Written from the perspective of America, where the U.S. maternal mortality rate increased by 93 percent in the past year, we turn our heads toward a conference convened this week at the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) congress in Lisbon, Portugal.

Midwives? They actually have a confederation? How unconventional is that, for a convention?

Not so, actually.

Worldwide, some 80 percent of babies are born with the help of midwives. That percentage isn’t quite as high in the U. S., though those numbers are on the rise.

This key conference was held by politicians, donors and UN agencies to discuss the millions of avoidable mother and baby deaths every year.

Apparently, for those gathered in Lisbon, it was not so key to some.

In that illogical scheme of things we have come to expect in such public parades of faux interest, those who are most in need were actually turned away.

Ah well, ‘God is in the details’ and all that, so it simply became another news event in a world over exposed and under informed. Shit happens, as Forest Gump once said. If it too often happens to those without a voice, at least we publicly display our disinterest.

Why this and, more importantly, why this now?

Because now is slipping through our consciousness, day by day, while we chuckle at the lesser insanities of present everywhere.

According to an article in today’s Guardian UK,

“Visa rejections have threatened progress on mother and baby health after experts from struggling countries were barred from talks, global midwife leaders have said. But last-minute visa refusals meant eminent midwives from Africa and Asia – where the majority of lives are lost – were excluded.

“Urgent appeals were lodged for delegates from countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia.”

How is that possible?

Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said visa assessments happened “rigorously, objectively and factually” in line with Schengen rules.

That’s what Ministries do, when they are caught red-handed in an outright lie. They lie to cover the lie, and run for bureaucratic cover.

Back to the Guardian article,

“In Uganda, midwife Harriet Akello runs a lifesaving initiative that has caught the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO). She was due to speak in Lisbon on how fragmented, risky maternity systems can reorient to a “midwifery model of care” – where a mother is kept safe by a small team of skilled midwives.

“With her work at the NGO Mother Health International, Akello helps overwhelmed public maternity centres pivot to WHO standards, operating in a remote post-conflict region near the border with South Sudan, 95km (60 miles) from a referral hospital.

“Akello said, “The world’s policymakers are in Lisbon, yet here I am in Uganda, trying to explain to an embassy why I should have the right to travel. I am gutted and insulted. The WHO says we need ‘midwifery models of care.’ I have a rare example of this, but I’ve been silenced.”

I have always concentrated on a ‘follow the money’ concept, because it usually predicts outcomes.

Yet, the experts I contacted on this issue claimed that the principal issue is less ‘who profits?’ than ‘who gets a seat at the table?’

When visa policies disproportionately exclude frontline health workers from Africa and Asia, influence shifts toward Western institutions, such as universities, ministries, foundations, NGOs, and medical organizations.

Even so, that criticism has been voiced for years by organizations such as the World Health Organization, which has repeatedly argued that maternal-health policy works best when local midwives, nurses, and community health workers participate directly in decision-making rather than being treated merely as recipients of ‘expert’ advice.

If you can control the experts, you have far greater control over the outcomes, but that’s still a follow-the-money issue when you boil it down. When I’m doing my job properly, boiling down is the goal.

My three children were all born in hospitals, attended by expensive doctors. It’s all too easy for people like me to turn a blind eye to those who don’t have that ability as ‘the second-hand choices of the poor.’

Not true at all, but the hand-picked attendees in Portugal are unlikely to hear that argument.

Even so, the irony is that the delegates denied visas were exactly the people working in those frontline systems. If they’re not in Portugal, discussions are dominated by large international NGOs, academic medical centers, government health ministries, donor foundations, global-health consultants, and pharmaceutical and medical-device interests.

The World Health Organization and the International Confederation of Midwives (the latter are the very people holding this conference) have repeatedly found that well-trained midwives can provide most of the essential care needed during pregnancy, childbirth, and the post-natal period.

Such care has proven itself,

‘to provide lower rates of unnecessary cesarean sections, lower rates of induced labor, including the use of forceps and vacuum extraction, less use of surgical incisions to induce births, as well as higher rates of spontaneous vaginal birth, as well as breastfeeding initiation rates. Not to sound like I know more than I do, but studies find greater maternal satisfaction with care, and both comparable or improved outcomes for mothers and babies in low-risk pregnancies.’

A major 2021 analysis published in The Lancet Midwifery Series estimated that universal access to midwifery services could prevent a large share of maternal and newborn deaths worldwide.

In conclusion, the strongest evidence supports an integrated system where midwives handle routine pregnancies and births, while obstetricians handle high-risk cases, and patients move easily between the two when needed.

Obviously, that’s not possible in many parts of the world.

Certainly, those healers and midwives (many of whom are men) have no business in Portugal.

As a side personal note, fifty years ago I had a close friend who was a talented and successful obstetrician. His personal delight was in bringing newborns into the world. When his medical practice insurance exceeded $100,000 a year, he quite unwillingly had to give up his career and retire…

Absolutely no one profited from that, and yet the squeeze continues…

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It’s quite likely that you don’t know what that is.

I confess my ignorance of the ‘Doomesday Book’ until reading an article by my favorite journalist, Seymour Hersh. It is he, you may remember (only if you are of a certain age) who made public, Nixon’s Watergate Break-in.

Oh dear, I am old indeed. That was half a century ago.

But Hersh is still with us, pen in hand, and I call your attention to his observations because I have been dumbfounded as to our current president’s ability to plow through all legal and constitutional restraints.

Seymour Hersh presages his article as follows;

“This is an account of the authorities, many of them top secret and higher, that permit President Donald Trump and his more knowledgeable senior aides to carry on their violent and vicious attacks on minorities and those who disagree with them and their policies with legislative and even legal impunity.

“The answer lies in most cases with what are known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEAD), which have enabled Trump today and his predecessors before him to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law, and censor communications. These extraordinary powers have been put to widespread use by Trump and his aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought.

“They have acted with no congressional authority, no judicial review, and no statutory mechanism for Congress to terminate their powers, once activated, as they have been since Trump took office.”

The Doomsday Book illustrates the dangers in that dilemma, and it needs to be widely known.

PEAD, is much like the Nuclear Suitcase, in that such emergency actions were never expected to be used. But someone in the Trump administration peeked under the privacies carpet and found them.

They had been found before, but former presidents had reliably set them aside, understanding full well that such powers were never to be used for raw political purposes.

Until now.

But we have never before, until now, encountered a president like this one.

Enough, of what fiction writers would call ‘a teaser.’ Let’s peek inside.

Sorry, it’s classified, and neither you nor I (nor Seymour Hersh) have clearance.

If any (and all) of that sounds like something to keep out of the sticky fingers of President Trump, you are both right, and now aware of how he found the keys to dictatorship.

The short answer to its top-secret classification is that no one outside a very small circle in government knows the full contents of the current PEAD, not the Congress, the Supreme Court, or the Executive branch of government. They remain classified, and no complete set has ever been publicly released.

My sources tell me they are pre-written executive orders, proclamations, and messages to Congress that a president could sign immediately during a national emergency such as a nuclear war, catastrophic terrorist attack, cyber collapse, or other continuity-of-government crisis. They originated during the Eisenhower administration during the Cold War.

As did a lot of slop we no longer need, but still remain on the books.

And, what we do know comes from declassified references, FBI memoranda, presidential library records, and continuity-planning documents. Historically, PEAD has reportedly included provisions for declaring a national emergency, calling Congress into emergency session, imposing censorship of communications, as well as restricting travel and passport use.

As if that wasn’t enough, it also covers establishing martial-law-type authorities, suspending or limiting habeas corpus, detaining large groups of people deemed security risks, and expanding executive authority over transportation, communications, and industry.

Even during the height of the Cold War, we never came close enough to those conditions to act on their content.

Much of what was unclear, now makes itself more clear and, to my sensibilities, dangerous in the extreme.

Civil-liberties scholars have long worried that PEAD may authorize actions that would be constitutionally questionable in normal times. These are not normal times, by a long shot. But their abnormality is due to our current president, rather than threatening international forces.

What is particularly striking is that researchers have identified references to at least 56 PEADs in Justice Department budget documents, yet the actual texts remain classified. Even many executive-branch officials reportedly have not seen them.

