#1,064: Of Sonnets, Citizenship and Salad Bowls: Becoming an American is No Piece of Cake

January 20, 2026 / Kurt F. Stone

For a country whose very greatness has long been owed to its many, many immigrants, it is incomprehensible - not to mention a bit oxymoronic - just how long America has been beset by deep-seated xenophobia. German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, Chinese, Eastern European Jews, Hispanics, Somalis; they’ve, all been, at one time or another, caught in the political/cultural crosshairs. Never has there been a country built by such a vast array of people from “the four corners of the earth” as it used to be put. But it hasn’t been easy or without prejudice. With each fresh wave entering upon our shores (or walking across our borders or landing at our airports), new conspiracies and what we might call “carcinogenic misconceptions” have come into play. And yet, despite the many social, cultural and economic disabilities which have awaited these newcomers, America continues to this day to be - mostly - “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” as somewhat ironically envisioned by the aristocratic Southern slave owning/attorney/reluctant patriot, Francis Scott Key, whose best known poem, Defense of Fort McHenry, eventually provided the lyrics for our National Anthem.

Without question, the greatest symbol of America vis-a-vis our long - though frequently tainted - history of welcoming immigrants from all nations, is the Statue of Liberty, AKA Lady Liberty. A gift to America from the people of the French Republic, it was meant to celebrate the enduring friendship between the two nations, commemorate the centennial of American independence (1876), and honor the shared ideals of liberty and democracy, particularly following the abolition of slavery. According to the original agreement, France would pay for the creation, construction and transportation of the 151 foot tall (46 meters) bronze statue; the people of the United States would cover the cost for its base. (n.b.: with its base, Lady Liberty’s total height was/is 395 feet [93 meters]).

The classic Petrarchan sonnet at the statue’s base, The New Colossus, was written by the 33-year-old Emma Lazarus, the fourth of seven children, born in New York City to a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese descent. Lazarus (1849-1887), the daughter of a highly successful sugar merchant, received a first-class education and early on, decided to become a writer. Her father, Moses, was one of her biggest supporters and he decided to publish her first book of poems (called Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen for “private circulation.” Shortly after its publication, Lazarus decided to send a copy of this, her first book, to the famous writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson quickly became her mentor and when she published her next book of poetry in 1871, she dedicated the main poem, “To My Friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.” This book, entitled Admetus and Other Poems, received critical acclaim. Widely traveled and highly engaged in civic committees dealing with anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the treatment of Jews in Europe, Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" for a fundraising effort to secure the pedestal upon which to mount the Statue of Liberty. The poem was not physically attached to the Statue of Liberty until 1903, over a dozen years after Lazarus's death in 1887.

During the twentieth century, however, people embraced Lazarus's words and the meanings they suggested for the Statue of Liberty and the United States. Within its 14 lines, she expressed the open-handed, warm-hearted attitude she believed would always make America singular among the nations; a land desiring nothing more than to

Send me, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, and to
send these, the homeless, Tempest-tossed to me.

Lazarus’ words represent the hope and the spirit of both the America of 1883 and that of the future. Emma was what might be termed a “professional idealist”; one who saw the good in that long road ahead which would provide a constant stream of new, ambitious, hard-working Americans. What she did not see (or perhaps refused to contemplate) was just how mangled and rutted that road would be. Take as but one atrocious example, the Johnson Act of 1924 (also called "The Johnson-Reed” or “National Origins” Act). In that fateful year (1924), President Calvin Coolidge signed the act which limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia. This act effectively cut immigration from Eastern Europe to next to nothing; in 1890, there weren’t nearly as many people emigrating from places like Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. as in 1900. Without having to say so, the bill was aimed against Jewish immigrants. Publicly, supporters of the bill (which wasn’t changed until 1952), claimed that its chief intent was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”

Although the word “homogeneity” is rarely - if ever - used in discussing immigration today, it is still a lurking shadow. Just this past Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would “pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates.” The countries affected include Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Among other measures taken to slash legal immigration in 2025, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions or entry bans on people from 39 countries. Plot all of these countries on a map—newly targeted and old—and you will see that most of Africa, large swaths of Asia, and much of the Muslim world are now unwelcome. Western Europe is unscathed. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (that’s French for “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”)

Today, there is so much rationalizing about keeping “them” out of America because they are mostly “escapees from prisons and insane asylums” (factually untrue); “get free health insurance and free public education” (first one false, second one true); “don’t pay taxes” (WRONG); and “won’t learn English.” This last one is particularly perplexing. I know from being married to an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher that the government-funded program (both state and federal) under whose aegis she taught for many, many years, was totally defunded by the very people who now hold a lack of English literacy against her students.

My wife, Annie, is an immigrant. She and her mom and dad (who was a Holocaust survivor from a small town in Poland) moved to the United States from Argentina in 1969, immediately went to work, paid taxes, learned English, went to class several times a week, studied hard, passed their U.S. History and Civics Test, and became proud citizens. It was no piece of cake . . . ah, but the pride of becoming an American citizen was - and still is - palpable. (Ironically, yesterday was the 45th anniversary of Annie’s raising her hand and becoming a citizen). On my side of the family, things were quite different: our parents, grandparents (save 1) and great-grandparents were all native-born Americans living in both the midwest (Minnesota and Missouri) and South (Maryland and Virginia). There were no tests to take; being citizens was their birthright.

It’s actually quite difficult to become a naturalized American citizen. In order to get just a taste of what it takes, I would like to suggest that you go to look over and try taking the American citizenship test required of all those seeking citizenship. It has 128 questions. Please go to the site, bone up and take the test. And if you are of a mind, please let me know how you did.

It never ceases to amaze me how little many “real Americans” know about American history, our system of government, or our founding documents. Many of these unlettered folk make it perfectly clear that the solution to any and all of America’s problems is deportation . . . of “illegals,” of those who are “merely” residents, and even, in some cases, of those who are citizens. What they wish, more than anything is that America go back to being a “melting pot.” Ah! There’s a term with an interesting history and a meaning rarely understood.

Originally, The Melting Pot was a play by the Anglo-Jewish playwright/novelist Israel Zangwill . . . often called the “Jewish Charles Dickens.” He was known for his poems, short stories, novels, plays, and the first “closed-room” murder mystery, The Big Bow Mystery. The Melting Post, ostensibly a love story between a Jew and a Gentile, was really propaganda for the concept of the United States as a great crucible in which newcomers shed their old-world ways and emerged as ‘shiny, brand-new Americans,’ as one reviewer put it. Both Zangwill and his play were so well-respected, that at its October 5, 1908 opening-night performance at Washington, D.C’s Capitol Theatre, Zangwill’s escort was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt. The play is still being staged in 2026, nearly 120 years later.

But there is a problem with the very concept of America as a “melting pot.” When different metals are put into a pot then melted down, each metal loses its identity; it becomes a completely new amalgamation. In metallurgy, this is no problem; when it comes to sociology, anthropology or the human sciences, it can carry more than a whiff of eugenics . . . a form of scientific racism. Simply stated a human “melting pot” creates a new entity wherein the various ingredients (in this case people from diverse cultures, histories, religions and language groups) become something which “civic scientists” think is best. To listen to many these days, the ideal (or “real”) American is white English-speaking Christian. That is what “The Great Replacement Theory” (a conspiracy theory if ever there was one) is all about. To my way of thinking, the better goal is the creation of a “salad bowl” - a single entity (a salad) - wherein the various constituent ingredients going into the makeup of that single entity are still easily identifiable . . . the lettuce, the cucumbers, the endive, radishes, tomatoes, nuts, cheeses, etc. America is best when its citizens and residents maintain a hyphenated identity.

Immigration has long helped make the United States the unique treasure it is. Many immigrants to our shores have begun their lives here working at jobs few wanted. With time, strong work ethics, and the desire to get ahead, they moved up the ladder, raising their families, paying their taxes and becoming citizens. Statistics have shown that - in contradistinction to what narrow-minded bigots claim - immigrants (whether documented or not) have a lower legal offending rate than U.S. born citizens. They have slightly higher birth rates than U.S.-born citizens which, at a time when the TFR (total fertility rate) is dropping, can be a positive good. Those who have made the danger of illegal immigration THE issue in political campaigns (think ICE and its many crimes against human beings) are not doing what is best for the American polity, society, economy or morality.

