Volume 12 Number 574

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Image by kropekkpl from Pixabay

Living in Uncertainty

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

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

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

The Depression

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

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

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

World Wat II

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

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

The Cold War

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

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

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

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

Recent Decades

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

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

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

The Birth Rate: A Misread Story

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

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

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

Our Current Lives in Perspective

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

End Note

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

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

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

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

Ernest Hemingway

Volume 12 Number 573

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Image by Martella

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

Who Is Abrego Garcia?

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

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

Following a Legal Existence

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

The Arrest and the Administrative Error

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

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

What Happened When He Got to El Salvador

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

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

Courts Order His Return — Administration Resists

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

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

False Allegations and a Manufactured Case

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

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

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

Never Admit a Mistake, Never Apologize

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

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

The First Finding of Vindictive Prosecution

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

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

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

Where Things Stand

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

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

End Note

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

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

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

Volume 12 Number 572

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The Ruling on A Personal Atomic Bomb

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

Image by Martella

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

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

Comments by the Justices:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Hawaii State Court.

Volume 12 Number 571

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Image by Martella

A Morning in the Dirksen Building

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

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

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

Why the Fifth Amendment

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

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

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

The Real Motive

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

What Trump Did and Said

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

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

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

The Death Toll That Followed

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

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

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

The Only Thing Worse

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

The Man They Put on Trial

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

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

No Evidence

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

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

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

A President Who Always Needs a Villain

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

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

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

What This Does to Science

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

End Note

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

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

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

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

Volume 12 Number 570

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Image by Martella

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

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

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

The Accusation

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

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

The ICC and the ICJ Are Different Courts

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

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

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

Genocide Verdicts in Past Tribunals

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

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

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

Genocide Acquittals

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

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

What the Warrant Means

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

The Genocide Question Is Separate

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

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

Where the ICJ Case Stands

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

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

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

The Debate Outside the Courts

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

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

Will Netanyahu Ever Stand Trial?

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

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

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

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

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

— Karim Khan, ICC Chief Prosecutor

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

— President Joe Biden

Volume 12 Number 569

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Image by Martella

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

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

The Plan and the Price

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

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

The Algae Takes Over

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

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

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

The Shifting Stories

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

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

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

From Farce to Something Dark

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

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

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

The Trump Pattern

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

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

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

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

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

A Mirror After All

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

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

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

--Donald Trump

Volume 12 Number 565

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Image by Martella

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

The Industry Ate Itself

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

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

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

The Writers Have Left the Building

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

Nobody Over Thirty Need Apply

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

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

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

Where Have the Stars Gone?

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

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

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

The Disappearance of the Character Actor

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

The Death of the Mid-Budget Film

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

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

How to Fix It

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

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

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

— Martin Scorsese

Volume 12 Number 567 B

Image by Martella

Biblical Claims and Their Limits

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

What the British Did

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

The UN Partition Plan and Its Aftermath

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

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

Passover 1968: The Settlers Plant Their Flag

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

How They Justify It

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

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

The World Pushes Back

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

Brooklyn Moves

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

Netanyahu’s Dangerous Coalition

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

Violence the Army Ignores

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

Israel’s Latest Push to Expand Settlements

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

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

The Failed Two-State Solution

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

A Possible Way Forward: Phased Sovereignty

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

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

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

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

On the 700,000 Settlers

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

--International Court of Justice

Volume 12 Number 567 A

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The Scene at Mount Rushmore

Image by Martella

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

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

What Trump Said

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

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

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

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

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

What Trump Has Done

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

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

What Other Presidents Said on the Fourth

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

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

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

What the Founders Believed

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

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

This Year’s Voices That Got It Right

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

Keeping the Republic

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

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

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

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

Volume 12 Number 566

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Image by Martella

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

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

In His Own Words

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

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

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

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

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

When Ignorance Has Consequences: Covid-19

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

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

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

RFK Jr.: Putting a Fox in the Henhouse

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

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

The Whipping Boy: Immigration

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

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

Elections and Democratic Institutions Endangered

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

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

Iran: Blustering Is a Dangerous Thing

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

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

Retribution: Settling Scores

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

— Charles Darwin

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

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

Volume 12 Number 565

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Image by Martella

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

What Adaptability Really Means

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

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

Two Very Different Kinds of Change

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

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

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

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

Why Change Creates Stress

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

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

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

Two Kinds of Change And How to Transition .

Sudden Change

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

• Don’t panic.

• Let yourself feel the emotions.

• Try to accept the reality of what happened

• Consider seeking professional aid.

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

• Think about your options and explore them carefully

• Don’t make big decisions quickly

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

Gradual Change

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

What helps:

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

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

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

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

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

• Lean on someone you trust and talk it through.

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

Habit of Adaptability

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

--Charles Darwin

Volume 12 Number 564

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Image by Martella

The Backdrop

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

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

A Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry

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

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

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

The House That Michael Built

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

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

Shopping at the Garden

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

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

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

The Payout

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

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

Cities Where the Wardrobe Is Big

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

Spike Lee and Celebrity Row

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

The Team as Identity

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

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

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

--The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The Advocacy Newsletter: Connecting.... the Dots

Volume 12 Number 563

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Image by CDD20 from Pixabay

On February 18, 2026, in a case concerning the possible detrimental effects of youth addiction to social media, Mark Zuckerberg testified, “I founded Facebook to help people connect.” So said Mr. Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, a corporation that, with its offshoots, reaches 3.5 billion viewers, was testifying in a California Superior Court case. It seems as if Mr. Zuckerberg was wrong in his founding concept -- but he can console himself by being one of the richest people in the world -- caused by his mistake.

General Findings

There is much authentic research that shows that addiction to social media, especially among young people, heightens isolation rather than causing connections. You might say that such addiction creates electronic connections that are more likely detrimental to personal connections.