The best-known historical examples that have surfaced include draft orders for national emergency declarations, suspension of habeas corpus the creation of a censorship office, martial-law arrangements, and mass detention programs. It should be noted that each of Trump’s 263 Executive Orders signed so far, depends upon a statement of national emergency that does not exist.

So, when people talk about the president’s ‘secret emergency powers,’ PEAD is usually what they mean.

The existence of the documents is no longer secret; their specific contents largely still are. One of the major constitutional questions is whether a president could actually enforce some of these actions without Congress or the courts intervening. Because the documents themselves remain hidden, that question has never been fully tested.

Might it be a sensible idea for those questions to come before the Supreme Court? I understand that Trump has the court in his pocket, but at least the request would have been made.

Enter Joel McCleary, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on biological weapons.

Hersh writes,

“A friendship was inevitable when McCleary and I first met decades ago, but we grew closer after Trump took office for a second time in 2025 and began a massive attack on the federal government workforce and authorized Stephen Miller, who by any standard is a sadistic extremist, to carry out the mass deportation of Hispanics and others, both undocumented individuals and persons in the country legally, often separating parents and young children.

“McCleary began to tutor me then about the vast legal authorities Trump had under PEAD. These powers had accumulated in earlier presidencies as the Congress continued to disagree on legislation to deal with immigration policy. Trump, Miller and ICE, relying on secret PEADs, have increasingly divided America with their overly aggressive tactics.

“That this danger was not theoretical,” McCleary writes in the recent private memorandum, “was confirmed” in October 2024 when Time revealed that Mark Harvey, a former special assistant to Trump in his first term as President who personally oversaw the classified binder of PEADs known to some inside the White House as the “Doomsday Book,” publicly warned that the institutional safeguards he once worked within during Trump’s first term no longer existed.

“During Trump’s first term, Harvey explained, the senior national security staff “deliberately shielded the president from learning the full extent of the emergency authorities, fearing he would invoke them in situations far short of the catastrophic crises for which they were designed.”

And now the gloves are off those tiny hands and we are at risk.

Next week, Seymour Hersh promises, “I will report on past occasions when PEAD has been invoked, when presidents have seen fit to avoid congressional oversight, including the Iran-Contra affair.”

Stay tuned…

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The two, obviously, are not disconnected, as our president stacked the court in its current 6-3 conservative majority.

Which might not be so bad. After all, we have survived such majorities in times past, but this one is not conservative. It is a veritable wrecking ball tearing away at the Constitution and the congressionally created laws of the land.

In my humble opinion (and my opinions are rarely humble), presidential recommendations to the high court should be aimed at convergence rather than political advantage. Five-four, in either direction, should be a constitutional stop-sign for presidential appointments.

Additionally, while I’m waving my arms around in frustration, it seems to me that retirement of Justices in ten years, or age seventy, should be the rule, whichever arrives first. This court, regardless of any feelings about our current president, is the most destructive in history and, apparently, will be with us for a long time to come.

A look at the record is dispiriting.

• Trump v. United States (2024) — Presidential Immunity.

  The Court ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for official acts, even after leaving office. Critics argue this creates a dangerous expansion of executive power and places presidents above the law.

• Corner Post v. Federal Reserve (2024)

  The Court expanded opportunities to challenge long-established federal regulations, potentially exposing decades-old rules to fresh litigation. Critics say it invites endless legal challenges to government agencies, and we’ve seen that gone badly awry.

• West Virginia v. EPA (2022)

  The Court adopted the “major questions doctrine,” limiting the ability of agencies such as the EPA to make major policy changes without explicit congressional authorization. Goodbye EPA regulations.

• Shelby County v. Holder

  Predates Trump but was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and became the foundation for much of the election-law landscape during his administrations. It struck down the formula used to determine which states and localities required federal ‘preclearance’ before changing election laws. It boldly gutted the most powerful enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act and led to a wave of voter-ID laws, polling-place closures, and voting-rule changes, all aimed at disenfranchising minorities.

• Rucho v. Common Cause

  Arguably the biggest gerrymandering case of the Trump era. It ruled that federal courts cannot adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering. That gave state legislatures broad freedom to draw heavily partisan congressional maps without federal judicial review.

• Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

  The Court never chose to rule on the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment because it was never certified as part of the Constitution. The practical effect has been that, despite receiving renewed state ratifications decades later, the ERA remains outside the Constitution.

  Thus, the judiciary and federal officials accepted procedural barriers that prevent recognition of the amendment.

• In Brnovich v. DNC, the Court upheld Arizona voting restrictions and made future Voting Rights Act challenges more difficult.

• In Trump v. Hawaii, the Court upheld his travel restrictions on several predominantly Muslim countries, a flagrant abuse of international travel rights.

• In Trump v. CASA, the Court substantially limited the ability of lower federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential policies. Many considered this one of Trump’s most important second-term procedural victories because it made it harder for a single district judge to stop administration initiatives nationwide.

• Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning a half century of abortion rights, was only possible because of his appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

If you think I’m cherry-picking, I’ll accept that.

Yet, together, these decisions strengthened executive power, reduced federal oversight of elections, and made it harder to challenge government actions in court. From a historical perspective, the immunity ruling, and the restrictions on nationwide injunctions may prove to be decisions with the longest-lasting impact on how the federal government operates.

Even so, the argument that Donald Trump has acquired (or is attempting to acquire) dictatorial powers is made by a number of constitutional scholars, former judges, historians, and political scientists.

These are not generally individuals with political prejudices. As for the Supreme Court ruling that presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts, they argue there is such a thing as too broad, and that this places any president too far beyond criminal accountability.

Trump has (possibly on purpose) made himself too hot a topic for impartial criticism, creating a presidency far more powerful than the framers intended. Some legal scholars have gone so far as to describe the ruling as making the presidency more ‘imperial’ and less accountable.

Maybe so, maybe not.

I’m in my tenth decade as a witness to American politics, and hove never seen such controversy, even when Franklin Roosevelt was simultaneously fighting both a major economic depression and a world war. It’s probably not unfair to point out that FDR was fighting for a wounded country, and Trump is fighting only for himself and a wounded image of himself.

Yet, the Founders we are all so fond of calling upon, designed a tripartite form of governance that aimed at keeping various powers in check.

If I am correct, they anticipated all the obvious grievances of their times, and did what they could to envision a nation of equals during a time of slavery. They were not perfect, because the times would not allow perfection, but they were pretty good.

Above all, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin and Washington, feared the concentration of power in any one person or institution. Having just fought a revolution against a king, they designed a government where ambition would counter ambition, forcing each branch to defend its own authority against the others.

In all such things, the Devil is in the details, and the unexpected usually strikes on its own.

What the Framers failed to foresee, was money taking over each aspect of the construction they labored to build. Wealth, in their times, was attached to land, and most of them were both landowners and slaveholders. Their wealth gave them more privilege than wealth, but they were wary of kings for good reason.

It all worked for over 200 years, but Franklin’s response to the question of “what kind of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin? persists, and may not survive our 250^th anniversary as a nation.

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

The United States of America was conceived as a promise. A promise of equality, over which we would fight a Civil War. A promise of opportunity as well as invention, prosperity, education, science, and agriculture. and a nation open to immigration, because we were lacking the hands to build and the imaginations to dream.

We are in danger, and the danger is not Donald Trump.

The danger is an uncontrolled, untaxed, and immoral concentration of wealth beyond what anyone would (or could) predict. Enough money in private hands to buy a Congress, infect a Supreme Court, and disable the machinery of free elections.

“We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.” Mark Twain

If that doesn’t make you cry, you have no tears to spare…

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And so it is with hope in the place of reflection.

For example, one need look no further than Tesla which, as I write this, is trading at $381 and, for those three hundred eighty-one bucks, you’ll get 13 cents back this quarter.

The Price-to-Earnings ratio of Tesla stock (TSLA) is somewhere around 360, depending upon what time of day it happens to be. For a comparison, look at Ford Motor Company with a PE ratio at 11, GM at 9 and Toyota at 8. That’s thirty times as high for every buck invested in a car company that’s missed every delivery date promised, already dropped two of its five offerings and has yet to fulfil Semi-truck orders accepted years ago.

Investors paying that multiple are effectively valuing Tesla as much more than a car company.

Really?

Betting on future growth from a Ketamine addicted founder with a trail of broken promises might seem strange, but then Ford isn’t promising autonomous driving, robotics, AI, energy storage, and robotics. For the most part, Ford delivers what it promises.