As a Mexican-American friend of mine - a man who started life as a campesino picking lettuce in the Salinas Valley, got a college education, became a civil engineer and eventually ran for the United States Congress - said to me on more than one occasion: Never, ever forget hijo . . . Columbus didn't discover America; the native Americans discovered Columbus. That’s what makes this country great!

PLEASE, PLEASE: DO GIVE THE American citizenship test A LOOK-SEE AND, IF YOU WISH, SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH ME !

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categories / Immigration

#1,063: While You Were Being Misinformed . . .

January 12, 2026 / Kurt F. Stone

Whether it be the god’s honest truth or nothing more than conspiratorial fiction, there are a lot of folks out there who believe that much of the choloshes drek (Yiddish for, roughly, disgusting crapola) that’s being broadcast in the country - e.g. headline-capturing events going on in Venezuela, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon and the Trump Kennedy Centre, murder victims being portrayed as the responsible party in their deaths- have a lot to do with keeping the ongoing Epstein Files out of the news. To update and to modernize a bon mot from our old friend Mark Twain: “If you don’t read, watch or listen to the news, you’re uninformed. If you do manage to read, watch or listen to it, you’re likely misinformed.”

Some of these journalistic diversions will grab our attention for weeks; some for months; some for only G-d knows how long. Take such current stories and situations as Venezuela+Maduro+Oil; Greenland+Denmark+NATO; and ICE/Renee Nicolle Good/bald-faced lies; they are all on our minds. The last of these involve ICE - the regime’s version of Die Geheime Staatspolizei (Eghad!: does this mean that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is the second coming of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler or that Deputy White House Chief of Staff [and Its ideologue-in-chief] Stephen Miller is the rebirth of Joseph Goebbels? As much as I revile both Sec. Noem and Mr. Miller [who is referred to by his colleagues in the White House as “The Prime Minister’] I pray the answer is “no.”)

Am I crazy, or have the “Epstein Files” taken far more than a back seat to just about everything else in the first two weeks of 2026? If so, I’m sure no one at the White House is complaining; this is the last thing they want on their plate as people’s attention begins turning towards election season. I guess, in their minds, the less press prominence the entire Jeffrey Epstein/Donald Trump/pedophilic sex ring/public figure imbroglio receives, the better it will be for their beloved Pouter Pigeon. (n.b. For those who may have forgotten, the term “Pouter Pigeon” it was a nasty epithet used nearly a century ago to describe Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. I wrote about the nickname and the man back in August 2025. See my essay Pouter Pigeon: The Art of the Kneel.)

But it’s not just Epstein et al that is missing from the news; so too are some stories and happenings that could actually bring a glimmer of hope to an otherwise disconsolate, disconnected world. Take as an example, a stunning, unanimous decision handed down just last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. This court, which hears appeals from the U.S. District Courts for the Districts of Maine, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island, ruled that the administration could not make drastic cuts to the federal funding supporting much of the country’s medical and scientific research. Their unanimous decision reaffirmed a lower court’s ruling from early 2025. In last week’s decision, the three-judge panel found that . . . one of the Trump administration’s earliest attempts to kneecap universities, through proposed reductions to grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was unlawful. As noted in the New York Times, “The [original] proposal brought an outpouring of opposition from hundreds of universities and hospitals, which warned that the cuts could cost them billions,` and make it impossible to continue studies in areas like cancer, genetics, gerontology, and infectious diseases”

Without getting too technical, the sharp (inhumane) cuts took aim at the pre-negotiated rates in thousands of federal grants that set aside money for overhead costs in medical research. Huh? Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Whenever and wherever “academic” (as opposed to “corporate”) medical research is undertaken, there must be funding provided for such things as facility upkeep, laboratory technology, and support staff. Ever wonder who takes care of the animals who are used in early-stage research? Every research facility most house (or have a working relationship with) a vivarium (that’s Latin for ‘place of life’) which feeds, houses and tends to the health of all the various animals (dogs, cats, birds, primates, etc.) who will partake in research. Simply stated, you do not want to use a sick animal in research; it can easily invalidate the results. What the administration has, as early as 2017, sought to do, is to cap these overhead reimbursement costs at no more than 10% of the total grant. The first time this proposal hit the House floor, it was summarily rejected. In the main, these overhead costs have classically come in at more than 25%. In other words, what the regime was seeking to do was essentially put a gigantic roadblock into medical research. Since this ruling came down just 24 hours after the abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro and Felon47’s announcement about taking over the country’s oil industry, it only ran, as Grandpa Doc would have had it, “On page 47, just beneath the truss ads.”

Last week’s decision upheld an earlier decision from this past April made in the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, which permanently barred the regime from capping the funding referred to above, and the proposal remained stalled throughout the remainder of 2025. Of course, what the Republican right hopes and prays is that when - and if - it reaches the top of the judicial food chain, that SCOTUS will overturn this past week’s decision, thus lessening the amount of funding for future medical research. Then too, there is the possibility that SCOTIS will issue a Stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”) decision, thus allowing the lower court’s ruling to stand. That would be the best of all possible worlds, however, one never knows. Afterall, the chances are that at least a couple of members of the nation’s highest court - as well as many, many members of Congress - have relatives who have suffered from oncological, neurological or gerontological issues that are currently being researched. If they have more empathy and compassion for their ailing family members than loyalty to their boss, perhaps they will do the right thing.

Speaking of congress, there’s another story that could give a glimmer of hope . . . but is off the front pages due to stories about ICE, Venezuelan oil, Greenland and the possibility of the regime attacking protest-beset Iran. What story? Well, simply stated, a move by an increasingly angry Congress to undo thousands of cuts to federal science programs that IT called for last year when planning the government’s current budget. Why would Republicans in Congress even consider going against their Führer . . . I mean leader? Because members of both the House and Senate - both Democratic and Republican - are getting sick and tired of the executive branch cutting not just federal spending on medical research, but cutting out Congress in toto from asserting its constitutionally-mandated job of dealing with all things fiscal and budgetary.

Am I just daydreaming? Well, for those of us who still read, watch and/or listen to professional sources of news, we know that just the other day, the Senate Appropriations Committee (Chaired by the frequently-reliable Susan Collins [R-ME), released a bipartisan package of bills that largely scraps their beloved Pouter Pigeon’s planned cuts . . . especially in the area of medical research. (It should be noted that Senator Collins, who has long had her own personal medical issues, has long shown great interest in healthcare issues, particularly those dealing with Alzheimer’s Disease (she is a founder and co-chair of the Congressional Task Force on A.Z.) , Diabetes (she chairs the Senate Diabetes Caucus) and Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases.

Seemingly overnight, Congress is racing to undo thousands of cuts to federal science programs that Felon#47 called for last year when planning the 2026 budget. As originally conceived, the White House budget sought an overall cut in scientific and medical research funding to $154 billion from $198 billion - a plunge of 22%. This would have been the largest reduction in federal spending on science since WWII, when Washington and the unraveling of nature’s secrets began their partnership. But just this week, Senator Collins and her committee released a bipartisan package of bills that largely scraps much of ITs planned cuts. According to analysts in the know, if the proposed budgets hold up in the weeks ahead, Congress will wind up setting aside roughly $188 billion for federal research - a drop of only 4% from the most recent annual budget. Some analysts actually foresee a possible rise of more than 2% in the budget category known as basic research, generally described as “. . . the blue-sky variety that produces fundamental strides and spinoffs in fields such as health care and A.I.”

This is, of course, potentially great news . . . a Congress working in a bipartisan fashion for the good of the public. Why it is happening seems obvious . . . at least to me. In a word: midterm elections. When it comes to medical and scientific research, few people are untouched; most of us know someone - be it a family member, friend, neighbor or worker - who could benefit from the miracles being performed in the world of clinical and/or scientific research. I know that personally, as one who has been closely allied with medical research and medical ethics for more than 3 decades, the idea of taking a meat cleaver to research gives me a lethal dose of apoplexy.