It has been found that platforms like Facebook can contribute to feelings of isolation or loneliness, especially among younger people. A substantial body of research in psychology and social science shows that extreme or problematic use can have the opposite effect for many users.

Here’s a summary of evidence from studies and reputable research that supports the view that heavy social media use is linked to increased loneliness, perceived isolation, and poorer mental health outcomes, particularly in youth and young adults:

Higher Social Media Use Is Linked to Isolation

A large U.S. study found that young adults who spent more time on social media had significantly higher odds of reporting perceived social isolation — nearly doubling the odds compared to those with low social media use.

Among youth in one study, those who most frequently used Facebook had significantly higher loneliness scores, and frequent use was tied to greater psychological distress.

Research suggests that superficial online interactions, where the quantity of contacts replaces meaningful emotional communication, can increase feelings of loneliness, especially for adolescents and young adults still forming their social identity.

Longitudinal research has found a pattern where higher social media use and loneliness reinforce each other over time. That is, lonely individuals may use social media more, and extensive use may intensify feelings of loneliness.

Other studies show that compulsive use or addictive patterns of social media use are strongly associated with poorer mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety, risks that often overlap with social isolation.

Important Nuances

While many studies find associations between heavy social media use and loneliness or isolation, it’s also true that some research suggests no simple causal link when looking only at time spent online — quality of interaction and content matter. Social media can also help maintain connection for some, especially older adults, showing the effect is not universally negative for everyone.

What Psychologists Say

Psychologists emphasize several factors that may explain why social media use can feel isolating. Constant exposure to idealized images of others can lead to feelings of exclusion or inadequacy, which fosters loneliness. Heavy use can displace real-world social time, weakening deeper social bonds. Platforms are designed to maximize attention, not necessarily deep connection, which can produce surface interactions.

Key Psychological Insights

Here’s an explanation of the psychological theories and mechanisms that researchers use to explain why heavy or problematic social media use can actually contribute to loneliness, isolation, and other negative mental-health outcomes — not just correlations, but why these effects can occur.

Social Comparison Theory

People naturally compare themselves to others to evaluate their own social status, attractiveness, achievements, etc. This is one of the most well-established psychological mechanisms. Social media feeds are filled with glowing representations of other people’s lives. When users compare their normal lives to others, it often leads to feelings of inferiority or exclusion. These upward comparisons don’t improve self-esteem; they can magnify insecurity by encouraging users to seek approval and validation through likes, which doesn’t satisfy deeper social needs.

Displacement and Substitution Effects

These come from theories in media psychology and social science. Time spent on social media displaces time that could be spent in meaningful real-world social interactions, e.g., face-to-face conversations or activities with friends. Although the internet theoretically offers expanded social opportunities, problematic use can actually lead to reduced social engagement in real life because online time supplants. More screen time can weaken deeper relationships, and for some people, it crowds out the social experiences that truly satisfy belonging needs.

Fear of Missing Out

This is a powerful psychological motivational factor. Fear of missing out refers to the anxiety that others are having rewarding experiences without you. Frequent social media exposure increases fear of missing out, which drives even more use, creating a feedback loop.

Instead of reducing loneliness, fear of missing out can intensify it by making users feel perpetually behind or socially excluded, even as they scroll.

Self-Discrepancy and False Self-Presentation

Individuals experience distress when the ideal self they present differs from their actual self. Maintaining an idealized image online can create stress, fear of negative evaluation, and undermine authentic connection.

This continual performance pressure doesn’t satisfy emotional needs for genuine connection and can heighten feelings of isolation and anxiety.

Cycle of Dependence and Emotions

Clinicians have also described addictive or coping patterns around social media.

· A coping mechanism: Some users turn to social media as a coping mechanism for existing loneliness, but this strategy may backfire and intensify negative feelings because it doesn’t address core needs.

· The feedback loop: This dynamic can create a feedback loop: feeling lonely → more social media use → more loneliness or distress → even more use.

Possible Social Media Effects on Mass Shootings

It has been theorized that excessive social media interaction is associated with people who attempt massacres in schools, houses of worship, shopping malls, and other places where people congregate.

There are research and expert analysis that explores the relationship between social media, online activity, and mass shooters or mass violence, but it’s important to be clear about what that research does and does not show:

Key Findings

A systematic study of mass shooters’ social media histories has found recurring themes in how some perpetrators used online platforms before and during attacks, though this is not the same as proving social media causes violence.

Social media as one of many influences:

· Other studies aimed at law enforcement and violence prevention suggest that social media can play several roles in the pathway to mass violence, but not as a simple direct cause. Some experts describe social media as enabling perpetrators to conceptualize violent acts, while not necessarily being the sole or primary cause.

There is no definitive evidence that “excessive” social media usage alone predicts violent acts. Most attempts to link social media use quantitatively to violence find patterns or correlations, not direct causal relationships. Many shooters have used social media to post violent or extremist content, but this does not mean casual social media use causes violence. Instead, it may reflect underlying issues like grievance, isolation, radicalization, and a desire for attention — factors that exist independently of platforms.

Jury Finding in the Meta/Google 2026 Case

· A Los Angeles jury in March 2026 found Meta and Google negligent in the case discussed at the outset of this paper, ordering the companies to pay $6 million in damages over defective design. More specifically, the jury awarded $3 million to the plaintiff — a young woman identified as KGM — and her mother, with Meta responsible for roughly 70% of that amount. The companies could also face future penalties. TikTok and Snap Inc. had already settled their parts in the case in late January. Meta and Google issued statements disagreeing with the verdict and said they would explore their legal options, including an appeal. The day before the verdict, a separate New Mexico jury had also found Meta liable for violating the state’s consumer protection laws and failing to protect children from sexual predators.