Wall Street just made Mr. Musk a $trillionaire on his latest IPO.

If the ground under valuations at Big Banks, Tech Companies and AI Startups seems a bit shaky, maybe it’s just me and my memories of persistent financial ‘adjustments’ every five years or so and major wreckages every decade or two. Born during the Great Depression, I’ve seen a lot of decades.

• Large parts of Europe are on financial thin ice,

• there’s a war in Ukraine in its fifth year,

• Israel is hip deep in what the world calls a genocide,

• the United States has joined Israel in an unprovoked attack on Iran,

• oil transport has been internationally interrupted through the Straits of Hormuz as a result,

• Trump’s tariff policies have business interruptions on a global level, and

• income inequality in America is at an all time high…but

• ‘happy days are here again’ on Wall Street.

Does that seem just a bit risky at the moment, or is it just me?

My sources say it’s not just me. They point out that markets are not the economy, and Wall Street is not Main Street (ya think?). Markets discount the future, with investors asking ‘what’s next,’ instead of ‘what’s going on now.’

P.T. Barnum had it right, when he said, “The public appears disposed to be amused, even when they are conscious of being deceived.” Amused is one thing, a PE of 360 is quite another.

It’s a good thing to remember that Wall Street makes no money in a stagnant market. When nothing moves, no one makes a buck. Thousands of traders whispering in thousands of ears keeps the bonuses rolling, and there are always ears willing to listen.

And then, of course, there’s interest rates.

Flying in the face of rational lending, we had decades of zero (or near zero) interest rates. ‘Free money,’ and many businesses (particularly small businesses) tanked up on debt for expansion, or buying back stock, if they were listed. The current U.S. prime rate is about 6.75%, and most commercial loans are a couple of points above that.

Now those ‘adjustable’ rates are biting a lot of businesses in the ankle.

The U.S. hip-deep in debt:

• Residential mortgages, $13.2 trillion,

• Student loans, $1.66 trillion,

• Credit card debt, $1.25 trillion,

• Auto loans, $1.69 trillion,

• Nonfinancial business debt, $22.2 trillion, for a chilling

• total of all categories, amounting to $40.0 trillion.

Those are $trillions, folks, forty-thousand $billions…

It’s useful (but not all that helpful) that markets rose during periods during the Vietnam War, as well as the Iraq War, and during other periods of severe social unrest. They also remained buoyant in the late 1920s and before the 2008 financial crisis, right up to the moment they didn’t.

In 1929, the Drake Hotel was the tallest hotel in Chicago, and known for its fine cuisine. It was a favored place for broken investors to enjoy a fine meal and jump to their death after a cognac or two.

The argument for caution is straightforward: when valuations become elevated, debt levels are high, geopolitical risks are multiplying, and a great deal of optimism is already reflected in asset prices, the margin for error shrinks. One of my favorite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, warned that “financial markets have a remarkable ability to ignore unpleasant realities for longer than observers think possible. But history also shows that when sentiment finally changes, it can change very quickly.”

One metric illustrates the point.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is roughly thirty times Ford’s. Investors are not paying for today’s thirteen cent return, they’re paying for a very (and I think over optimistic) future.

If I’m on track, it can be brutally repriced when it doesn’t and, in these times of international finance, the world will share the wreckage.

So, the issue isn’t risk.

The issue is underestimating, giddyness, and greed.

I think I’m not not alone, in wondering why so many warning lights are flashing as stock indexes remain near record highs.

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As I type this, it will be 1,564 days or 4 years, 3 months, 14 days, 0 hours, 20 minutes since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

That unprovoked invasion was supposed to last but a few days before total capitulation. It seems the nation and its president had other ideas. Offered a flight out by the US, President Zelensky replied, “Don’t send me transportation, send me bullets.”

And thus began a heroic tale that stunned the world.

For many European heads of state, it became a useful photo opportunity. Arriving in Kiev, smiling at the camera while shaking the president’s hand, they guarantee their unwavering support and scamper back to whatever country from which they came.

How do I love thee, let me count the ways…

Surprisingly, my sources confirm that more than 40 European presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, and senior EU leaders have made at least one visit. Many have gone multiple times.

• June 16, 2022, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, Mario Draghi, Klaus Iohannis visited together.

• February 24, 2024 (2nd anniversary) the leaders of Canada, Italy, Belgium and a number of EU institutions visited Kyiv.

• February 24, 2025 (3rd anniversary) One of the largest gatherings included leaders from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Canada and others, joined Zelensky in Kyiv.

• May 10, 2025, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Donald Tusk arrived together in Kyiv to support Ukraine and call for a ceasefire.

• February 24, 2026, (4th anniversary) a new summit in Kyiv brought Nordic, Baltic and other European leaders to Ukraine on the war’s fourth anniversary.

In total, Kyiv has hosted dozens of European leaders and well over 100 individual leader visits since February 2022, making it one of the most heavily visited wartime capitals in modern history.

Most heavily visited and most lightly supported.

Love, it seems, is more observation of body-counts than the bullets requested.

It’s one thing to honor anniversaries, and quite another to agree to a marriage. In my view, Europe and, probably more importantly, the United States, never showed up at the alter.

Since the disastrous Trump-Zelensky White House shaming in February of 2025, Europe has held roughly 15–20 major leader-level conferences, summits, and Coalition of the Willing meetings in about 15 months. These include gatherings in London, Paris, Kyiv, Brussels, Berlin, and several virtual summits.

Bottom line, the Coalition of the Willing wasn’t all that willing.

Launched by Britain and France in March of 2025, leaders held a London summit, a Virtual summit, and a Paris summit, all of which occurred within a month. Additional meetings in April, May, July, September, October, November, and December of 2025 were sort of ‘base camps’ for approaching a Paris summit in January, and a Kyiv summit in February of 2026.

No sherpas were in sight. All of which embarrassed both themselves and the definition of summitry.

Even so, like a proper sugar daddy,the recalcitrant Coalition came up with about $300 billion.

Both supporters and critics can claim partial validation. Supporters will tell you the aid stopped a sovereign democracy from being erased, while critics insist all that dough only produced a very bloody stalemate.

But, even with Trump declaring Ukraine had no cards to play, by mid-2023, public rhetoric in parts of Washington, London, Brussels, and the media, escalated toward recovering all occupied territory, isolating Russia economically, crippling its military, and weakening Putin permanently.

All of which are pretty much ‘high, apple pie, in the sky expectations’ for Ukraine, when you compare it to the US’s inability to make that happen during an entire Cold War. That required far more than survival, including sustained offensive superiority, industrial overmatch, air dominance, ammunition supremacy, and political unity over many years.

None of those advantages were on the menu in Kiev.

Meanwhile, Zelensky was holding the whole thing together with chewing gum.

So, the apple pie conditions never fully materialized, as Russia adapted its economy to sanctions, China, India and others continued buying Russian energy, and Moscow ramped up drone and artillery production.

The 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive became a psychological turning point. And, way too many in the West expected dramatic breakthroughs, including the collapse of the Russian initiative, and Crimea possibly being under immediate threat. That was a study in ‘wishful thinking,’ which might well have happened if Europe had stepped forward with an upgrade in weaponry.

Didn’t happen.

And, you might well ask, if $300 billion cannot decisively win the war, what exactly is Europe’s (and Putin’s) endgame?

Time to call it what it is, and admit that Europe is terrified of Putin, and his nuclear capability.

All this nonsense, along with summits that never deal with real issues is hanging Ukraine out to dry, just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain did in WWII, when he sacrificed Czechoslovakia for “Peace in our Time.”

Winston Churchill nailed it when he told Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” There are those who say Britain wasn’t yet ready.

When is anyone ever ‘ready’ for a madman?

This fear of Putin and atomic response will go on and on, as he nibbles away at Europe. Who’s next? “Well,” the summit attendees are bound to respond, “he will never dare to attack a NATO country.” Peace in our time was a pretty hard nut to crack for Poland, France, and Hitler’s other targets in continental Europe.

If Europe will not have the courage to arm Ukraine with ‘like for like’ missiles and aircover, it ought at least have the moral courage to say so. Mothers shielding their babies with their own bodies in basements, and ‘making do’ with destroyed infrastructure, while European heads of state attend endless summits, is Churchill’s definition of ‘dishonor.’