So why aren’t we seeing, hearing or reading good news when it comes our way? Why are there so few who are unaware that both parties in Congress are working together to keep funding dollars available even while doing their best to renew subsidies for the Affordable Care Act? I really do not have an answer. What I do know is that come November, we need a vast turnover in both the House and Senate. We need to ensure that we get closer and closer to a veto-proof Congress and that when the next Supreme Court Justice decides to hang up the gavel, that he/she will not be replaced by a troglodyte. Goodness knows, our appeals courts are already chock full of Federalist Society philistines.

If there is ever to be better news out there, it will be because we picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off and became far more engaged in civic accountability.

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categories / All Politics All the Time, The Regime

#1,062: Iraq 2.0 or, Mark Twain Was Right!

January 06, 2026 / Kurt F. Stone

Mark Twain, the greatest and, for my money, wittiest of all American authors, carried more satirical barbs in his literary quiver than just about anyone who ever lived. Among his best and most spot-on bon mots were:

All generalizations are false, including this one.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Reader: suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress. And one of my very favorites:
History doesn’t repeat itself . . . but it rhymes.

One result of early Saturday morning’s successful commando-style abduction and removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Máduro and his wife Cilia Flores (called Operation “Absolute Resolve”) is that this last Twain quote has suddenly taken on an eeriness that can best be summed up by yet another great writer . . . Marcel Proust, whose 7-volume novel À la recherché du temps perdu (generally translated Remembrances of Things Past or literally, In Search of Lost Time) says it all. Between Twain and Proust, we have both an explanation and a warning. Indeed, there are many things about yesterday’s snatch-and-grab of the Máduros and American military actions against Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya a generation or two ago that have a haunting similarity . . . call it Twain’s notion about history “rhyming.”

With Iraq, the proximate cause of our military action was Saddam's IEDs; with Venezuela, it was originally saving Americans from Maduro’s “narco-terrorism.” From all accounts, planning for the removal of Máduro began as early as August of last year. Without question this highly dangerous mission was carried out with both military deft and clandestine precision; one White House spokesperson likened its pinpoint exactitude to something Israeli commandos might carry out. During its planning stages White House officials told congressional leaders that their objective in Venezuela was not regime change, but rather the knocking out of drug trafficking. (n.b. It should be noted that Venezuela is hardly as big a player in the international drug trade [both cocaine and fentanyl] as many other in South American and Latin American countries.)

At this point in the essay, it is well to bring up yet another quote from Mark Twain that he may well have written while looking in a crystal ball and viewing a picture IT: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” Throughout his political career, our beloved Pouter Pigeon has claimed to be an isolationist; a man who firmly believes that “America First!” means precisely that. And up until beginning his second go-round as POTUS he has shown little if any interest in promoting democracy abroad. But ever since last Saturday’s military seizure of Venezuelan President Máduro - a raid undertaken without Congressional approval - IT and members of his administration have been issuing warnings to several other countries and territories - including Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran and Greenland. (In response to his bundling Greenland into the mix, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that the United States had “no right to annex” Greenland and that the island was not for sale.)

So much for keeping one’s mouth shut . . .

Then there is the situation with Venezuela’s neighbor to the West, Colombia. Though Colombia is a major non-NATO ally of the U.S., IT has repeatedly threatened its President, Gustavo Petro, alleging without evidence that he (Petro) has ties to the drug trade. During an informal chat with the press aboard Air Force One, POTUS issued a stark warning to Petro and Colombia that underscored his administration's increasingly aggressive posture toward leftist governments across Latin America. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,’ he said. “I don’t know if they’re going to hold out.”

Speaking of Colombia, our beloved Pouter Pigeon said: “Colombia is very sick too — run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long.” In response, President Petro – a former guerrilla himself – said “I swore not to touch a weapon ever since the 1989 Peace Pact, but for the homeland, I will take up arms again. He also stressed that his armed forces have been tasked with defending him and all Colombian cities from foreign forces, and argued that his government was leading the charge against the illegal drug trade in his country, telling Felon#47 an attack on him would only embolden the cartels.

Yesterday, Felon#47 said: “We are in the business of having countries around us that are viable and successful and where the oil is allowed to freely come out . . . American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.” And here I thought that this had already been addressed by the Monroe Doctrine back in 1823. (It should be noted that 47 renamed it the “Donroe Doctrine after the Venezuelan raid. How’s that for chutzpah? Oh well, at least he was painfully truthful about oil . . .)

Venezuela has the largest untapped crude oil reserve on the planet: an estimated 300 billion barrels . . . of which they extracted a mere 960k barrels/day (as opposed to the U.S., which has a proven reserve of 45 billion bbl and produces a planet-leading 20.1m barrels/day. One of the reasons why Venezuela produces so little oil on a daily or even yearly (50m bbl) is that its oil fields and pumping stations - which are secured by both the Venezuelan and Cuban military - are in a physically frightful state. (It should be noted that the majority of its oil exports go to China. It’s an obvious trade-off: China needs the oil and Venezuela needs the cash).

In order for IT’s promise to make the American takeover of Venezuela pay for itself, he will need to convince American oil companies to invest literally tens of billions of dollars in its restoration. In order for them to accede to their leader’s command, he will need to make some gigantic promises about how much they and their stockholders will make, as well as how many billions of dollars the U.S. Treasury is willing to spend in order to protect the melioration of the industry itself. And mind you, this is no overnight project; it will take years. Winning a war (or snatching a dictator) is the relatively easy part; what happens beginning the next day - that’s the hard part. It is the difference between going home and attending victory parades and settling in for a forever war . . . like Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, to name but three.

Precisely who is going to be “running” Venezuela is anyone’s guess. Secretary of State (and current acting National Security Advisor) Marco Rubio simply has neither the time nor the talent to add “Viceroy of Venezuela” to his c.v. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s obvious problem is his glaring incompetence. Then too, there simply aren’t enough qualified, capable economists, diplomatists or internationalists left at the State Department to fill the literally hundreds upon hundreds of posts required to “run” a foreign government . . . especially on behalf of an occupying power that, try as it might, cannot get its own house in order.

Last but certainly not least, there are the issues of Congress, Constitutional legality, America’s standing within the community of nations, international repercussions (e.g. precisely how will the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ affect Xi’s vision of power in Asia), the Epstein Files and . . . dare we say . . . the midterm elections, which are a mere 241 days away. If the Democrats will only do their job (a big “if”) and continue asking voters the question “What does the Regime’s taking over Venezuela accomplish for you in terms of bringing down the price of food, health insurance, rent, paying your bills?”) perhaps they will be able to convince enough voters that enuf’s enuf!

For when you cut through all the basura y tonterias (look it up), politics works best when it speaks of to the people through pocketbook issues.

These are some of the most challenging times we have ever experienced as a nation. Indeed, it is getting harder and harder to be a patriot. How is this to be overcome? For one possible answer, we conclude where we began: with the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain:

PATRIOTISM IS SUPPORTING YOUR COUNTRY ALL THE TIME, AND YOUR GOVERNMENT WHEN IT DESERVES IT . . .

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categories / The Regime, American History

1,061: Some New Year's Resolutions for 2026

December 31, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

As I begin writing this essay, we are about 60 hours away from the secular New Year, 2026. That means we should be well on the road to figuring out precisely what our resolutions for the next 12 months should be. According to people one whole hell of a lot smarter and better educated than I, this custom/ritual goes back at least 4,000 years . . . to the time of the ancient Babylonians. From what I’ve read, rather than making self-reflecting resolutions, this ancient folk would make promises to their gods. It was part of an immense twelve-day festival known as Akitu that took place not in January but in mid-March when crops were planted. Promises made to the gods included paying their debts and returning objects they had borrowed in hopes that the gods would bestow a favor on them for the upcoming year.

Similarly, ancient Rome established January 1 as the beginning of the new year in 46 B.CE., naming the new year after Janus, a two-faced god whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches. This was symbolic because the Romans believed that Janus looked backwards into the previous year, and ahead into the future, therefore the Romans offered sacrifices to the god and made promises of good behavior for the coming year.