Despite the historic nature of these verdicts, the companies have not yet been forced to overhaul their products. Rather than proactive policy reform, the companies have largely continued existing limited safety measures while fighting the cases in court. But Congress has yet to act. In short, the verdicts are a significant legal turning point, but meaningful, court-mandated platform changes remain contingent on ongoing trials and appeals. ............................................................................................................................................

"The more social media we have, the more we think we're connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other."— JR (the French street artist

Volume 12 Number 562

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Image by Martella

By April 2026 he had signed more than 254 executive orders in his second term — a pace that dwarfs any modern predecessor. Some are legitimate policy moves. Others are petty, vindictive, self-serving, or constitutionally incoherent.

Trump relies on executive orders because they give him something Congress never will: instant, unilateral gratification. No negotiation, no compromise, no one telling him no. For a man who spent decades as the sole authority in a private real estate empire, the messy, deliberative nature of democratic governance is an irritant. He just issues them as a form of personal gratification. Reflecting his increasing instability they have become more erratic and unpredictable.

Here, in list form are Trump’s second term in office executive orders that tell a story of someone increasingly going off the rails.

Remaking the Republic in His Own Image

1. The January 6 Mass Pardons [Jan. 20, 2025]

Within hours of being sworn in, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people charged or convicted for the Capitol attack, including those who assaulted police and those convicted of seditious conspiracy. Court-ordered restitution was wiped out along with the convictions. Since that date 97 of these model citizens have been accused of new crimes. Legal status: Constitutionally valid. The pardon power is broad and essentially unreviewable.

2. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico [Jan. 20, 2025]

On Day One, Trump ordered federal agencies to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America. The Gulf has been the Gulf of Mexico for roughly 400 years. Mexico declined to go along. The AP refused to acknowledge the change and was banned from White House events. Legal status: Within executive discretion. A judge later restored AP’s access on First Amendment grounds.

3. Ending Birthright Citizenship [Jan. 20, 2025]

Trump signed an order purporting to end automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents, a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment since 1868. Multiple courts immediately blocked it. Legal status: Blocked as unconstitutional. Supreme Court ruling pending.

4. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement — [Jan. 20, 2025]

The second U.S. withdrawal from Paris, having done it in 2017 and been reversed by Biden in 2021. The U.S. is now the only major economy outside the accord. Legal status: Within presidential authority. Legally effective.

5. The DOGE Workforce Purge [Feb. 2025]

Trump directed all agencies to coordinate with Elon Musk’s DOGE to slash the federal workforce, targeting more than 100,000 workers across the VA, Defense, Treasury, and other departments. Legal status: Partially blocked by multiple courts. Congress creates and funds federal agencies; the president cannot unilaterally eliminate them.

6. The Kennedy Center Takeover and Renaming [Feb.–Dec. 2025]

Trump fired the bipartisan board, installed himself as chairman, and replaced the president with a political operative with no arts experience. In December, the board renamed it the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” new signage appearing the next day in visibly mismatched font. In early 2026 the board voted to shutter it for two years, triggering mass layoffs. Legal status: Renaming challenged in court. Two lawsuits over the closure pending.

7. Reinstating Confederate Statues [Mar. 2025]

Under an order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Trump directed the Interior Department to reinstate statues removed after 2020. Confederate General Albert Pike’s statue returned to D.C. in October 2025. Legal status: Within executive authority over federal property.

The White House as a Trump Property

8. The Gold-Everything Renovation [Jan.–Oct. 2025]

Trump flew in his personal “gold guy” from Florida: He installed gold trim on Oval Office doorways, a gilded presidential seal on the ceiling, gold cherubs from Mar-a-Lago, gold coasters stamped “TRUMP,” and the Rose Garden paved over with Mar-a-Lago-style tables. The Palm Room was stripped of plants and renamed “New Lobby. Magnificent marble floor, compliments of President Donald J. Trump!” Legal status: Within presidential authority. No successful legal challenge.

9. Demolishing the East Wing for a Ballroom [Oct. 2025–ongoing]

Trump demolished the entire East Wing, built in 1902, to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. Costs have climbed from $200 million toward $400 million. The project bypassed all historic preservation review. Donors include Amazon, Google, Meta, and Lockheed Martin, all with substantial federal contracts. Legal status: National Trust for Historic Preservation cited violations of required review. No court has halted construction.

The Naming Spree

10. Putting His Name on Everything [Throughout 2025]

Trump’s name now appears on the U.S. Institute of Peace, a new class of Navy battleships, the “Trump Gold Card” visa, “TrumpRx,” “Trump Accounts,” a Florida road to Mar-a-Lago, and a Middle Eastern transit corridor. Stalled in Congress: renaming Dulles Airport, rebranding the Washington Metro as the “Trump Train,” and adding his likeness to Mount Rushmore. . He has frequently stated that he uses his name on properties, products, and government initiatives because it represents prestige and is a brand people inherently trust. Trump also feels that if you slap your name on things it assures your name will go down in history and you will not be forgotten. Legal status: Most within executive discretion.

The Pen Against the Press and Political Enemies

11. Defunding NPR and PBS [May 2025]

Trump ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease all funding to NPR and PBS, calling them “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS.’” A federal judge permanently blocked it in March 2026 as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Congress separately voted to cancel CPB’s funding; CPB announced plans to close. Legal status: Permanently blocked by federal court. Administration has appealed.

12. Pardoning Corrupt Politicians [Throughout 2025–26]

Trump granted clemency to at least 20 corrupt politicians, all Republican or politically useful, including a congressman indicted for bribery, a senator who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud, and the CEO of Binance convicted of money laundering. The DOJ simultaneously dismantled its Public Integrity Section. Legal status: Constitutionally unreviewable.

13. Banning the AP from the White House [Jan. 20, 2025]

After the AP refused to adopt the “Gulf of America” name, the administration expelled the wire service from White House pool coverage. Legal status: A federal judge ordered access restored as a First Amendment violation.

Constitutionally unreviewable.