No international bully has ever been appeased.

Vladimir Zelensky, the bravest man of this century, deserves better than to beg his way around Western powers. So do Ukrainian soldiers and its public…

And that is largely where the debate now lives.

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ChatGPT is involved here, because there’s really no other source than artificial intelligence to scan the statistics upon so broad an issue. Along with that disclosure, I readily admit my prejudice that “statistics will admit to anything, if sufficiently tortured.”

With both those issues in mind, off we go…

The ‘prompt’ for Chat was, “give me a list of things the American public is 60% against,” and its immediate response was, “If you mean issues where roughly six in ten Americans oppose a policy, proposal, or action, here are some recent examples.”

Fair enough.

• Unfavorable view of Benjamin Netanyahu: 59% have no confidence in him; 60% view Israel unfavorably in a recent Pew survey.

• U.S. military action in Cuba: 61% opposed.

• U.S. military action in Mexico: 60% opposed.

• U.S. military action against Iran: 57–70% opposed, depending on the poll.

• Continuing the Iran air campaign: 59% opposed in early polling.

• Trump’s proposed White House ballroom project: 56% opposed.

• Trump’s foreign policy performa…

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We’re good at that, we Americans. The unhoused rather than homeless is but another example. George Carlin has a wonderful video on that subject, dating our dehumanization all the way back to the First World War. There’s a link at the bottom of this article, in case you’re interested.

Those who have caused all this societal grief are so ashamed of themselves, they eagerly climb on board the Precariat Express.

Reaching for a definition, my dictionary comes up with “word not found.” It suggests precariat is “a portmanteau of ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat,’ referring to a social class of people whose lives are characterized by a lack of job security, stable income, and social protection.”

A portmanteau, should you be unfamiliar with that word, is a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings. Motel fits that usage, being made by combining ‘motor’ and ‘hotel.’

So, my dictionary disallows a word, by defining it.

As Carlin informs us, ‘shell-shock,’ a perfectly reliable word for the horrors of war, has become ‘post-traumatic stress disorder,’ a word entirely devoid of any human feeling.

But it did gain two extra words, so I guess that counts for something.

Yet, the ‘precariat’ is more than simply a few people that deliver your pizza. They’re an entire class, eating away what once was our middle class, formerly supported by labor unions.

Temporary contracts, gig work, no benefits, unpredictable schedules, little legal protection, and few paths to stability. all flies in the face of the family life we once knew, when a single wage-earner could support a family.

In the United States, it has expanded dramatically through app-based labor, subcontracting, and the erosion of traditional employment protections.

Some of the most easily recognized American examples include:

• Uber Technologies — drivers classified as independent contractors rather than employees, typically without healthcare, pensions, paid vacation, or job security.

• DoorDash — where drivers pay fuel, vehicle, and insurance costs themselves.

• Amazon Flex drivers — technically contractors using personal vehicles to make deliveries.

• Bicycle courier services in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — many riders work through subcontractors or apps, often paid per delivery with no insurance or injury coverage despite dangerous conditions.

• Warehouse temp agencies supplying workers to firms such as Amazon or logistics hubs — workers may wear company badges but are technically employed by staffing firms.

• Home care aides and elder-care workers — frequently employed through fragmented agencies who pass along low wages and inconsistent hours.

• Freelance media workers, copywriters, and designers working through platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.

• Seasonal retail and fulfillment workers hired for holidays and quickly dismissed afterward. I once worked during Christmas for the post office, delivering packages with my Dad’s truck.

• ‘1099’ construction and trucking workers —legally dubious contractor arrangements used to avoid payroll taxes and benefits.

“It’s not us,” says Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “We have to use subcontractors and have no control over their business arrangements.” Bullshit, Jeff. What passes for slave labor is entirely under your control.

A major distinction of what we now call the precariat, is that workers bear the risks once required by employers, such as healthcare, retirement savings, social security contributions, worker compensation between jobs, equipment costs, insurance, and even legal liability, where they can get away with it.

Add all of that together, and you can see where employers benefit.

Critics, those few whose voices are heard, argue this model creates a four tier society:

• a larger share of whom are working poor,

• a shrinking secure middle class,

• an expanding workforce living paycheck to paycheck despite being continuously employed, and

• white-collar workers.
  Supporters argue that gig work offers flexibility and entry-level income opportunities.

History creates society as much as it records it.

The American precariat was enabled by the 2008 financial crisis and suffered further during the COVID era, as app-based delivery and contract labor became normalized across much of the economy.

Normalized, was it? What on earth is ‘normal’ about the combination of a bubble-based series of bank mismanagements, followed by a pandemic?

What was normal, was the super-rich responding to opportunity, as the super-rich have done throughout most of American history.

And I made no complaint over that, until they stomped all over a middle class that took 200 years to build, stole in-the-dark-of-the-night all the tools from the toolboxes that constrained the necessary limitations on capitalism, engineered a fraudulent takeover of the checks and balances that supported a democratic republic…

…and then ran off with the wealth of the nation.

This essay is getting longish, but several points have yet to be made.

In 1776, the year or America’s birth, Adam Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. That elegant tome is usually shortened to The Wealth of Nations.

It is, according to those who know better than me, considered one of the foundational works of modern economics and classical liberalism. Smith argued that markets often function best with limited government interference, that a division of labor increases productivity, and self-interest can unintentionally benefit society through competition and trade.

He argued that national wealth comes from productive labor rather than hoarded gold or colonial mercantilism.

I argue (with far less reputation than Smith) that we find ourselves overwhelmed today by hoarded financial holdings and a grip on mercantile assets that is colonial at best, and overarchingly repressive at worst.

The wealth of our particular nation has, within my lifetime, expanded a thousandfold.

One percent of our citizenry now controls 60% of all American assets.

From the comfortable days of a wealth class made of millionaires, who paid their taxes and ran a government without debt, we have elevated ourselves a thousand floors, to a billionaire class that pays virtually no taxes, defeated the tenets of a nation of law, and engendered a forty trillion dollar indebtedness.

I was a young businessman in those times. We provided free university education for our returning soldiers after WWII, and built Levittowns to house them. We rebuilt a destroyed Europe and Asis with Marshall Plan funds.

There was nothing we could not do.

And we sold it all, became consumers instead of producers, and called that progress.

Adam Smith was also a moral philosopher. His earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, emphasized empathy, ethics, and social responsibility. Those social admonitions are often overlooked by people who reduce him to a simple defender of greed or laissez-faire capitalism.

We shared that philosophy, and traded it for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Watch George Carlin, you’ll be glad you did…

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So help me, that is a Guardian UK headline.

Bear with me, as I share the opening paragraphs of the article: “An investigation into acts of self-pleasure among parrots and other birds has reached a climax, with the results providing welcome relief for vets and researchers, not to mention the birds themselves.

“Bird keepers are often advised to discourage and even punish birds for masturbating, but the study found the activity was more common in the wild than in captivity, with researchers concluding it is part of a bird’s natural behaviour.

“The report’s authors urged vets to reassure worried owners that the antics are not harmful and warned that efforts to intervene, which range from removing perches to hormone treatment and surgery, could be far more damaging.

“Our big finding is that masturbation is not a negative response to captivity,” said Dr Chloe Heys, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Lancashire in Preston. “This is widespread in birds and we found it’s a perfectly natural and healthy behaviour that’s part of their repertoire of sexual behaviours.”

Bird keepers ‘are often advised,’ are they?

That’s news to me. I was raised as a kid with a parrot, a somewhat nasty bird that drank coffee and bit my finger if I offered to shake hands-feet with it. But I had never observed Abner trying to pleasure himself. I had just only recently gotten around to that discovery myself.

And, what does that say for the wild bird world outside our windows? Is that low hum sometimes heard at night, not the neighbor’s car left idling in his driveway, but the collective moan from the trees, announcing community orgasm among our perched bird world?

And, is it nocturnal, or only likely to assault our ears at that specific time for ‘easy listening’?

Further, what has it to say of our wider, un-feathered natural world?

Whales, I’m told, can communicate across hundreds of miles. Are the oceans abuzz with self-manipulated sexual activity? These are serious questions, that may affect radar, sonar, and other man-made instruments of destruction.

One can but wonder.