Nowadays, of course, there is a greater tendency for those who do make New Year’s resolutions, to keep them to the self-reflecting sort . . . more often then not dealing with things like diet and exercise, the maximization of good deeds and the minimization of things that are harmful or deleterious to one’s bodily or spiritual well-being. For 2026, I myself have decided to take on a new type of resolution . . . a negative one. To wit, in 2026, I am resolving to not forget a dozen or more acts of delusion, mendacity, madness and/or imbecility on the part of the 47th POTUS, his staff and the vast majority of Congressional Republicans who, despite all the delusion, mendacity, madness and/or imbecility, have managed to sit on their hands and keep their mouths shut.

Let’s face facts: within mere minutes of taking his second oath of office on January 20, 2025, Felon#47 began acting like an unhinged autocrat ruling over a vast dictatorship, rather than the democratically-elected leader of the planet’s most praiseworthy representative democracy. Let’s remember a dozen or so of his worst (and downright loopiest) acts . . . acts which we resolve not to forget in the New Year 2026. What follows is not ranked from really bad to absolutely the worst of the worst, but rather, somewhat chronologically:

February: 5 weeks and 3 days into his second term, POTUS invites Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy (Criminy!! So many ways to transliterate Володимир Зеленський) and members of his presidential staff to pay a lunch call at the White House. While there, Pouter Pigeon and V.P Vance begin castigating Zelensky for not demonstrating enough gratitude for American support. It turns into a shouting match, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance accusing the besieged Ukrainian leader of standing in the way of a peace agreement with Russia. Later, Zelenskyy and his staff were essentially kicked out of the White House (even before lunch was served) and departed with grim looks on their faces. (n.b. By April, Felon47 was accusing Zelenskyy of being the one who initiated the war against Russia, not vice versa!)

March: In a new version of “March Madness,” Pete Hegseth, the Sec. Def (more on him below) added new meaning to the term “ineptitude” by accidentally (?) including Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, in a “signal chain” on Goldberg’s I-phone while sitting in his car in the parking lot of the local Safeway. The chain, which involved a highly classified meeting discussing attack plans against the Houthi in Yemen, included then-National Security Advisor (and current U.N. Ambassador) Michael Waltz and the aforementioned Hegseth, who wound up putting all sorts of highly sensitive, classified information on that chain. This episode represented one of the biggest, most painful black eyes of Pouter Pigeon's second term; there is simply no reason why such information should have been included on a signal chat . . . especially one including a devout anti-Trump journalist like Goldberg. “Signal Gate” (the shorthand name for this debacle) will be debated in political circles for at least the next half-century.

April: Precisely 24 hours after April Fools Day, IT announces a sweeping set of tariffs upending decades of US trade policy and threatening to unleash a global trade war. Henceforth, he announces, in the future, every April 2nd will be known as “Liberation Day.” That which he and his economic advisors have in mind look to be the most sweeping tariff hikes since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act . . . the 1930 law best remembered for triggering a global trade war and deepening the Great Depression. As a predictable response to the newly-added tariffs on imported products, consumer prices continued to rise. Trump clung to his familiar lie that these tariffs are paid by foreign countries, not by people or companies in the US. (The tariff payments to the government are made by US importers, not foreign exporters, and importers often pass on some or all of the added costs to the final consumer.) The president essentially fact-checked himself this past November, when he told an interviewer that he would lower Americans’ coffee prices by lowering his tariffs on imported coffee.

May: On the 21 of the month, the U.S. government announced the United States had officially accepted as an “unconditional gift,” a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner from the Qatari government, and that the Air Force was being tasked with upgrading and retrofitting it in order for it to be used first, as a new Air Force One for POTUS, and then to be moved to his future presidential library . . . presumably in South Florida.

December: While speaking in Mount Pocono, PA on the 11th of the month, Felon47 told the assembled crowd of MAGAites that he believed the term “affordability” was a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. Nonetheless, 16 days later he proclaimed that the 2026 midterm elections would revolve around "pricing.” During an interview with Politico on the day after Christmas, the Republican president expressed confidence that midterm voters — who will decide which party controls Congress next year — will embrace his economic agenda. “I think it’s going to be about the success of our country. It’ll be about pricing,” POTUS told the outlet. “Because, you know, they gave us high pricing, and we’re bringing it down. Energy’s way down. Gasoline is way down.”

August and September: Throughout these 2 months, IT declared at event after event that the “most favored nation” policy he unveiled in an executive order in May would serve to reduce the price of prescription drugs by 1,000% or more. Depending on the date and venue, his numbers would change; at various times the price reduction might be “1,400 to 1,500%, or, in a single day, “I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,000% – by 900, 600, 500, 1,200.%” Needless to say, this is not how math works. Even if his policy does produce a big decline in drug prices – and that is very much uncertain given that it relies on cooperation by reluctant pharmaceutical companies or hypothetical future regulatory action – he can’t actually cut the price of any product by 500% to 1,500%. If he magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut. Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications rather than paying for them. I for one know of no drug company in the world that would give a person $400 to buy a drug that they are now pricing at $100.

July: On the second of the month the administration announced that in order to save money, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was being defunded and thus closing its doors. For the past 20 years, the USA has been the leading government donor to humanitarian response plans, development aid, and multilateral development banks. USAID was established in 1961 as an independent agency in the executive branch under the direct authority and guidance of the Secretary of State. The agency's aim was twofold: the first, to provide humanitarian assistance, and the second to also assist and support economic growth and self-resilience of developing countries, especially those deemed strategic for the US economic and geopolitical impact In each mission and country where USAID had been operational, the agency engaged with diverse partners, such as central governments, private entities, local organizations, and international and national non-governmental organizations operating mostly bilaterally. Over the years, and despite a relatively modest effort in relation to its national wealth, the USA's importance as a donor for development and humanitarian aid overshadowed any other donor. From 2001-2021 alone, it is estimated that USAID saved more than 92 million lives worldwide. According to a report by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, the White House decision to fiscally dismember USAID, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition. To my way of thinking, this story, in the long run, could likely turn out to be the gravest, most inhumane act that the IT Administration will be remembered for . . .

July: On the last day of the month, POTUS announced that he would be building a 90,000+ sq. ft. ballroom . . . a single room twice as large as the entire White House. In his initial announcement, he promised that nothing would happen to the East Wing; it was totally destroyed in less than a week. The room, which could easily seat more than, 3,000 people, would be paid for by ITs wealthy friends . . . the very billionaires who would benefit so greatly from his “Big Beautiful Budget Bill.” The cost has been skyrocketing; as of today, the estimated price is above $400 million. (n.b. On December 12 fr this year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was chartered by Congress in 1949 to facilitate public participation in the preservation of sites of national significance, filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against various individuals and agencies of the government asserting that ongoing construction of the White House ballroom is unlawful and asking the court to halt further construction activities until the government complies with the law by going through the legally mandated review processes, including a public comment period.)

Since Day One: As like many candidates for the White House, Felon#47 repeatedly spoke about what he would do “on day one.” How was anyone to know that his first act would be to pardon all those felons languishing in federal prison as a result of their being convicted of crimes on January 6, 2021? Pardoning felons would quickly turn out to be one of his favorite activities . . . including: On May 28, Trump pardoned reality TV stars Todd Chrisley and Julie Chrisley, who were convicted in 2022 of several counts of fraud and tax evasion involving more than $30 million. Todd was serving a 12-year sentence, and Julie was serving seven years; In mid-October, Trump commuted the prison sentence of Grpthr Santos, the disgraced New York Republican who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft last year. Days later the president handed a full and unconditional pardon to Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. Binance had ties to the Trump family's cryptocurrency business, but Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes that he does not know who Zhao was. In early December, IT formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president who was at the center of what the authorities had characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” In issuing the pardon, IT pledged to issue the pardon after Mr. Hernández sent him a four-page letter casting himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden-Harris administration and comparing his fate to that of the American president. Do remember, this pardon occurred at the same time the administration was carrying out a series of naval attacks against Venezuelan boats under the assumption that they were transporting drugs to the United States under the orders of President Nicholas Maduro. . .