Economic and Constitutional Overreach

14. “Liberation Day” Tariffs [Apr. 2025]

Trump declared a national emergency over the trade deficit and imposed sweeping tariffs on virtually every country using the 1977 IEEPA. Markets crashed. The administration rolled back the highest rates within days. The Supreme Court struck down the broad-based tariffs in February 2026. Legal status: Struck down by the Supreme Court. Narrower tariffs remain in effect.

15. Schedule F: Ending Civil Service Protections [Jan. 20, 2025]

Trump reinstated Schedule F, stripping civil service protections from tens of thousands of career employees in “policy-related” positions and making them fireable at will. Legal scholars call it the gravest threat to an independent civil service in modern history. Legal status: Legally effective. No court has struck it down.

16. Criminalizing Flag Burning — Despite the Supreme Court [Aug. 2025]

Trump directed DOJ to prosecute flag burning and announced on Truth Social that offenders face a year in prison, ignoring the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling that it is protected speech. A combat veteran burned a flag outside the White House the next day; he was arrested for lighting a fire in a public park. Legal status: Already resolved by Texas v. Johnson (1989). .

17. “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” [Aug. 2025]

Trump mandated classical architecture for all federal buildings and required 30-day personal presidential notification before any “Brutalist, Deconstructivism, or modernist” design. Biden had rescinded an identical first-term order. Legal status: Within executive authority. Not challenged.

Self-Dealing

18. Giant Banners of His Own Face on Federal Buildings [Throughout 2025–26]

Enormous banners displaying Trump’s face were hung on the Justice Department, Agriculture Department, and other federal buildings. The practice has no precedent in American democratic history. Legal status: No statute prohibits it. No court has ruled on it.

19. The $1.8 Billion Anti-Weaponization Fund [May 2026]

The administration created a $1.776 billion taxpayer fund through a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS, negotiated between his legal team and the Justice Department he controls, administered by his former personal attorney, now Acting AG. The deal also shielded his personal tax returns from enforcement. This also provided for pardoned January 6^th individuals to receive sums of money to compensate them from having been imprisoned. Many are seeking compensation or refunds of their court-ordered fines through civil lawsuits the newly established $1.776 billion Justice Department program. This was all too much and finally even a Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said, “Utterly stupid, morally wrong-take your pick.” Capitol Police officers beaten on January 6 have sued to block the fund. Legal status: Contested. Judge questioned whether the parties are genuine adversaries.

20. Pardoning Himself and His Family Forever [May 2026]

There has always been a discussion among scholars as to whether the President can pardon himself. Now Trump has taken the controversy one step farther. He worked it out that not only him, but his family are pardoned forever from all criminal liability and certain financial crimes. He is also guaranteed exoneration that the federal government would not be able to pursue tax claims against himself or his family or his businesses. The agreement was issued by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. This exempts Trump and his family from rules that others must follow. It is written to protect the current president and his family with no mention of future presidents. Legal status: A future Justice Department could contest the ruling on the grounds that it was corrupt and unenforceable.

The Pattern

No single item here is the story Some have been blocked by courts, some are pending judicial review and, sadly, many fall into the realm of being actually carried out as

presidential prerogative. What the full list reveals is the work of man who is on the edge. This is particularly evident in his need to smack his name on everything. The gold cherubs, the renamed gulf, the ballroom where a historic wing once stood, the banners of his own face on government buildings, the name added in mismatched font to a memorial for an assassinated president, these are not the acts of a confident leader securing a legacy. They are the acts of someone who cannot distinguish between the government he was elected to lead and his vanity, professionals call a case of “extreme narcissism.”

He began his term with mass pardons. He is ending it demolishing the White House East Wing for a ballroom and creating a self-dealing billion-dollar fund through a lawsuit he filed against himself. The escalation is not random. It is the sign of a man who has become increasingly out of control, with no one to stop him. At this rate he might pardon anyone who shoots a Democrat and compensates them for any inconvenience that arose from their arrest.

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“This is evidence of President Trump’s ‘uncontrollable authoritarian impulses.’

-- U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen

Volume 11 Number 561

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About 18 years ago, early in my retirement, I was a volunteer assistant basketball coach in an Ann Arbor, Michigan high school. One day our team was playing at a nearby college arena in a sectional tournament. At a break, I went down to the cafeteria and joined a group of four or five of our Black players at a table.

They were just having soda pop. “Did you guys eat already?” They shook their heads no. It dawned on me that they had no lunch money. “Treats on me,” I said, handing one of the boys a $20 bill. They excitedly thanked me and went off to the food counter. I sat there briefly ashamed that I had been so oblivious to what it was like to be part of the less entitled of this world. All I had done was render a little kindness.

The Bigger Picture

Recently the incident returned to haunt me. A recent tax break for the rich reminded me of that long-ago encounter. I realized that those boys were strangers to me even though I spent many hours with them, akin to the Judaic biblical “strangers” that Abraham encounters in his sojourn.

So it makes me cringe when I learn how multi-billionaires have received a major tax break largely offset by cutting Medicaid. The poor are effectively paying for the richests’ tax break. My basketball players, and millions like them — are truly the strangers among us. Surely the rich, in this the wealthiest country the world has ever known, are in the best position to help them.

The Biblical Context

Here is what the Bible says about how to treat the stranger. In Genesis 18, God established a covenant with Abraham that included specific directions about welcoming strangers. When three strangers approached, Abraham, despite being 99 years old, ran to meet them, bowed low in humility, offered water to wash their feet, and prepared a lavish feast. This was later formalized in Jewish law through Moses:

“ You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21).

This commandment appears 36 times in the Torah, more than any other, making it the most emphasized moral obligation in all of scripture. The biblical tradition demands that those with more bear greater responsibility for the community’s vulnerable, and that withholding from those in need is tantamount to theft. The “stranger” today becomes the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized, those who are outsiders to economic power.