The singing of mosquitoes, chirping of crickets, even (as yet, unstudied) moaning of trees as they bend in the wind. What of these things, I ask? Is the veretative world left out, or merely unstudied? A vet surely cannot answer, but perhaps a horticulturist might apply for a grant to see what your houseplants are up to when you’re not looking.

Dr Ana Basto, a vet at the University of Lancashire who was not involved in the study, said the report would help vets give better advice to bird owners.

“This research is pivotal and will be a step towards achieving a more holistic understanding of why and how birds behave the way they do.”

What about our kids, Ana, locked in their bedrooms upstairs, loud music playing, and not answering the door?

Are they to be ignored, while we fret over a parakeet with a smile on its beak? What are vets contributing to the understanding and support of our sexually misunderstood children?

Down with birds and up with children, I say.

It’s a mantra for today’s over-stressed parents.

Our kids do not (yet) shit on newspaper in cages.

Free the whales, save them snails, take a deep breath and allow the animals, vegetables and humans to get along as they always have…badly, but with an outlet for their misery…

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Senator Sanders is an American national treasure, the only socialist politician in a nation that rejects socialism. The man who never gives up a fight for the American people has a plan.

Like a Timex watch, Sanders Takes a Lickin,’ and Keeps on Ticken.

The definition of a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ is “A state-owned investment fund comprised of money generated by the government, often derived from a country’s surplus reserves, which is invested in various financial assets to benefit the nation’s economy and future generations.”

Lots of countries have them, including the Government Pension Fund of Norway, China Investment Corporation, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Kuwait Investment Authority, and Qatar Investment Authority. These funds, and many others like them, are distributed periodically among the citizens of each country.

The United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, does not have one.

In its place, having busied ourselves with more pressing issues, we have the largest national indebtedness among the world’s nations, approaching $40 trillion.

We are also, at least for the present , leaders in the world race for the development of artificial intelligence, and Bernie has a plan for the juxtaposition of debt and wealth.

You will be interested in that, because you have a personal stake in both.

Getting down to the nitty and gritty of artificial intelligence, Bernie claims there is actually nothing artificial about it. It’s based upon supercomputers raking up all the current (and future) knowledge of the world in a pile, much like autumn leaves in a yard.

That’s a task that’s doable, but it takes enormous funding and, much like a poker game, one or two players will take home all the winnings, and the losers will have nothing but empty pockets.

Bernie argues that America is not quite yet a poker game, but it’s dangerously close. He wants the government to replace Las Vegas, with the American public both dealing the cards and raking in the winnings.

That’s how Weath Funds are built, by countries that care to build them

So, just what is the intelligence behind the artificial moniker?

Bernie claims it encompasses “our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning human history.”

In a nutshell, it’s the entire nut, and squirrels like Elon Musk should not own that nut. It’s in the public domain.

And, that’s not just Bernie’s opinion. According to Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, his models were trained on our “collective experience, knowledge” and “learnings of humanity.”

And we’re going to allow a couple of billionaires to ‘own that,’ and resell it to us?

According to Sanders, “For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world.

It’s time for us to reclaim it.”

Continuing, Bernie writes, “That is why I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.”

“This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.

“If passed, this legislation would do two crucial things. First, it would give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology. No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.

“Second, this legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer. If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.”

Only one thing stands between this legislation and its passage.

American government is today (and has for generations) been bought and paid for by the Billionaire Class.

Inconveniently, they are the only impediment to legislation that would stop the steal of humanity’s collective knowledge, for their private gain.

I’m too small a voice. All my wrenches are still in the hands of the monkeys.

Guaranteeing this legislation will require class actions on a scale beyond my means or capacity.

Someone out there must take up Bernie Sander’s cause…

“The future of A.I. and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. It must not be dictated by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities and the American people. It’s our future. We must decide it.”

…Bernie Sanders…

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It’s a loser’s game to try to ferret out what’s in Donald Trump’s brain. But the fuel that energizes it seems to include a mixture of personal gain, flattery, media domination, and whatever any of his long list of sycophants last whispered in his ear.

The title of this essay suggests a long-anticipated invasion of Cuba.

The whisperer in this latest flight of fancy is likely either Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who is of Cuban origin), or what’s left of the American mafia, which still smarts from its loss of a gambling empire on the island. Certainly, it would not be Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump claims weekly phone conversations.

On all other fronts, it’s Trump 101.

My sources tell me that on an average day, Trump probably appears on 300–500 newspaper front pages nationwide.

For a man Forbes rated at $4 billion before becoming president, his estimated current personal (and family business) intake of an additional $10 billion puts the Emoluments Clauses in the Constitution at risk of being meaningless. At 64.4 months in office thus far from his two terms, that ups his intake of questionable payoffs to a bit over $155 million a month.

Not included in that number is another that might very well pale all others by comparison. Simply advance knowledge of his various tariff determinations would allow and insider trading

Running down ‘whispers in his ear’ is more fun, but ultimately far more speculative.

Someone, or something, encouraged him to:

1) abandon military support to Ukraine;
2) enact sweeping up-and-down tariffs and trade wars;
3) order mass deportations and immigration crackdowns;
4) allow Elon Musk to create and use the Department of Government Efficiency to emasculate government bureaucracy;
5) ignore the orders of federal courts, including the Supreme Court;
6) remove the U.S. from international obligations such as the Paris Accords and USAID;
7) dismiss and replace large numbers of immigration judges;
8) kidnap the democratically elected president of Venezuela by military force;
9) attack without warning or reason the sovereign nation of Iran;
10) continue to threaten a military takeover of Greenland; and
(11) openly consider the invasion of another sovereign country, Cuba.

So, what we actually know, on a day-by-day basis, is that instead of a horse-whisperer, we need a Trump-whisperer deep within those closest to him.

Good Lord, that pretty much means Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, any of those dudes standing in at his inauguration, or the rare few who have not yet been thrown under the bus.

Stay tuned, we may be in for a far bumpier ride than anticipated.

Our only hope is that that bus still hasconsiderable room under it…

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I believe there’s a whole lot of confusion over artificial intelligence and its purported threat to humanity.

It’s a tool, folks, and yet we continue to ascribe human responses to an invention that is not anywhere near human.

“It will turn on us once it achieves sentience.”

Sorry to disappoint, folks, but AI is a machine. Ever since Hal in the Space Odyssey series, over-excited viewers have assigned human attributes to computers. Once the current frenzy pauperizes investors, and settles on one or two winners, that speculation will no doubt calm down.

AI is powerful because, for the first time, computers are learning directly from computers and, before long, they will have captured and documented pretty much all that is known in today’s world, updating itself tomorrow and the next day into an endless cycle.

It’s quite likely that either Greg Brockman and/or Elon Musk will own those piles of facts, and sell them to us on their way to $gazillionaireship. Why pause at mere $trillions?

Nothing new there, the super wealthy have been treating us like third-rate citizens ever since they sold us to China.

My bet, if I had any money to bet, would trend toward Brockman, because I think Musk has pretty much run his race and shown himself to be a poor manager of spectacular innovations.

Who really knows how all that will shake out, but trillions of dollars are in the game at the moment. Most of those trillions will be lost by investors who find themselves left by the side of the road. Another bubble set to blow up in humanity’s face.

What I think, for sure, is that worrying about AI turning on its human ownership is like expecting a hundred thousand Encyclopedia Britannicas to produce a logical opinion on human behavior.

AI does not in any way mirror the human animal that created it.

It does not fancy the acquisition of wealth, needs no food nor air to breathe, and is not interested in yachts or winter holidays in warm climates. So far as I know, it harbors no political ambitions.

Those who bask in the sun of its creation will do what all greedy inventors do…rob us blind for its use and (probably, successfully) lower the common man yet one more embarrassing rung down the ladder toward poverty.

Yes, jobs will be lost.

But the knowledge base of the common man will rise enormously, and self education will be available at $20 or $30 or $50 each and every month. One can expect Harvard and Yale and MIT to all but disappear, like riders into a western sunset.

We cannot know the ultimate ramifications of artificial intelligence, any more than we understood what prior technological progress had in store, as we moved from agricultural to industrial to consumer and information eras.

But all of them scared us half to death. 125 years ago, 94% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today, 4% handle a much larger source of food (with a little help from a Mexican here and there). Henry Ford’s River Rouge assembly line took coal and iron ore in at the top, and delivered finished automobiles at the other end. In the process he doubled wages to $5 a day.