September-December: Speaking of Maduro and Venezuela, there are the extraordinary efforts by the administration’s least competent equerry, Sec. of War Pete Hegseth, to carry out attacks by both sea and now air, all the while convincing Americans that it is for the purpose of keeping Fentanyl out of the hands of American youth. The secretary has even gone so far as to claim that each downed power boat saves the lives of no less than 25,000 potential Fentanyl users . . . perhaps even higher. It is highly likely that when it reconvenes, Congress will look into: A), whether or not firing at the Venezuelan boats constitutes an act of war which requires Congressional approval, and B), whether or not the real issue is Venezuelan oil and minerals.

January 21- December 31, 2025: The Epstein Files. Need we say more? This is a scandal which has already bypassed both “Teapot Dome” and “Watergate” in terms of smarm. Indeed, as the years go by, this will likely be known as “The scandal that destroyed both a presidency and a political party . . .”

Dec. 30, 2025: The “Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” created by an act of Congress in 1964 in memory of the slain John F. Kennedy, has just announced that due to circumstances beyond their control, it was cancelling its annual "New Year’s Eve concert . . . and likely suing The Cookers, a much revered jazz ensemble scheduled to headline the evening’s festivities. Ever since IT fired the Kennedy Center board and replaced them with a roster of billionaire allies . . . and added his name to its masthead . . . attendance has fallen precipitously. In matter of fact, no events are currently scheduled until the end of March, 2026. Just the other day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), one of the few remaining non-Trump selected Kennedy Center Board Members, joined by a large group of her Democratic colleagues, filed a suit in federal court arguing that only Congress can change its name. a controversy sparking legal action from both sides

There are certainly other issues, events and political sins that we should resolve ourselves to never forget . . . such as ICE raids in largely “Blue” states and metropolitan areas; the shipping off - frequently without benefit of any legal recourse - of immigrants to CECOT (El Salvador’s brutal mega prison . . . Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo); and Felon47’s transmogrification of both himself and his government into a rebirth of France’s Louis XIV , Le Roi Soleil (“The Sun King”), who gilt everything he saw or touched in his expansive realm, . . . sort of like the Oval Office . . . except his gold wasn’t purchased at Home Depot!.

During this coming New Year, I urge one and all to resolve to use the memory of what in 2025 as the fuel for what can and should be in 2026. About the only positive thing I can say about POTUS is that he is distinctly mortal . . . and that his mortality is making itself increasingly evident with each passing day.

There are precisely 307 days to go until America votes . . .

I urge us all to keep the two-faced Janus in mind; one face to the past and one to the future. . . and remember the words of Dante (Paradiso, Cante III): "E 'n la sua volontade e nostra pace" . . . “And in His will is our peace.”

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#1,060: Gross Incompetence, Breaking International Law, Retribution, a Christmas Without 37 Pencils, and a Mandated Change of Font: THAT’S MAGA

December 15, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

History teaches that America’s 29th (and until recently, absolutely worst) POTUS, Warren Gamliel Harding, had one of the worst, least competent, most corrupt and avaricious Cabinets of all time. The reason? Unwilling to break up his “Ohio Gang” - his poker buddies - Warren simply brought them to the Nation’s Capitol. Among those he appointed were Harry M. Daugherty (his A.G. and years later fictionalized by actor Christopher McDonald in Boardwalk Empire), Albert Fall (Sec. of the Interior), Charles Forbes (Head of the Veteran’s Bureau) and Jess Smith (Daugherty’s chief aide, who would commit suicide at age 50 after it was discovered that he was running a bootleg and graft operation out of “The Little Green House on K. Street.”

All the fun and fermentation of the Harding era came to a crashing conclusion on August 2, 1923 when the 57-year old president suddenly dropped dead of what future POTUS Herbert Hoover officially stated was “cerebral apoplexy.” Don’t believe it: to this day there are those who believe that his wife Florence (nicknamed "The Duchess”) had actually poisoned him. The reason? She was fed up with all his extramarital affairs, one of which wound up presenting the courtly president with a daughter. In 1927, Nan Britton, the mother of that waif, would ghostwrite a best-selling work entitled, simply, The President’s Daughter. (Ironically, there is one other book - in this case, a fictional thriller - with the same title. It was written by none other than President Bill Clinton).

As bad, incompetent and corrupt a president as he was, Warren Harding, believe it or not, did more to preserve both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution than any of the nation’s chief executives: in 1921, he signed an executive order to transfer the two documents from the State Department to the Library of Congress, thus initiating their permanent display in protective glass cases . . . a crucial step in their preservation. While this is both true and somewhat ironic (considering the many, many failures of his presidency), it also true that Warren is no longer considered by historians to have been the worst of the worst. That position clearly belongs to the Man from MAGA. Felon47’s Cabinet is rife with incompetent sycophants ranging from DOD’s Pete Hegseth and A.G. Pam Bondi, to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr., DNI director Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of Education Linda (“The Queen of the WWE”) McMahon. (And by the way, Harding did somehow manage to name three pretty accomplished gentlemen to his Cabinet: Andrew Mellon at Treasury, Charles Evans Hughes at Foggy Bottom (State) and future POTUS Herbert Hoover at Commerce.)

Hardly an hour goes by without the current POTUS referring to his predecessor as “Sleepy Joe” or remining one and all of his supposed mental deficits. One thing he has - to the best of my knowledge - never claimed is that the gentleman from Delaware surrounded himself with a mass of incompetent people who had little if any experience in government. Say what you will, but there is/was no comparing :

Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin (a PhD economist who had served 8 years of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and happens to be married to Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof) to the current Treasury Secretary, former Soros Hedge Fund Manager Scott Bessent;
Biden-era A.G. Merrick Garland (A.B. Harvard, J.D. Harvard Law), a former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (who was nominated by Barrack Obama for the Supreme Court . . . a nomination that Senator McConnell would not permit so much as a hearing on) and Pam Bondi (J.D. Stetson), who prior to becoming A.G., served on ITs legal defense during his first Senate impeachment trial.
Biden’s Defense Sec. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, the 12th commander of the U.S. Central Command (2013-2016) and current Sec-War Pete Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton, former Fox News talking head and alleged alcoholic.

Historically, most - if not all - presidential administrations have included friends, supporters and even family members of the sitting president. The regime, however, has taken what is essentially an historic grian of sand and turned it into an alpine-sized monolith. In order to be in - and stay in - the good graces of the boss, one must be (if you are female) young, sylphlike and always showing a crucifix above the cleavage; it also helps to have been at one time or another part of his defense team. For males, let’s begin with possessing the riches of Croesus, and the ability to hold one’s tongue on most occasions, and end up with the ability to spell r-e-t-r-i-b-u-t-i-o-n, and possess relative political tone-deafness. Why hasn’t anyone spoken out about all the failed and illegal attempts to turn the Bondi-led Justice Department into a personal law firm that legally harasses any and all of ITs current or former political enemies . . . those who came into the political cross-hairs for simply doing their jobs (like Senator Adam Schiff and N.Y. A.G. Letitia James)?

The best - and most successful - political leaders manage to get across the message “I feel your pain” to a large segment of the public. And what makes this all the better is that these politicians actually believe what they are saying. Think Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barrack Obama. What we face today is something sui generis: a leader (?) who is essentially telling the vast unwashed public (supposedly the bread-and-butter of his fan club) “You aren’t feeling any pain; believe me: there is no pain . . .” Just the other day, Felon47, while ostensibly kicking off the year-end holiday season repeated his bizarre “toy rationing” idea. During a speech in Mount Patterson, PA, where he was slated to talk about affordability (which he initially claimed was a “Democrat hoax” and then claimed to wholeheartedly embrace as his idea) he told Americans that they can “give up” products, including pencils and dolls, for their children to bring down costs! Said the Grinch of Palm Beach: ’Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but always need you always need steel [sic.].” Besides being both incomprehensible and economically loony-tune, he showed just how out of touch he is with the children who love receiving toys, and the parents who wish they could give them more . . .

It makes one wonder precisely who (or whom) the regime is doing its darndest to please. It’s certainly not the working or lower-middle class. Then too, if logic prevailed, it couldn’t be farmers, inhabitants of small-town America, minorities or non-whites. So who would it be? It seems to me they are most concerned about people with unreasonable fears and grievances . . . who need others to blame for the things they themselves do not or cannot understand. Take DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and WOKE as an example.