The New Law’s Effects

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the recent tax legislation is strikingly at odds with this biblical tradition. Key estimates include:

• The top one percent of households is projected to receive more than $1 trillion in tax reductions over ten years.

• Nearly half of those gains go to the top 0.1 percent — roughly 200,000 households earning above $2 million annually.

• The top 10 percent would see their resources rise by roughly 2–4 percent due to lower taxes.

• Federal Medicaid spending cuts would cause approximately 7.5 to 7.8 million people to lose Medicaid or related coverage, with total uninsured Americans projected to rise by 10 to 17 million.

Many of those affected are people of color, working poor adults, caregivers, disabled people, and low-income older Americans. For them, marketplace plans may technically exist but remain financially out of reach, with deductibles running several thousand dollars annually. This legislation moves resources upward, reducing health and food assistance for low-income Americans while financing large tax cuts for multimillionaires. It also throws a few dollars to a large swarth of the population to appease them, but the big bucks are going to the super rich. It is exactly the reverse of the biblical imperative.

The Least Give the Most

The most striking fact about charitable giving in America is well-documented: the poor give a higher percentage of their income than the wealthy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the poorest one-fifth of American households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their income to charity, while the richest fifth donated only 2.1 percent,— less than half the rate of the poor. The disparity is deepened by the fact that charitable gifts from the poor are not effectively tax-deductible, because they don’t earn enough to itemize, meaning the wealthy receive a government subsidy for their giving while the poor sacrifice with no such benefit.

Religion motivates giving more than any other factor, and lower-income Americans tend to be more religiously observant. The poor are more likely to personally know people in need and feel a visceral connection to suffering. Wealth insulates people from seeing suffering directly; the poor cannot look away.

The New Testament’s widow’s offering (Luke 21) captures this perfectly: Jesus praised the poor widow who gave two small coins over the wealthy who gave large sums, saying she gave everything she had while they gave only from their surplus.

A Potential Correction

An additional 2.2 percent social services tax on the wealthiest Americans would bring them up to the charitable giving level of the lowest-income Americans, 4.3 percent. Based on AI analysis, this would raise approximately $125–135 billion per year. That amount could in addition to existing government spending fund health insurance for 15–20 million low-income Americans, universal free school breakfast and lunch nationwide, large expansions of affordable housing, tuition-free community college, major upgrades to veterans’ care, expanded home health care for seniors, investments in addiction treatment and mental health, and child tax credits that sharply reduce child poverty.

This could take the form of a designated line on wealthy tax returns, a social services income tax, identified on their tax return exclusively for those purposes. Supporters argue that wealthy Americans benefit disproportionately from public infrastructure, legal protections, financial systems, and educated workers, and therefore owe more toward social stability and opportunity. Critics argue that mandatory redistribution can discourage investment, and that government spending is often less efficient than private philanthropy. Still, mathematically, even a relatively small increase in taxes on very high incomes could finance social programs on an enormous national scale.

Abraham ran toward the stranger and gave his best. It is interesting to contemplate our nation basing its fiscal policy on that same biblical moral imperative. In the meantime, it is my hope that my basketball boys’ lives turned out better than their beginnings.

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“Carried interest loopholes allow billionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than their secretaries.”

--Warren Buffett

Image by Martella

The Pivot That Gave it Away

Robert Kennedy Jr. built much of his national identity on vaccine skepticism. For years, he questioned childhood immunization schedules, criticized federal regulators, and argued that public health agencies were too closely aligned with pharmaceutical companies. But when that message met the broader electorate, it stalled. It has consistently shown that while Americans are frustrated with healthcare costs, they continue to support routine childhood vaccinations by large margins. School immunization requirements remain widely accepted

Polls show that Americans prefer their physicians for medical advice. So, Trump got the message and probably told Bobby,” Enough with the vaccines. Find something else. I don’t want to add to my hate club.” The vaccine attacks stopped being the headline. The messaging mostly now took on food additives, which most people are leery of anyway. The campaign moved from repealing vaccines to promoting “clean foods.”

What the Public Actually Says It Wants

When Americans are asked what they want changed in healthcare, vaccines are rarely on the list.

They want:

• Lower prescription drug prices

• Transparent insurance billing

• Expanded access to primary care

• Stronger mental health services

• Protection from surprise medical bills

The lesson most people took from the pandemic was not “abolish vaccines.” It was “don’t let this kind of chaos happen again.” Many Americans express a desire for clearer public health communication and better emergency preparedness.

Kennedy’s early emphasis on tearing down vaccine structures did not align with what voters say they prioritize. And when messaging drifts away from voter priorities, campaigns adjust or the candidate loses. Goodbye vaccines as an issue.

The Trump Factor and Memory

Public reaction to COVID-19 leadership still shapes healthcare politics. Americans remember the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis. They remember public clashes with Dr. Anthony Fauci, shifting narratives, press briefings that created confusion instead of clarity.

And they remember the disinfectant remark — when President Donald Trump publicly speculated about whether disinfectants, most people think of Clorox, could be drunk internally to treat COVID-19. It became one of the most widely criticized statements of the pandemic era, or any era. Medical experts immediately warned against dangerous interpretations. Comedians had a field day with this one. The moment symbolized, for many Americans, what happens when complex medical crises are treated as theater.

That period shook confidence. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Protective equipment ran short. Families lost loved ones. Businesses shut down. Mixed messaging deepened anxiety so when candidates suggest aggressively dismantling vaccine infrastructure or portraying public health agencies as wholly illegitimate, voters measure those ideas against their memory of 2020.They saw what instability looked like. And they do not want it to happen again.

Flu Shots, Schools, and Real-World Behavior

Public opinion is not just measured in polls. It is measured in behavior. Every year, tens of millions of Americans voluntarily receive flu shots. Pharmacies expand hours during peak vaccination season. Employers encourage immunization. Senior centers organize vaccine clinics.