If one were to look for hope in a future that in many ways looks pretty bleak, AI may allow us to overcome technologically a headlong rush into environmental disaster.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Then Elon might see no need to ship humanity off to the worst possible choice…Mars.

But stop worrying about artificial intelligence. Hal was a fictional device.

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I write about international politics. It’s what I do and have done for the 33 years I’ve lived in Europe, so keeping up with the thornier matters of war, threats of war, and the stupidity of those who would destroy rather than build, is my daily diet.

I recover my sanity in the company of Patrick Mahomes, Fred Couples, and Ronnie O’Sullivan.

According to my sources, for most Americans, sports are often more emotionally engaging day-to-day, while politics is considered more important in principle. It would be nice to think so but, from what I see of American weariness with the current state of our union, I’d put my money with the Kansas City Chiefs any day of the week

The NFL alone routinely dominates U.S. television audiences. Events like the Super Bowl attract 100+ million viewers, far beyond even major political speeches or debates. How many actually watch the annual State of the Union speech? That’s the Super Bowl of politics, and it gets a meager 30-40 percent of that, and actually even that surprises me.

For me (now that Tom Brady hung up his helmet), Mahomes is tops among quarterbacks today. Freddie Couples still has the finest swing and sweetest personality in golf, and no one will ever pick up a snooker cue as skillfully as Ronnie O’Sullivan.

My down time values individual skills above all other stuff to watch, which is why since Roger Federer retired I don’t pay all that much attention to professional tennis. So how come Freddie is my guy? Probably because he still loves the game, and his swing and personality remain, way past their sell-by dates, and old folks pay attention to that.

I’m old.

Now, I’m told that politics has become vastly more consuming since about 2015.

Interesting, that date.

Consuming, or frightening and impossible to predict? Maybe that’s exactly its pull. We now have a frightening and impossible to predict man behind the desk in the Oval Office.

I never really thought of it that way. Cable news, social media, and culture wars turned politics into a form of both identity and entertainment. Check out the parallels to sports: teams we can rail against: a hero here and there, villains everywhere behind the scenes, rivalries, statistics and, best of all, daily outrage cycles.

Election years can temporarily rival sports in attention, especially around figures like Donald Trump.

The deeper distinction, so my advisors advise, is that both sports and politics offer a sort of tribal belonging, with no real-world consequences, as long as those masked guys aren’t after you. The main difference is you can’t talk politics anymore at the office, or beyond almost anyone not sitting at your own kitchen table.

Sports is okay at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Politics is a no-no, sometimes even with your wife, husband, or mate.

Which begs the question, what’s left if sports are of no interest to those closest to you?

What else provides emotional release, gets you anxious and angry, has clear rules and scoreboards, mostly feels chaotic and ambiguous, ends with a winner and never really ends?

The answer is nothing.

That’s a pretty severe admission, so I looked around, even between the cushions on the sofa and under the corner of the rug. You can crochet if you care to, take up watching old movies or gourmet cooking. But modern life is too discouraging to contemplate without sports.

One of the striking developments of modern America is how politics adopted the emotional structure of sports. Jerseys became hats and slogans, rallies became pep events, opponents became enemies, and ‘winning’ always mattered most.

Our younger generation has clearly seen (and embraced) the transition , and done so without question, which I find particularly disturbing. But all generations are now younger than mine, so we’ll leave it at that.

Politics, which once dominated civic management, now most often resembles a permanent championship season.

Anyone interested in watching Ronnie O’Sullivan crush a snooker opponent at age fifty?

I thought not.

We are mesmerized by watching an eighty-year-old run rampage over all the tenets of American government.

Please let me know when his season ends…

(A note about ‘paid subscribers,’ which appears below. You get no added benefits by subscribing, everyone gets the same. But the seven bucks helps me keep my bills paid, so if the cost of a cup of coffee each month isn’t too much, please kick in)

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Okay, assassinated is a more accurate word, because they were all political killings.

I was in my thirties back then, newly married, raising a family, and inspired by what I heard from President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and a black preacher I was only becoming acquainted with, name of Martin Luther King, Jr.

My political education was probably somewhat in its infancy then, but my landscape architectural practice was thriving and the future looked pretty much like a rosy peach.

In what seemed an eternal damnation, it all disappeared like sand underfoot.

President Kennedy was the first, smiling one moment from a motorcade in Dallas, and then gone in a blur of bloodshed, sirens and mayhem, his wife Jackie holding his already lifeless body. We hadn’t lost a president this way since Lincoln, and no one was alive today to remember that. We simply did not do those things anymore.

Of particular interest to me, since their near-miss of potential conflict after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had opened a private, back-channel correspondence, outside the peering eyes of their governments, to negotiate nuclear disarmament. That may not have been in the best interests of the military industrial profiteers.

Kennedy’s plans to end the Vietnam war paint a picture of a president who had made powerful enemies across the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and Cold War hardliners. Investigations by Congress and other authorities were removed from public scrutiny for 50 years, without any credible excuse, and extended for another 50 in 2013, adding fuel to the theory he was killed by the CIA.

Can you think of a reason for blindsiding investigation for a hundred years, when all the witnesses are dead?

Me neither.

Then came the next, and the next, and the next.

Two years later, Malcom X was shot 21 times at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted, though two of the three were later exonerated after evidence revealed both police and FBI misconduct and suppressed evidence. Malcolm had recently broken with the Nation after a pilgrimage to Mecca and his evolving views on race and activism.

Attorneys have argued that a member of BOSSI (a covert intelligence unit within the NYPD), reported having witnessed what appeared to be a rehearsal for the assassination a week or so before it happened. The FBI and NYPD, they allege, were aware of credible threats to Malcolm X’s life but ensured he remained vulnerable in the days leading up to his murder. Make what you care to of those quasi-governmental dark forces that move against the interests of White America.

Three years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King had come to support striking sanitation workers. James Earl Ray, a white rascist, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years. King’s death sparked riots in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Thirty-one years later (these things take time, you know), a civil jury found that a conspiracy involving local Memphis police and federal agencies contributed to his death — a verdict largely overlooked by mainstream media. His assassination accelerated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, an Act the Supreme Court has found a need to pretty much destroy earlier this year.

These things take time, you know.

As I mentioned, what took nearly 200 years to achieve, comes apart quite quickly.

Any fool with a chainsaw can cut down in minutes a tree that took 300 years to grow…lessons to be learned…saviors are not unlike trees

Two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, the former president’s brother, was shot, minutes after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.

Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by a Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant, who was angry over U.S. support for Israel. Kennedy died the following day. His death ended what many believed was the most viable path to ending the Vietnam War through electoral politics.

That was not to be, because a man was angry and no one gave a shit at the moment…at least no one who was charged with protection. Fancy that.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the last of the famous family brothers, finally died in 2009 of a normal, peaceful death.

The fingerprints of the CIA, which Harry Truman had named ‘the American Gestapo,’ remain markedly present on each killing during this unprecedented decade of murder, mayhem and criminal activity.

It’s as if the old days of Mafia gangland killings were in reboot. You have to be pretty old to have a memory of those times, probably seventy by now, but that era of our American history is too easily erased in the common memory by moon landings, unwon wars, and financial disasters.

Now, of course, even that history is under attack by those who would remove it from the public memory…such as it is.

In his first week in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors. These executive orders are (and were) designed to chill and prohibit lawful efforts to advance equal opportunity.

They attempt to do so by spreading disinformation and distorting federal laws to advance an agenda based on division and hate.

No one remembers.

And the band plays on…

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Briefly, to refresh your memory of why ‘checks and balances’ are part of our governmental history, the Founders harbored a deep fear of concentrated power. They’d just shaken off a king, but were equally wary of mob rule, military dictatorship, and corruption by wealthy interests.

Little did they know of monetary dictatorship or, perhaps, they knew all too well.

Their solution was to carefully divide government into self-correcting sections, each wary of the others. These Founding Fathers (as we are fond of naming them) were well-read and honorable men, doing their best to carve out a free nation from one still embracing slavery…not an easy task, and an imperfect one at best.

And they found the guidance they sought largely from the French political philosopher, Montesquieu. He wrote The Spirit of the Laws, which argued that liberty survives only when power is separated into different branches. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and (my favorite) Thomas Jefferson, adapted those ideas into the American Constitution.