In the midst of all the outrageous Sturm und Drang enveloping early 21st century America, there are plenty of ultraconservatives who want men, women and children to find solutions to the pains and shortcoming of society, by blaming those who are different . . . or at least those who are “catering and caring” for those who are different. Here are 2 examples; one more ludicrous than the other.

In Wisconsin, there is a group called the Wisconsin Deafblind Project, a state program for the families of children with combined vision and hearing loss. It has made a world of difference to both the children and families of those, like the Who’s Tommy are “deaf, dumb and blind.” This past September, the Regime cancelled the five-year $918,000 grant for the program, which supports about 170 children. It also ended a $10.5 million grant used to recruit and retain special education teachers in the state. At the same time, the administration cut similar programs for deafblind children across seven other states . . . all of which lean Democratic. According to a article in the Times, “In each case, the federal officials cited language in the programs’ grant applications related to goals for diversity, equity and inclusion.” (n.b. It should be noted that one of the first executive orders signed after taking office targeted DEI initiatives throughout the government, including federal grants used to advance DEI programs.)

Precisely how assisting these children and their families - already facing lifetimes none of us can imagine - has to do with “Making America “Great Again” is anyone’s guess. But please, don’t even try to guess, for there is simply no answer. It is just plain cruelty; it has nothing to do with any religious or moral ethic I’m aware of.

The one that really takes the cake is Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent announcement that as of December 8, 2025, and for reasons of “pushing to stamp out diversity efforts,” he would “order a halt to the State Department’s official use of Clibiri” (a sans-serif typeface [font]) thus reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Sec. Rubio called a ‘wasteful’ sop to diversity.” “Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said. From hereon out, Foggy Bottom will be returning to the serif typeface Times New Roman.

According to an “Action Request” memo, the secretary said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” His order noted that when compared to Times New Roman, Calibiri is “informal” and “clashes with the department’s official letterhead. Even the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been abolished. (BTW: The initial change from Times New Roman was meant to improve accessibility for readers with disabilities such as low vision, dyslexia and people “who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers.”

Gee, don’t you feel so much better just knowing that by “returning to tradition” the regime is getting closer and closer to stamping out all remnants of diversity across the federal government?

Now, if only they could get rid of tariffs, stop blowing Venezuelan boats out of the water, and release the Epstein files, perhaps America could get back to climbing back up a few rungs on the ladder of greatness.

Please?

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categories / The Regime, All Politics All the Time

#1,059: The Stove Pipe Mocks the Yarmulke - A Parable With a Punch

December 06, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

(Introductory note: My maternal grandfather, James J. Kagan [1891-1974] was a unique and accomplished man. After working as an executive for Sears Roebuck for nearly 20 years, he decided to become a doctor. He managed to graduate and go into practice just before his 51st birthday. I inherited a couple of precious heirlooms from him: a nickname (“Grandpa Doc”) and a vast storehouse of stories. Anyone who ever knew him or spent even a bit of time with him, heard the famous introductory phrase “That reminds me of a story.” And so, this week, a brief parable from a vast treasure chest . . . )

The elegant stovepipe mocked the little skullcap (yarmulke). “Poor, little, insignificant skullcap,” he spoke. “You are only worn by pious Jews and rabbis. You are always an object of ridicule and it is hardly appropriate to wear you in the street. Look at me! I am proudly worn by aristocrats, and the wealthy exhibit me at their most elaborate affairs. See how inconspicuous you are alongside me!”

“Yes, that is quite true,” the yarmulke agreed. “I cannot deny the fact that you receive great honor and adorn luxurious banquets and parties. But do remember, dear stovepipe, that you are empty from top to bottom, whereas I am filled throughout with head and brains!”

Moral: Elegance is not always a sign of intelligence!

Thanks Grandpa Doc . . . this too reminds me of a story . . .

One of the members of the French Rothschild family - Baron Jakob Mayer - spent a weekend on a small farm in the French countryside. When the owner gave him his bill, he was startled to see the amount he was charged.

“What!” Baron Rothschild explained in surprise; “Four francs for an egg? Have you such a scarcity of eggs?”

Not of eggs, the owner replied, “but we certainly have a scarcity of Rothschilds!”

Sometimes a good brief, punchy story takes away the pangs of politics better than a glass of wine.

Kurt Franklin Stone

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categories / Tales & Parables

#1,058: "Sane Washing"

November 24, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

On June 9, 1954, during the historic “Army-McCarthy Hearings” held in Washington, D.C. (and viewed live on nationwide television), the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) charged then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson with having sold America out to the Communists. He further charged that the Truman administration was riddled with subversion; and that the men and women who guided the country for the previous 20 years, were Communist dupes.

Harvard-trained attorney Joseph Welch (a Bostonian who represented the Army in the hearings), thrust a verbal saber through the Wisconsin senator’s political heart, first stating Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or recklessness.

Then, In a mere 21 words, the balding Welch (1890-1960), sent McCarthy (derisively known as Tail-gunner Joe) on a downward spiral that would see him become a public pariah, and then, within less than 3 years drink himself to death at age 47.

The 21 words?

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

Ever since January 20, 2025, the date Felon#47 took his second non-consecutive oath-of-office, I have found myself wishing, hoping and praying that somehow the late Mr. Welch could reappear as some contemporary public servant’s doppelgänger; some man, woman or even educated child who would call out IT (and the various nefarious members of his revolutionary regime); someone who would and could stand up and clearly state that he/they are nothing more than a bunch of treacherous, addlepated lawbreakers who are an absolute disgrace, and should thus be tossed out on their collective rears for the good of both America and the rest of the world.

Of course, a single heroic person - like Joe Welch - cannot be expected to turn back the tide in 2025; oh so much has changed in the past 70+ years. Back in 1954, most people got their news from - in order:

Local and national newspapers;
Local and national radio broadcasts;
Local and national television.

Over the past two generations, we have become inundated with so many sources of online “news,” ranging from websites and blogs, to podcasts, cable broadcasts and what one might collectively term “cyber dreck.” Indeed, for every taste, inclination or fear, there are tens of dozens of matching “authorities” or references. Back in 1954, Joseph Welch’s 21-word putdown of “Tail Gunner Joe” acted as a national political muscle relaxant; first, because he was the right man at the right time and the right place; and second, because there were so very, very few sources of communication . . . especially for one who spoke the plain, unvarnished, non-hyperbolic truth.

Today, of course, it would take an army of Joe Welches to have as much of an impact as a single person speaking the unvarnished truth. And today, the need for that truth is as essential as at any time in our nation’s history. Consider that in the 10 months and 4 days since our Blessed Little Pouter Pidgeon took his 2nd oath of office, he has made the following statements (and performed the following acts) in public:

Claimed in a speech at the Iowa State Fairgrounds that before his return to office, the U.S. was “close to death.”
In the same speech alleging that he had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, boasted that the only jobs lost under his administration were those held by illegal immigrants, and that he’s fighting “an illegal alien invasion”
Has repeatedly asserted that he is a better president than George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Welcomed Saudi strongman Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a lavish state dinner, literally rolling out the red carpet, greeting him with a ceremony that featured marching bands, flag-carrying horsemen and a military flyover. When questioned about the prince’s involvement in the killing and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Adnan Khashoggi, POTUS actually stated: "You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial . . .”, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he (bin Salman) knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."
Publicly stated that the half dozen members of Congress (Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Chris Deluzio and Rep. Chris Houlahan - all of whom previously served in the military or intelligence community) who made a 1-minute video urging the military and intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” should be hanged for sedition and treason. (“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” IT wrote in one of his messages on Truth Social) In statements by House Speaker Mike Johnson and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt they danced around their boss’s call for hanging members of Congress. The Speaker said Felon47’s statement was not a call for Democrats to be executed, but instead were only the POTUS merely expounding on a legal question. Huh?
Told a reporter for Bloomberg News whose question he did not like “QUIET PIGGY!” When asked about this, Press Secretary Levitt claimed that her boss was merely showing that he’s “frank and open.” Not a word was heard from anywhere else within the MAGA ranks . . . except for retiring Marjorie Taylor Greene, who found the response contemptible. (It should be noted that the Georgia Republican becomes vested in her congressional pension in the first week of January, 2026).