If sweeping vaccine distrust were spreading through the mainstream, flu vaccination participation would collapse. It hasn’t. Similarly, public school immunization requirements remain broadly in place nationwide. School boards have not rushed to dismantle them. Even in politically divided states, vaccination documentation continues to be standard for enrollment.

Parents might argue about mandates, but most still comply. Because when it comes to classrooms, the calculation is simple: fewer outbreaks mean fewer disruptions. That behavioral evidence contradicts the narrative that the country is eager to undo vaccination systems.

Doctors Still Win the Trust Battle

Another barrier to Kennedy’s broader vaccine agenda is trust in personal physicians. Americans often distrust Congress. They criticize federal agencies. They argue about pharmaceutical profits. But surveys consistently show high levels of trust in individual doctors and nurses. When pediatricians recommend vaccines, most parents follow that advice. When cardiologists recommend booster shots for high-risk patients, compliance remains strong.

During COVID-19, despite political conflict at the top levels of government, local doctors and hospital staff became anchors of stability. Communities saw physicians working exhausting hours. That strengthened trust in frontline medicine even as political trust wavered.

When Kennedy questions vaccine safety broadly, voters weigh that claim against what their own doctors advise. In that comparison, the white coat usually wins.

The Adherents Who Wanted a Revolution

There’s tension inside Kennedy’s movement as well. Some early supporters rallied specifically around dismantling vaccine policy. That was the defining cause. As the campaign broadened its focus toward food regulation and chronic disease prevention, parts of that base expressed frustration.

They wanted aggressive repeal efforts. They got messaging about processed food and agricultural chemicals. When a campaign moderates to appeal to a wider electorate, it risks losing purists. And evidence of frustration among some adherents reflects that shift. The irony is sharp: the pivot necessary to expand appeal can shrink enthusiasm among the most committed activists.

That internal friction underscores a larger point — the original anti-vaccine emphasis had intensity but limited mainstream expansion potential.

Why the Broader Public Isn’t Following

The average American voter is not looking to burn down public health institutions. They are looking to improve affordability and access without destabilizing prevention systems. COVID-19 reinforced the importance of coordinated vaccine research. The rapid development of vaccines in 2020 and 2021 was seen by many as a scientific achievement, even by those critical of specific mandates.

That experience complicates blanket narratives portraying vaccine systems as fundamentally corrupt. At the same time, the chaos of pandemic messaging — including high-profile clashes between political leaders and medical advisors — made voters wary of politicizing science. They want steadier leadership, not louder conflict.

The Conclusion

Kennedy’s softened rhetoric, the broadened focus beyond vaccines, and the visible frustration of some original adherents all reflect that broader landscape. Americans are frustrated with healthcare costs. They want reform. They want transparency.

But after watching COVID-19 unfold, after the disinfectant comment, after the Fauci clashes, after months of uncertainty, they are not eager to destabilize foundational public health systems.

The public may criticize the system. They may demand change. But when it comes to dismantling vaccines or reliving pandemic-style confusion, the prevailing response is steady and unmistakable:

No thanks, Bobby.

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“Instead of combating the rapid spread of health misinformation with facts and clarity, Kennedy is amplifying it... [his policies and positions] have rejected science, misled the public, and compromised the health of Americans.”

Congressman Raul Ruiz, MD

Number 559 Volume 12

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

There is no bigger story in medicine right now than GLP-1 drugs: Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. These names have become household words. They are genuine medical breakthroughs.

A Market Like No Other

The numbers are staggering. In the U.S. approximately two in five adults suffer from obesity. (Obesity is generally classified as an, “abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health”.) So the recent breakthrough drug to treat this widespread condition has exploded. In the U.S; roughly one in eight adults has tried a GLP-1 drug. Six percent are currently on one.

These are a marketing phenomenon. With a hefty retail price tag, of $900-$1,300 per month, without insurance, the global GLP-1 market was worth roughly $53 billion in 2024. It is projected to surpass a staggering $315 billion by 2035. Two companies dominate: Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and America’s Eli Lilly. Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic alone commands nearly a third of all market revenue. Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound are closing fast, with Eli Lilly now holding approximately 57% of the U.S. market. Other companies are flocking in and now approximately 60 are competing for market share.

What These Drugs Actually Do

GLP-1 stands for glucagon-like peptide-1. It is a hormone your gut produces naturally after you eat. It tells your brain you are full. It slows digestion. It prompts insulin release to lower blood sugar.

GLP-1 drugs mimic this hormone — but more powerfully and for longer than your body ever would on its own. The result: you feel full faster, stay full longer, and want less food. Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) targets the GLP-1 receptor directly. Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) targets both GLP-1 and a second hormone called GIP, making it a dual-action drug and — in head-to-head trials — a more powerful one.

What Should Come With the Drug

GLP-1 medications were never designed to work alone. Every approval, every clinical trial, every prescribing guideline comes with the same language: to be used in conjunction with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity.

That phrase is not legal boilerplate. It reflects how the drugs were tested and what they were designed to support. What good habits look like in practice consists of well-known, traditional components:

• Eat less but eat better. Lean protein, vegetables, fiber. Smaller portions.

• Cut out ultra-processed foods, fast food, and sugary drinks — the very foods that drove the obesity crisis in the first place.

• Move more. Thirty minutes of moderate exercise most days. Strength training matters especially, because these drugs can cause muscle loss alongside fat loss.

• Get enough sleep. Poor sleep drives hunger hormones up.

• Work with a dietitian or behavioral health professional. Eating is often as much psychological as it is physical.

A relevant question is, “If eating a proper diet is necessary why does someone need the LPG-1 medicine”? The answer is that these sensible guidelines are easier to follow because the LPG-1 drug suppresses appetite. No longer the hunger pangs that drives dieters go off the rails. The patient find it easier to follow the guideline but still decides what to eat and when they to eat.

