the time to finally dispose of her in a way that might relieve their guilt? Was it simply a matter of wanting to avoid the legal consequences of a death at home, and the almost certain subsequent investigations that would cause? The answers were more maddening than I could ever imagine.

Over the first twenty-four hours or so of her admission we treated her with antibiotics and fluids and considered our options for “disposition” In a county medical center this is all-important. Patients tended to stay for 3-4 days or 3-4 weeks, and the latter period usually represented a failure to move the patient on to the next appropriate level of care, clogging up your panel of patients and displacing new patients into hallway beds. General Surgery had already refused to take her but were coming by daily to remove dead tissue from her bedsore. Gastroenterology was trying to figure out how to safely place a feeding tube through her abdominal wall into her stomach given the immovable obstruction of her flexed arms and legs. Orthopedics pronounced her contractures as untreatable at this advanced stage. Nursing homes wouldn’t accept a patient with an active bedsore, and her nutritional status would need to improve over a long time before any tissue and skin grafts to her decubitus could be entertained by the Burn service. Handing over such a patient to the next medicine intern rotating onto the service without a disposition was an almost irreparable badge of shame. She, however, declared her own disposition.

About thirty-six hours into her admission, the fully evil nature of her family’s passive aggressiveness emerged. She went into delirium tremens, alcohol withdrawal syndrome. Only seen in those who drink alcohol heavily and continuously for a substantial period of time. The tools available at that time to suppress the syndrome and prevent death were fairly primitive and minimally effective. Magnesium infused continuously helped quiet the storm of the nervous system, as (perhaps) did an alcohol cousin called paraldehyde. Safer drugs such as valium were not yet known or approved for treatment.

While we struggled through keeping her alive for the next three or four days, our team’s Social Worker came up with answers that we almost couldn’t comprehend. He had learned that the young woman, our shell of a human being, was twenty-five years old, and had been a severe alcoholic for some years. All that, we knew from our experiences with her. He then relayed that the young woman at home became less and less active, unable to go to get alcohol on her own, finally unable to even get up to get it from the cupboard and drink it on her own. When arousing from alcoholic stupor, she would begin screaming endlessly to be brought a drink. And so the family would do, repeatedly, until she re-entered her stupor. Eventually they just kept a bottle of vodka at her bedside, and between cleaning up her excrement and urine, fed her the alcohol in bed. They became collectively exhausted of the effort and expense, and so carried her to the back seat of the family car and brought her to our ER. At least they didn’t truly “dump” her on the pavement outside the ER, as often happened.

Neither we nor she ever saw or heard from the family again. She certainly eventually died. I know not where or how, as after another week or so I collected my red badge of shame by handing her over to the next intern rotating in. And I did not want to know anymore of her or her family. Who willingly seeks familiarity with evil?

That was the 9th level of the bell-shape curve.

PART II EVILS AND ANGELS

RESTORATIONS OF FAITH COME IN SMALL STORIES

And yet that bell curve has another end, trailing off towards divinity.

Years later, well-settled in my private practice, I greeted a young mother and her pre-teen daughter along with “Grannie” in a wheelchair. Both mom and daughter were attentive and affectionate to Grannie, noting she had lived with them for some years after her husband had passed away. Concerns were minor, a possible chest cold, but always of concern in an elderly person with very limited mobility. Grannie’s ability to give history was absent. I quickly saw that this woman, her daughter, and the husband were providing a high level of total care to this lady. Their absolute rejection of consideration of “placement” in a nursing home, etc., quickly became evident. I saw no evidence of significant infection, but clearly a significant neurological problem was present. She couldn’t sit still, squirming and throwing her arms and hands about, legs shuffling, head bobbing here and there. Hearing seemed intact, but she gave no appropriate responses, grunting now and then with a wandering tongue and eyes. This appeared to be a movement disorder called chorea, accompanied by some form of dementia. A rather horrible diagnosis came to mind.

Huntington’s chorea is an hereditary disease, transmitted as an autosomal dominant. That means that a child of a person with the genetic error is very likely to inherit the disease regardless of sex. Onset of symptoms as the nervous system decays can vary from youth to older age, and the progression is always to dementia, total invalidism, and death. Here seemed a clear case in front of me, with two additional generations probably affected. How was I to broach this awful destiny to these warm, loving, attentive descendants?