Now mind you, the above bullet-pointed issues, words and events are but a mere handful of the egregious, irrational things POTUS, members of his regime, and MAGA republican members of Congress have been engaging in. In terms of response, Democrats have been pretty damn loud; major media outlets fairly muted (perhaps out of fear); IT’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill as mute as Marcel Marceau (but not one millionth as entertaining). No, what Republicans from the Cabinet to the White House Press Office to the vast majority of members of the House and Senate have been practicing is what one might call Sane Washing, herein defined as “The act of media or public figures framing someone's radical or extreme ideas. statements, and actions in a way that makes them seem normal and acceptable.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, a small tide is beginning to turn; Felon#47’s inanity, boorishness and pro-Fascistic personality are beginning to wear a bit thin. Perhaps some MAGA Republicans are awakening to the fact that:

Tariffs are not good (let alone great) for anyone but billionaires;
That gifting Argentina’s fascist government with $20 (or is it $40?) billion to prop up their beef industry while American ranchers are staring down the barrel of economic ruin is insane;
That transforming the entire Department of Justice into one’s own personal law firm makes a mockery of American justice;
That publicly insulting and threatening any- and everyone - who disagrees with you, is both boorish and unbefitting for the most powerful person on the planet;
That continuing to tell lies both in print and in front of the world’s cameras is causing this nation to take a nose-dive in the estimation of our allies.
That trying to convince “just plain folks” that you are on their side, while obviously caring only for billionaires, is the height of hypocrisy;
That permitting ICE agents (many of whom have no training or skills suitable to their assigned tasks) to kidnap, beat and then deport human beings - many of whom are American citizens - is going to lose you tons upon tons of votes.
That blowing up Venezuelan boats and trawlers in the name of "ridding America of Fentanyl” is against International and American Constitutional law. (It should be noted that just minutes ago, it was announced that IT and Defense Sec. Peter Hegseth ruined the holiday season for our troops by canceling and restricting their leave for both Thanksgiving and Christmas as they prepare to wage war against Venezuela and their president, Nicholas Maduro, whom they have now officially labeled an “international narco-terrorist.”);
That sending National Guard troops to roam the streets of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans in the name of “fighting crime” is unconstitutional;
And on and on and on.

To be certain, there are plenty of Democrats who are in no way backing down when it comes to calling out POTUS and members of his regime for the lying, thieving anti-democratic people they really are. Think of Democrats like Senators Adam Schiff (CA), Amy Klobuchar (WI) Elissa Slotkin (MI) Mark Kelly (AZ) and Charles Schumer (NY) as well as Reps. such as Ocasio-Cortez and Dan Goldman (both of NY), Rosa De Lauro (CT) Al Greene and Jasmine Crockett (both TX) and Eric Swalwell (CA). (Mind you, this is but a tiny list at this point). And, as of today, it looks like California Governor Gavin Newsom will be running for the Democratic nomination for POTUS in 2028.

Dear reader: do not be deluded into thinking that replacing the current POTUS (and House and Senate) with Democrats will immediately solve all our social, cultural, economic and political problems. The fact of the matter is that IT DOESN’T TAKE NEARLY AS LONG TO TURN PEOPLE AGAINST ONE ANOTHER AS IT DOES TO BRING THEM BACK TOGETHER; IT IS FAR MORE DIFFICULT TO FIND THE GOOD IN PEOPLE WHO HOLD DIFFERENT OPINIONS OR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS THAN IT IS TO DRIVE A WEDGE BETWEEN THEM.

America is in for a couple of decades of social/cultural/political repair. But, as the ancient Chinese adage teaches: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That step can involve letting your senators and representatives know that you will only support and vote for those who have the courage to put distance between themselves and the regime; who have both the grit and compassion to admit that there is good in all people . . . regardless of their gender identity, ethnicity, color or economic status.

Learn our history; get to know the principles upon which our nation was founded . . . and above all, know that nothing can wash away or purify the insanity of a dictator except direct action.

Wishing one and all a happy, healthy, delicious, and caloric Thanksgiving,

KFS.

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categories / The Regime

#1,057: "The Best MRI We've Ever Seen!"

November 17, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

This past Thursday, while attending my twice-weekly Institutional Review Board (IRB) teleconference, I suffered an extremely brief, extremely transient neurologic event. It came and went within 45 seconds. It occurred while I was presenting the first of 3 “Continuing Review” reports. At the end of the first report, I was about to say, “I recommend renewing this protocol for an additional 12 months.” Nothing came out of my mouth. After the 45 second gap, I successfully concluded the report (which unanimously passed), and then continued with the second and third continuing reviews . . . both of which came off without a hitch. I’m happy to say that both also passed.

Experiencing a transient brain “hiccup” (now how’s that for a medical term?) in front of nearly a dozen physicians, pharmacologists, medical researchers and galaxy-class diagnosticians, is nothing to be sniffed at. As soon as the meeting adjourned, my colleagues - friends as well - began contacting me, expressing their concern and urging me to get my hind end to an E.R. Within 2 hours, I was checked into a local hospital which, thank G-d, is one of the 2 best in Florida, and began going through a battery of tests to determine whether I had suffered a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack), a bout of aphasia, or something else. Over the next 12 hours I had a brain MRI, a continuous EKG, an EEG, an echocardiogram, and an ultrasound . . . along with the normal array of blood tests, blood pressure and heartbeat rate procedures. At the end, all determinations were negative: I had not had a stroke (thank G-d), and that evening (Friday) I was back on my feet, officiating at Shabbat services.

There are certain events in the medical universe that get tagged with the word idiopathic, meaning not “could only be contracted by an idiot,” but rather “of unknown cause or mechanism.” Perhaps the most telling of the various tests was the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), which showed nothing unusual . . . or in a humorous sense, no extant brain! Before an MRI is ever undertaken, the patient is informed which part the body or which organ is being imaged. After being read and analyzed (which frequently can take more than an hour or two) the results are told to the patient in terms they can (hopefully) easily understand. MRIs are not evaluated in terms of "good,” "better,” or "best”; it is not some sort of subjective test. What it can do is to show any irregularities or progressive tendencies. . .

Now, the reason why I am writing about this is not to tell you my innermost secrets or to give you a 101 course in medical procedure. Rather, I am writing this due to an irony concerning the 47th POTUS.

As I was in the hospital undergoing the above-referenced tests, IT was aboard Airforce One, flying back to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. While in flight, he was chatting with the various reporters on board. One of the reporters, a women, asked him:

Reporter: “Mr. President, can you tell us why you needed an MRI? I understand that the results were good, but what was it for?”

POTUS: “Because it’s part of my physical. Getting an MRI is very standard. What? You think I shouldn’t have it? Other people got it.”

Reporter: “Typically, an MRI -” the reporter said before POTUS cut her off.

POTUS: ”The doctor said it was the best result he has ever seen as a doctor . . . that’s it.”

He then went on to call the result “outstanding.” Dissatisfied with his response, the reporter pressed on:

Reporter: “Was it your brain? Or your heart? Or . . .

POTUS: “I have no idea what they analyzed, but whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well. And they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen. Now, the other thing I took is I took, as you know, an advanced, very advanced test on mental acuity, because I think a president should have to do that. And as you probably heard, I aced it. I got a perfect score. I got the highest score. I got a perfect score. . . and the only reason I tell you that is that it’s one subject, unlike Biden, and others, that you can take off your plate.”

For someone who claims not to know what his MRI “analyzed,” it’s hard to see how this could be true. Or maybe he just doesn’t want us to know. Either way, we’re left with a lot more questions than answers. And by the way, according the the HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) Act of 1996, all patients (or their legally authorized representative[s] must be fully informed about the procedure.

Just so we're all on the same page, an MRI is a fairly involved process that involves removing clothing, donning earplugs, and lying completely still in a large scanner for extended periods of time with the goal of obtaining quality images of internal structures of the body. Given the amount of effort this process takes, several people on social media pointed out, patients would generally know what body part is being tested. Felon47’s response to the reporter aboard Airforce One was, of course a blatant lie. How can anyone be sure? Simple: his lips were moving.