The Abuse Problem

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Many GLP-1 users are not doing those things. Some treat the drug as a green light to eat whatever they want, just less of it. Others use the reduced appetite as an excuse to eat almost nothing — crash dieting under pharmaceutical cover — without addressing the food choices underneath. Some patients, freed from constant hunger, still reach for the same junk food they always ate. The quantity goes down. The quality does not improve.

There are no hard global statistics on how many users fall into this pattern. But the clinical signals are clear. Doctors report it routinely. Weight loss results in real-world practice consistently trail what clinical trials show. Trial participants are coached, monitored, and supported. Most real-world patients are not.

When You Don’t Change What You Eat

GLP-1 drugs reduce appetite. They do not change your metabolism, rewire your relationship with food, or improve the nutritional quality of what you consume. If you eat less but still eat poorly, you lose some weight — but you miss the bigger opportunity.

Poor diet quality on GLP-1s means:

• Continued nutritional deficiencies, since smaller portions of bad food is still bad food

• Higher risk of muscle loss, because protein intake drops without attention

• Cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors that don’t improve as much as they should

• Less total weight lost, and less durable weight loss over time

There is also a subtler problem. Some users report that on GLP-1s, they lose interest in all food — including healthy food. If that indifference isn’t channeled toward better eating patterns, old habits reassert themselves the moment the drug’s effect eases.

What Happens When You Stop

This is where things get serious. About half of all GLP-1 users quit within 12 months. Cost is a major reason. Side effects push others out. Some simply decide they’ve lost enough feeling they can control the weight without the medication.

The consequences of stopping are swift and well-documented. An analysis of 37 studies covering more than 9,000 patients found that people regained an average of nearly a pound per month after stopping GLP-1 drugs.. Most people were back to their starting weight within 18 months.

There is a worse wrinkle. Much of the weight lost on GLP-1s includes muscle mass — somewhere between 40 percent and 60 percent of the total loss, by some estimates. When weight comes back, it tends to come back as fat. People who stop may end up with a worse body composition than when they started.

It doesn’t stop with weight. Blood sugar rises. Cholesterol rises. Blood pressure rises. Heart disease risk markers — which had improved on the drug — rebound. One recent editorial in the highly regarded British Medical Journal ,BMJ, put it bluntly: these drugs should not be treated as a cure. They are a treatment. And like most treatments for chronic disease, stopping them means the disease returns.

There is one meaningful exception in the data. Patients who maintained a restricted diet, particularly a lower-carbohydrate approach, after stopping their medication, showed significantly less weight regain. The habits built during treatment carried forward. The biology was kinder to those who had done the work.

In Summary

GLP-1 boom is real. These drugs help people who genuinely struggle with obesity. The science behind them is solid and doing its part. But a drug that suppresses appetite cannot supply nutritional behavior. That part still belongs to the patient.

Too many people are taking an expensive medication and eating their way through its effects. They are losing less than they could. They are failing to build good habits to fall back on. And when they stop, for whatever reason, they are regaining everything, sometimes ending up worse than before.

The GLP-1 drugs are a remarkable tool. But a tool used badly is still a tool used badly. The drugs are doing their job. The question is whether patients are doing theirs.

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“It’s not magic. You still have to make choices every single day.”

— Instagram

Volume 12 Number 557 .................................................................................................................

Image by jhusemannde by Pixabay

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That was the headline. Maybe you saw the article or heard the newscast recently about me. The doorman in my building buzzed me at 3 a.m. and said that there were a couple of ice men who wanted to talk to me. I shouted at him,” Robert this is the middle of the night in 21^st century I have a refrigerator... not an ice box. Tell them to go away.” “No. No. These are the other kind or ICE men...the immigration kind.” “How many are a couple?” “There are 10 of them.”

I knew what it was. I do have a million or so subscribers to my weekly newsletter..... that is if you take away five 00000 that leaves you with... 10. Okay, that’s not a lot but I have only been publishing those political essays for... 12 years. I said, “Send them up in 10 minutes.”

I wasn’t going with them. Having previously prepared, I quickly donned my disguise as a... fast food delivery guy. There were well worn black clothes accompanied by a huge delivery bag with the red DoorDash logo emblazoned on it, topped off by a gigantic motorcycle helmet to hide my face. I quickly walked right past those idling ICE agents in the lobby.

I was waiting outside my building for an Uber to carry me safely away when I was tackled by three of the ICE agents and cuffed. The leader said, “You’re under arrest for being an illegal alien, breaking the Three Generation Act and for treasonous writings about the president, and we are going to get you out of the country.”

“Can I ask you one thing” I asked? “Make it fast.” “How did you know it was me?” As he pointed at my feet the agent said, “Shmuck, the Gucci loafers gave you away,” as they led me off.

So it started. I was hauled off to Rikers Island, which the administration had turned into a detention camp fo immigrants. These detainees were those whose family hadn’t been here for three generations that meant-- you, your parents, and grandparents. The only exception was for... registered Republicans.

I was charged for being an illegal alien and writing the...... truth about the president. That was a no-no. The Supreme Court had approved both counts. And now in addition to the new definition of illegal aliens you could only write untruths,.. sometimes called lies, just like the president is a model for.

I am far from alone with the immigration problem. It is expected that about three million New Yorkers, will be deported. There is a lot of anger as you would expect. But the new Mayor thinks it’s a great idea. He reassuringly says, “Three million people that means about..... one million empty apartments. That solves all my... housing problems. Plus, there is room for low income and the homeless. We are going to have mixed housing everywhere. It’s a Social Democrat’s dream. Whoops! Meant Republican dream.” That’s right... The Mayor doesn’t want to be deported either.