Which established three branches: Legislative (a Congress to write laws), Executive (a President to enforce laws), and a Judicial (Supreme Court and lower courts to interpret laws).

The key element was that each branch could, and would, restrain the others.

Congress could impeach presidents and judges, presidents could veto congressional legislation, and courts could declare laws unconstitutional. Madison famously described the logic as “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Somehow fraud and bribery escaped the net, probably because honorable men do not practice that dark art, and these were honorable men.

Meanwhile, money increasingly bled into the equation.

Back in the day, senators were chosen by state legislatures, not directly by voters. Political campaigns, militias, foreign affairs, and government itself was small-scale and relatively inexpensive. But, within a hundred years, Industrialization changed all that dramatically. Railroad barons, bankers, and industrial magnates began exerting enormous influence over legislatures and parties.

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, campaign financing had become central to American politics. Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United v. FEC greatly expanded the role of money in political speech, allowing corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals to spend vast sums independently in elections.

Speech was still free, but the size of the megaphone was determined by money.

Critics argue (quite sensibly) that the original constitutional balance has shifted from institutional cross checks toward total financial control over governance.

I continue to remind my fellow citizens that, in 1950 (a mere 75 years ago), our government had no debt, financed itself entirely through taxes, and those taxes were agreeably paid by those who owed them. American business and individuals thrived as never before (or since) with a graduated tax that topped out at 92%.

The (or since) modifier is as wrecked as a head-on collision by the establishment of a $billionaire class, our first ever, that aim to become $trillionaires.

And they will, if unchallenged.

The answer is clear, and those who claim ‘we can never go back’ are wrong, and have been proven wrong.

We came back, enduring a Civil War that ended our history as a slave nation.

We came back, from two World Wars, the Great Depression, and an economic recession (on average) every 4 ½ years since.

We came back, from the horrific assassinations of the 1960s, when we lost President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, The Honorable Martin Luther King, jr., and Islamic leader Malcome X.

We are a nation of comebacks.

The overriding question is whether Americans, as a nation, are beaten, broken, and left by the side of the road of history…or not.

You may not know, or remember, much of what I’ve written so far, because you were not there.

Only 1% of those of us born in 1935 are alive today, and a large portion of those among us are in various stages of dementia.

I was there, every step of the way.

The first president I ever knew, until the age of ten, was Franklin Roosevelt. I listened to the Fireside Chats, heard Hitler speak, was there when our soldiers came home to free university educations, watched Harry Truman preside over the Marshall Plan, and was at lunch in my family’s kitchen when Kennedy was killed.

Those words are not braggadocio.

They are a lifetime remembrance of the pain and prosperity that illustrate the America in which I grew up. I’m old now, not ‘getting old,’ but truly old, and most of my brain cells are hitting on all cylinders. I’m telling you how it was and how it can be again, because too few of us are alive to comment.

Don’t believe the best of America is behind us.

Don’t believe it can’t be restored to the majesty it once enjoyed.

The billionaires are not in charge.

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I’m not sure if Trump can sue Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for $10 billion in damages for leaked medical information that showed he never actually had bone spurs.

But that worked elegantly at the Internal Revenue Service, so why not?

That settlement produced terms that were, to put it as mildly as a serving of cottage cheese, extraordinarily broad and controversial.

So far, we learned that Trump agreed to drop the $10 billion lawsuit, which is his go-to agreement when he gets what he wants. No president in our nation’s history has done so, but it might just be a shortage of hutzpah in presidential DNA.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand.” Had he merely rephrased that to “I will sue the Confederacy for $10 billion unless they free the slaves,” we might well have avoided the Civil War.

Lincoln himself was a lawyer, so it’s unclear how he missed this opportunity.

Anyway, as part of Trump’s deal, the Justice Department created an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” of roughly $1.8 billion, ostensibly to compensate people alleging politically motivated government targeting.

Really?

That’s what government does, is politically target its citizens. In government’s new and Trumpian iteration, why else would we have one?

In other words, with two out in the 9^th inning, and the bases loaded, the IRS allowed the visiting team to bunt in the tying run, and then lose the game by an errant throw to third base. Coming to bat at the final half-inning, Trump struck out the side with a $10 billion pitcher.

And, as the grandstand emptied, here came the clincher…

An addendum signed by Acting Attorney General, flavor-of-the-month Todd Blanche, barred the IRS from pursuing audits or tax claims involving Trump, his family, or affiliated businesses for any tax returns filed before May 18, 2026.

The language reportedly said matters that “were raised or could have been raised” were permanently closed.

The agreement also reportedly included a formal government apology connected to the tax-return leaks.

Why ‘reportedly?’

Have we not seen the document?

No direct cash payment was reportedly made personally to Trump through the settlement itself, though critics argued the audit waiver could be worth enormous sums if disputed tax liabilities were never revisited.

If you think this article wandered too quickly away from Trump’s phony-baloney medical checkup, you are on-the-money. I’m guilty on both counts.

But this is a presidency both mystical and magical.

One never knows which rabbit will be pulled out of the hat…and now…

…about those bone spurs

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There once was a man named Iranian Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. — an event many historians describe as Iran’s first real chance at parliamentary democracy.

Remember now, and here’s where it gets complicated, Iran was formally ruled by the Shah of Iran, the monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. So, Iran in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a hybrid system: it had a king (the Shah), an elected parliament, prime ministers, powerful landowners, clerics, military factions, and heavy British influence, mostly because of their heavy oil extraction companies.

So, Mosaddegh did not overthrow the Shah, he became prime minister under the Shah through parliamentary politics.

The Setup, Mosaddegh was a liberal prime minister in a kingdom. He believed the Shah should rule under a constitution, not as an absolute monarch. Essentially, he believed in parliamentary authority, civilian government, elections, and limits upon royal power.

None of this was all that radical, but based upon in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, in which had tried to create a modern constitutional monarchy. Mosaddegh saw himself as merely defending that tradition, which made him dangerous to both the Shah, and all those nasty foreign powers accustomed to dealing with strongmen.

Which is where Churchill comes into the picture, cigar clenched firmly in his jaw.

Mosaddegh argued that Iran’s oil belonged to Iranians. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company controlled enormous wealth while most Iranians remained poor. This was not new, it has ever been so in strongman countries. Britain received both huge revenues and strategic advantages from Iranian oil.

Mosaddegh’s nationalization was a declaration that 16% royalty was not nearly enough for Iran’s in-ground oil reserves and Iran was not, by any means, a British dependency.

That made him a hero across much of the developing world.

That was more than enough for Sir Winston…

In a nation all but destroyed by the ravages of WWII, and in the process of gradually losing what would become almost all of its World Empire, the impudence of a neighboring monarchy suddenly nationalizing its oil reserves was a bridge too far.

If this formerly agreeable Iranian kingdom was about to become disagreeable, in a matter so important to Great Britain, Churchill would step to the helm of its democratic ship of state and correct its course.

He had not been head of the Admiralty for nothing.

The simple coup of a mere prime minister was not a hill too steep to climb for a man who had once run an empire upon which the sun never set.

The Americans would need to be involved. An inconvenient and pesky thing at the time, but necessary in this postwar world. The CIA was wearing new shoes at the moment, eager to get over the pinch and expand Bill Donovan’s old OSS beginnings across a world ripe for pickings. It had not yet earned its Harry Truman reference as “an American Gestapo,” when the word Gestapo was so fresh in the world’s mind.

But the Central Intelligence Agency had its own SS General Heinrich Müller, in the form of Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Together they helped shape the aggressive anti-communist posture of the 1950s. Critics argued that the brothers completely obliterated the line between diplomacy, corporate interests, and covert intervention.

So, there’s a benchmark for you, if you are not otherwise occupied.

The brothers accurately defined Churchill’s requirements in Iran.

In Churchill’s own words, “You can always depend upon Americans to do the right thing, once they have explored all the alternatives.” Indeed, the world’s greatest power (at the time) didn’t get there by fair play and square dealing.

So it was done, the details of Mosaddegh’s demise of no interest to us here, other than the fact that he he initially escaped capture during the fighting in Tehran, but surrendered a few days later to avoid further bloodshed. His televised military trial (in small-screen black and white) became internationally famous.