As is so often the case, the patient and/or the family knew the real situation; here, atypically, there was no denial. I told the adult daughter that Grannie appeared to have a severe neurological disorder that, if confirmed, might be very important to the family. Daughter promptly answered, “Yes, we know, she has Huntington’s chorea”, with an understanding smile by both her and her pre-teen daughter. I asked if she knew the importance of this to her family. I wondered how she could remain so placid with this situation, especially with her daughter present. Was she in denial of the consequences of the diagnosis? How was I to explain the horrible consequences?

After the briefest of puzzled expressions, daughter volunteered, “Oh yes, we know about the heredity. But she’s not really my mother.” She then went on to explain that Grannie had been their new neighbor when she and her husband and baby daughter had moved in to their present home. Grannie and her husband became close friends, and, in effect, adopted grandparents of the young daughter. When Grannie’s husband, her initial caregiver, had died, they just naturally took her in to live with them, and had continued so for years.

And so they did for some time yet, until Grannie passed away, not in hospital or nursing home, but in her adopted family’s home, surrounded by that we all seek but so often fail to find.

Evil may visit us all from time to time, but now and then, angels do live next door.

By page 170 of the hardback edition, his wizardry steps out from behind the curtain and shows its all-powerful truth. Ostensibly only referring to the currency of the early 2020’s, it remains in place today as his predictions evolve before us.

Civilizations and constituent societies progress through recognizable forms. The upheaval of the last few years can be identified as a nascent totalitarian movement by accretion of religious rites, observances, miracles, and martyrs…

An insistence on pansexuality has replaced previous injunctions to chastity with an equal vehemence; vagrancy is redefined as a sort of martyrdom; disorder is celebrated with that pride once reserved for examples of restraint; and “the peace which passeth all understanding” has given way to an insistence on the constant performance of rage….

…how (could) the Left burgeon as it did as a political-religious entity without a name and without a leader(?)

Causes proliferated. Climatists aligned with Black Lives Matter and gradually with Antifa, anti-Zionists, and many others. New constituencies of victimhood were created out of whole cloth based no longer on race or ethnicity alone but also on invented gender and micro-religions. Masses of new victims and potential future voters were invited in.

But what of the leader, that person to whom they could ascribe superhuman powers, whose every action and utterance strengthened their cohesion? The form—insurrection—required a leader…And then the thing became clear….the Left has had a leader…one to whom all attention must be paid. His name ever in our mouths.

…Donald Trump has been the leader of the Left…They couldn’t find anyone…to send in, so they chose the rival team’s most powerful player and instructed (their) faithful that it was opposite day.

Human beings are herd creatures and, knowing ourselves weak, fear isolation….Every society evolved a system that…substituted a group-specific anxiety for a generalized terror….who would have thought this enlightenment would devolve into savagery?

The priests of our new idolatry are the politicians and their nongovernmental like who have discovered the old secret of power gained through fear of the mob.

The greater fear of the Left, “led” by Trump Derangement Syndrome, has become being left out of the mob.

They have changed and added new causes and constituencies like outfits fetched from a deep closet of fear, envy, and resentment of their own good fortune, freedom, and prosperity. They have produced new leaders for a future wherein Orange Man no longer “leads” by opposition. These new leaders, with the vigor of youth equal to Trump’s vigor of enthusiasm, finally found a fusion of all their varied forms of victimhood. Socialism subverts the individual to the collective, but if it is Democratic Socialism, it must be an expression of the will of that collective and therefore legitimate.

This new legitimacy is perfected in the Left’s equally vigorous and charismatic replacement for Not-Trump, Zohran Mamdani. Foreign born, of minority faith that openly opposes Western civilization, he is the embodiment of the new idolatry. His high priestess, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, may honor his leadership through even higher office, being native born, of non-oppressive gender, and a minority that may become our new majority thanks to the birthrate of our recent “invitees”. Or their newly powerful constituencies may be able to modify the Constitution, allowing Mamdani the Presidency in the ultimate act of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We may be witnessing what Mamet calls “a biblical epic”.

The collective of Democratic Socialism seeks the safety of the mob and avoids the fear of self-direction.

Paraphrasing David Mamet, “Choice, born of free will, is a burden of which many seek to be relieved.”

What is your choice?