The hordes of detainees are also being held in Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and Madison Square Garden. Detainees buy seats for your family on Ticketmaster, at the price of major sporting events. And you all just sit in your seats until called to be deported. And New York being New York some people pay $3-$5,000 a seat at MSG for courtside seats where you can see close up the Urgent Care unit on the basketball court taking care of the sick detainees.

A judge ruled that I was to be deported to my father’s previous home in Europe — a shtetl, a small village, called Glynyanar, now in Ukraine. I pleaded saying “It’s now in a war zone, it’s 4,400 miles from NYC. There are no longer any of my people living in Glynyanar. They all fled Russia to join the procession with Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof” when everyone was singing Anatevka, Anatevka, beautiful Anatevka. My people were singing, “Glynyanar, Glynyanar, what dump what a dump, Glynyanar.” “Besides, they don’t have prune juice in Ukraine,” I appealed to the judge.

“No dice. You broke the Three Generation ruling plus being a traitor spreading those vicious truths about the president for years. This comes from ICOTUS, the newly dubbed Inferior Court of the United States. You are out of here.”

So, I tried to escape again and finally managed it by having my visiting brother-in-law smuggle in a hacksaw hidden in a gigantic Katz’s Deli knish. I sawed off my jail cell bars and swam back to Manhattan.

I am living a life of secrecy, disguised as a salesman. The streets are empty since the pending millions of arrests, and the few people roaming around will even look at me because of my sign saying, “I Sell Presidential Commemorative Coins.”

Meanwhile, if you see me on the streets, just pass by...those ten ICE men are still looking for me.

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“ICE actions are likened to “modern day slave patrols,” reflecting deep concern over racial profiling and the detention of individuals with pending legal cases.”

--Representative Jasmine Crockett

Volume 12 Number 556

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More than a dozen Heritage staffers announced during Christmas week that they were leaving the organization. There is seemingly a drift toward acceptance of the extreme right among Heritage leadership that has created this situation.

Image by Prettysleepy from Pixabay

The exodus was set in motion in November after the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson’s inflammatory interview with white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes. This rupture was on vivid display at Turning Point USA’s “America Fest,” where Republican firebrands like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Steve Bannon argued over Fuentes and whether he had a place in the party.

The traditionally staid Heritage Foundation is known for its influential policy research and advocacy on issues such as economics, national security, and social policy. Out of character, in 2024 Heritage published a 920-page blueprint called Project 2025, an extensive plan to consolidate presidential control over the executive branch and to accomplish its policy goals during an anticipated Trump presidency.

The document has become a “hot potato” in the political world. Democrats view it as a blueprint to undermine the nation as Trump ascends to a second presidency.

Project 2025 and the Second Trump Term: Project 2025’s influence on Trump’s second term is best understood as an indirect but substantial shaping force through:
• Personnel appointments — many officials with ties to the blueprint hold key roles.
• Policy overlaps — executive actions and directives echo major Project 2025 recommendations.
• Alignment — long-term goals of shrinking government and expanding executive power match administration priorities.
• Public distance vs. reality — Trump often publicly disavows the project while pursuing parallel outcomes.

In short, even if Trump doesn’t invoke Project 2025 as his administration’s “official playbook,” its ideas and personnel networks have helped shape legislative and executive priorities in his second term.

So, let’s take a look at this powerful organization—the Heritage Foundation—its history, how it came to author Project 2025, and how it fits in with the Trump administration.

Early Years of the Heritage Foundation:

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 during the Nixon administration by four Republican political activists who were discontented with Richard Nixon’s embrace of what they deemed the liberal consensus, as well as the cautious nature of existing think tanks. They sought to create a movement that advanced conservative policies.

In January 1981, Heritage published Mandate for Leadership, a report aimed at reducing the size of the federal budget. It provided guidance to incoming President Ronald Reagan on how he could utilize the federal government to advance conservative policies.

By the mid-1980s, Heritage had emerged as a key organization in the national conservative movement. In recognition of its rapidly growing influence, Time magazine labeled the organization in 1986 “the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks.” Heritage was influential in developing and advancing the Reagan Doctrine, a key foreign policy initiative.

During the first Bush administration, Heritage remained an influential voice on domestic and foreign policy issues. In 1990 and 1991, it was a leading proponent of Operation Desert Storm, designed to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

Heritage continued to grow in the 1990s. In 1993, it opposed President Clinton’s health care plan, which ultimately failed in the Senate in 1994. That same year, Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House.

Heritage in the 21st Century:

During the second Bush administration, Heritage was noted for supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the broader “war on terror,” while challenging opposition to those conflicts.

In March 2010, the Obama administration introduced the Affordable Care Act, which Heritage opposed.

Like others in the Republican sphere, in 2015 the Heritage Foundation reversed course following Trump’s election. It subsequently gained influence in his presidential transition and administration. At least 66 individuals with Heritage ties joined the administration, and Heritage alumni were widely hired.

While out of office, Trump continued to exert influence on Heritage. Beginning in 2022, the organization publicly embraced “Trumpism” as its guiding ideology. In July 2024, Heritage advanced a conspiracy theory that the 2024 election would be illegitimate—before it had even occurred.

Critics of the Project 2025 Manifesto:

Project 2025 has been in development since 2023. Its full title is Project 2025: The Conservative Plan to Transform American Government. It outlines a comprehensive agenda for reshaping U.S. government institutions and policies.

Given the document’s controversial nature, one might expect it to be closely guarded—like the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. Instead, Heritage published it openly for public consumption; it is even available for purchase online.

A Supreme Court ruling in July 2025 has heightened concerns, as presidents now have expanded immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office.

Summing Up:

Powerful influences on the current presidency are a foregone conclusion, as Trump is surrounded by many authors of Project 2025 and its ultra-conservative Heritage adherents. Whether the organization can withstand its recent association with figures like Fuentes and his ultra-nationalistic, racist followers remains to be seen.

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Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a stronghold of Trumpism.”
— Bari Weiss, Journalist