He defended himself passionately and with great skill, arguing that he had acted constitutionally and in Iran’s national interest by nationalizing Iranian oil.

But the deal was done and, at least, he faced no firing squad.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by lifelong internal exile under house arrest and, for the remainder of his life, lived under heavy surveillance at his family estate in Ahmadabad, a village northwest of Tehran.

He was forbidden from political activity and largely cut off from public life, dying there in 1967 at age eighty-four.

The Shah retained his monarchy, playing alto-sax in the British and American Big Band, until his reckoning in an Iranian Revolution in early 1979. The wheel of truth does indeed turn slowly, and the truth it reveals is often but another lie.

The sequence went roughly like this.

Massive civilian protests, strikes, and demonstrations against the Shah escalated throughout 1978 and, in January of 1979, the Shah left Iran, announcing a ‘vacation,’ but everyone understood his regime was permanently made redundant and bankrupt. The Shah died in exile in Egypt in 1980.

On the first of February in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to enormous public support. Almost immediately, the monarchy collapsed and Khomeini’s revolutionary forces controlled the country.

The part I never really understood, because I’m not yet old enough to remember centuries-old history, is who the hell the Mullahs were and where they came from.

The Mullahs, more formally the Shiite clerical establishment, did not suddenly appear in 1979. They had been a major force in Iranian society for centuries.

Who knew?

In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly acknowledged the American role in the coup, calling it a setback for Iran’s political development. Later, declassified CIA documents explicitly confirmed CIA involvement.

A setback for Iran’s political development is, perhaps, praise by too weak a term, Madeleine.

Iran should be a bastion of democratic policy in the Middle East today, and it is not.

But Bastions are harder come by than back-to-back Superbowls.

Ninety million citizens of that country have been denied their destiny. And Albright calls it ‘a setback for Iran’s political development.’ Is the Trump presidency nothing more than ‘a setback for America’s 140 million citizen’s political development?’

Perhaps.

But 130 million Americans, 90 million Iranians, 46 million Argentinians, 40 million Ukrainians, and 11 million Cubans might argue with the definition of a ‘setback.’

In this fragile geographic territory we casually call ‘the Middle East,’ events are transpiring today that may well set political and military realities for a century, perhaps more. They are as casually laid out as Trump’s daily diet Coca-Cola intake, and as easily disposed of as sweeping the cans into a wastebasket.

Yet it all could have been different, if world powers had not abused their power…and sallied forth to commit these identical abuses today.

Churchill has been dead sixty years, John Foster Dulles sixty-seven years, Allen Dulles the same.

Have we learned nothing?

My near-century witnessing politics tells me we have not…

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That’s Ernest Hemingway.

My morning Guardian announces, “Trump warns ‘clock is ticking for Iran’ to reach peace deal. We are restarting our coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran and Israel’s war on Lebanon. Donald Trump has issued an extreme warning to Iran to quickly agree to a peace deal with the US or face devastation.”

It was Albert Einstein who admonished that “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” is the definition of insanity.

My sources say if you mean literally “how many times,” the answer is probably well over 20 major public warnings in the past year alone, and far more if one counts speeches, Truth Social posts, interviews, and repeated formulations of the same threat.

Einstein is silent on defining ‘over and over,’ but we can presume Mr. Trump has exceeded the quota. As for ‘whom the bell tolls,’ it certainly doesn’t seem to be Iran, as they still have not run out of ammunition, their process for leadership succession is far deeper than Trump’s and, although they have been illegally attacked and lost a very large number of civilian casualties, their army remains intact and they continue to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Mr. Trump is fond of reminding his political and military opponents that “they have no cards,” as if international negotiations was a poker game. If that be true, one need look no further than Ukraine standing off the entirety of Russia, with nothing other than sheer determination of will, to disprove the opinion.

On the other hand, by his own metaphor, Trump went to China with no cards, and returned embarrassingly empty-handed.

He joined Israel in illegally attacking Iran, with all the cards in his hands: the largest military on the planet, backed by its similarly potent navy, and a willingness to expend what Harvard by war-budget specialist Linda Bilmes estimated the real wartime cost to be approximately $2 billion per day, with eventual long-term costs potentially exceeding $1 trillion.

That’s a lot of cards by any poker-player’s count, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

Prior to this exercise in insanity, the Strait was open to all world oil shipments, the American navy was satisfied to illegally attack unarmed speedboats in international waters, 10,000 Marines were elsewhere and the only serious grumbling about Iran came from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Iran had pissed him off by, apparently, providing aid and military support to Palestine, where an internationally recognized genocide was underway, as well as Lebanon, where one was anticipated.

Box-score at the moment, one international criminal avoiding prosecution by a thread in Israel, and an American president naming everything in sight for himself, and ruling as a dictator by Executive Orders, as well as already convicted of 34 felonies in New York State prior to taking office.

How many cards in how many decks does it take before the world cries ‘foul.’

Hemingway could never have conceived of so many bells tolling.

It may be well past time to ask for whom they toll.

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I deeply hope so.

Today is my 91^st birthday, so I’ve been rattling around the political world a while. And I’ve been paying attention. Always a split-ticket voter, I was a Republican until I realized what Reagan was up to and, even then, I voted for the great communicator twice. In the words of many, ‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me.’ My first presidential vote went to Eisenhower.

That’s enough mea culpa, time to get to the point.

The point is Graham Platner, and if we think an extraordinary but flawed citizen, without political experience, can express a voice. Our voice, for a change.

In order to understand Graham, you have to know his story, and that’s a bit of a long haul https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/magazine/graham-platner-interview.html#commentsContainer. It’s a long read, and very few of us do long reads any more, so I doubt you’ll take the necessary half-hour and then come back to what I have to say.

I read the transcript, and was impressed by the raw history of what he’s been through as a three-tour Marine in Iraq, what it did to him, and how he fought through to recovery.

His story makes any politician who’s not seen battle look pretty thin in the CV department, particularly when they send someone else’s kids off to war.

But, the point is…drum roll…are we forever destined to have politicians run our politics, or are we ready to trust a few seasoned American citizens?

My take on it, after a lifetime of observing, is that politicians come up through the ranks of ass-kissing and taking money from special interests, in order to advance. Why else would a candidate for the Senate spend five or six million dollars of his own (or someone else’s) money to get a job that pays $275,000? You might ask Chuck Schumer, he’s been at it for long enough, is at the top of the minority Senate leadership, and can’t decide how to parse a meaningful sentence.

And yet, there are exceptions lurking out there. AOC is one, a barista that unseated a well-known congressman who had served many terms with what was deemed to be a ‘safe seat.’

There was a message in that. A noticeable crack in the ‘who the hell do you think you are’ power structure. So, if I was a voter in Maine, I’d send Graham off to a shot at making me proud.

Platner is a Marine veteran and Maine oyster farmer who emerged in 2025–26 as a rising progressive Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine. He built attention with a strongly populist, anti-billionaire message and endorsements from figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Enlisting in the U.S.Marine Corps in 2003 and deployed to Iraq in 2005, he served three combat tours, including in some of the war’s hardest-hit areas such as Ramadi and Fallujah.

The experience left him deeply disillusioned with America’s wars and the military-industrial system. He’s spoken about PTSD and the psychological impact of combat, though he also admitted that, as a young Marine, part of him was drawn to the intensity and identity of being a soldier.

That’s why we send young men to war. Not our own kids, but other people’s kids.

When I look back at the political leaders I revere; Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, the senior George Bush and John McCain all come to mind, and every one of them served in the military.

Bush the younger, who ducked active duty, lied us into Iraq, and plunged us from there to the longest war American ever fought, twenty years, four times as long as WWII. His Vice President, Dick Cheney, personally set the stage for torturing prisoners of war, an international crime.

It’s long past time to trust our government to citizens in place of professional politicians.

Mark Twain had a thing or two to say about that profession and, particularly Senators, although I wonder at that narrow a view:

“There are many Senators whom I hold in a certain respect and would not think of declining to meet socially, if I believed it was the will of God. We have lately sent a United States Senator to the penitentiary, but I am quite well aware that of those who have escaped this promotion there are several who are in some regards guiltless of crime--not guiltless of all crimes, for that cannot be said of any United States Senator, I think, but guiltless of some kinds of crime.”

Guiltless of some kinds of crime.

Thanks, Mark, for making the point.

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