As the oldest person ever elected POTUS - and as one whose growing mental deficits are on virtual display every time he steps in front of a camera - we have every reason to be frustrated and fearful. The simple and obvious fact is that no one within the White House - not to mention the group that used to be called “institutionalist Republicans” - has publicly said thing one about his obvious loss of mental acuity. Especially now when he has sent the world’s largest aircraft carrier (the USS Gerald Ford) into the Caribbean for the stated purpose of "combatting the drug cartels.” There can be no doubt that this is neither a military tactic nor for the purpose of preserving and protecting national security; it is addle-brained way of attempting to divert public attention away from the bitterly controversial "Epstein Files” imbroglio. Think about it: this mental basket case’s military dreams are being channeled through Secretary Pete Hegseth, the wingnuttiest member of his (or indeed, any other president’s) Cabinet.

Now, more than ever, it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment, the Presidential Disability and Succession Act.” Beside the fact that the chances of this happening are somewhere between “none at all” and “less than that,” if approved, it would turn the Resolute Desk (which now sits at Mar-a-Lago) over to V.P. J.D. Vance, a man who once referred to his then-future boss as “cultural heroin” and said he feared he could be “America’s Hitler.” But alas, Mr. Vance, like all but a few brave conservative souls, has developed collective amnesia.

Please, if you know anyone who still holds fast to the notion that IT is the greatest POTUS in American history, ask them to explain it to you without mentioning Biden, Obama or Clinton. Tell them to keep it purely positive; to state their case without putting anyone else down. I bet it can’t be done.

Then too, please, please, don’t just sit back and kvetch (Yiddish for “complain”) about the current state of affairs. Get busy: call or write your member of Congress about enacting the 25th Amendment; get active in your local congressional representative’s reelection campaign; become more of a patriot than you have ever been.

Much of the world is wondering whatever became of America: its wisdom, its courage and its leadership. We are no longer, as IT would have us believe “more respected in the world than at any time in the past.”

MRIs are not “good,” “better” or “best.” What they can show are “improvements,” "problems,” and "time for palliative care.”

It’s time for the latter . . .

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categories / IT, Medical Ethics

#1,056: "White Hawk"

November 09, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

This past Tuesday’s off-year elections brought more hope to Democrats and independents (and more fear to Conservative MAGA Republicans) than any political event in recent memory. In virtually every election at the state, county and local levels Democratic candidates for governor, state attorneys general and local boards of education and supervisors did precisely what polling numbers predicted they would: win big. Moderate Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, while democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani prevailed in his race for New York City mayor over the state’s moderate ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent. (It should be noted that these 3 victors are so relatively unknown that their names have yet to be added to spellcheck). Unquestionably, Republicans from Maine to Seattle will be told that Mayor-elect Mamdani - a Muslim who made “affordability” the keystone of his campaign - is all they need to know about the Democrats; a party of anti-Semitic Marxists bent on bringing Sharia Law to America.

But these marquee races were just the beginning:

Pennsylvania voters chose to retain three state Supreme Court judges that were first elected as Democrats after millions of dollars in outside spending driven by conservative billionaire Jeff Yass’ efforts to reshape the state court’s politics.
In Georgia, Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson were elected the newest members of the state’s five-person public utility regulator after earning 60% of the vote. It’s the first time Democrats have won a nonfederal statewide office there since 2006.
At the state legislative level, Mississippi Democrats broke a GOP supermajority in the state Senate after flipping two seats in that chamber plus another pickup in the state House.
Democrats flipped all three city council seats in Georgetown, S.C., and winning back mayoral races in Connecticut.
Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield defeated megachurch pastor the Rev. Solomon Kinloch to become the first woman to lead the Motor City. She will inherit a city that continues to improve following Detroit’s 2014 exit from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Mayor-elect was elected to the City Council in 2013 at age 26, and has been council president since 2022.
In Cincinnati, Vice President J.D. Vance’s half-brother, Republican Cory Bowman, lost his long-shot bid in the nationally-watched mayoral race, running 56 points (78.2%-21.8%) behind Democratic incumbent Aftab Pureval. (It is interesting to note that although he endorsed his half-sibling, the Veep made no contribution to Mr. Bowman’s campaign).

To my way of thinking, perhaps the biggest victory – the one that should cause the greatest amount of angst and worry within Republican circles – belongs to the Great State of California and its 40th governor, 58-year old Gavin Newsom. Thanks largely to the governor’s around-the-clock campaigning and stellar fundraising, California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50, Mr. Newsom’s measure to gerrymander at least 5 more Democratic congressional seats, countering a similar redistricting effort in Texas pushed by IT (whom Newsom recently branded “The Nodfather” For his part, Felon47 has been referring to the California Governor as “Newscum” since early 2024) Prop. 50 passed by such a wide margin (61.4%-35.9%) that national news sources were able to call it within 5 minutes of polls closing in the Golden State. Even before the results were announced, Governor Newsom was making plans to celebrate his victory over the Nodfather in the Lonestar State. Last night (Saturday Nov. 8), standing against the backdrop of an enormous American flag, befitting a national campaign, the California Governor framed the redistricting battle in historic terms. In the eyes of many, the rally was nothing short of Newsom’s first campaign stop in his quest for the White House in 2028.

Speaking before a standing-room only crowd at a union hall in Houston, he told the cheering Democrats “We can shape the future here all across the South and across the United States of America. You have that power. You do. Not Donald Trump. Shouts of “2028!” echoed out. Just last month, he openly acknowledged that he will consider a 2028 presidential run shortly after the 2026 midterms. While Governor Newsom was wowing the crowd in Houston his office announced that this week he will be traveling to Brazil to attend the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) “ . . . joining international partners to strengthen climate commitments and showcase how California - the fourth largest economy in the world - is proving that its clean energy transition is creating jobs, driving investment, and cutting toxic pollution.”

The press release drew a stark contrast between Governor Newsom and the Nodfather: As the President of the United States turns his back on people and the planet, California is inking global partnerships focused on creating jobs and cutting toxic pollution. The economic winners of the 21st century are those who build the clean energy future . . .

It won’t be long before the public “learns” from a thousand-and-one online “new sources” that Gavin Newsom is a drunk, a failure as a businessman, a mayor and a governor; that he has the lowest approval rating of any governor in the United States; is farther to the left than Leon Trotsky, and wants to bankrupt America . . . just as he has bankrupted California. And, oh yes, he wants to give free education, free healthcare and free food to every illegal immigrant in the 50 states. And you know what? There will actually be people out there who swallow this swill as if it were the greasiest cheeseburger in the world.

The fact of the matter is that were one to examine what he has and has not accomplished during his eight years as mayor of San Francisco (2004-2011), eight years as Lt. Governor under my old boss Governor Jerry Brown (2011-2019) and going on seven years as governor, one would find that while he dreams the dreams of an out-and-out idealist, he has always managed to live the life of a political realist. He has had his victories and defeats, but in the main is a strong leader who ranks high on the honesty scale and has put a stamp of progress on a huge polyglot state. Make no mistake about it: his politics are best characterized by a blend of progressive ambition and pragmatic, quite moderate actions, marked by a focus on large-scale climate and social goals while also facing criticism for fiscal decisions and the handling of specific issues. In other words, he practices the politics of the possible.

What “proof” will his detractors have for all the asinine allegations mentioned above? First and foremost, that he is a 4th generation San Franciscan . . . and you know what that means! Even worse: Newsom’s aunt Barbara was married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi! Newsom’s father, William Alfred Newsom III was a state appeals court judge and longtime attorney for Getty Oil. The Getty-Newsom connection is both long and strong. Businessman and classical music composer Gordon Getty, one of the late oil tycoon J. Paul Getty’s 4 ,invested in 10 of Newsom’s 11 businesses, beginning with his first, the PlumpJack Winery in 1992. It should be noted that Gavin Newsom is godfather to the American model, socialite and LGBT+ activist Nats Getty. Although raised a Roman Catholic, as a child, Gavin Newsom went to a JCC preschool in San Francisco, and spent time at the Jewish summer camp Camp Tawonga.

In July 2008, Newsom married to film director Jennifer Siebel; they have 4 children. His first brief marriage was to America’s current Ambassador to Greece, former Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle. In October 2006, Newsom, then Mayor of San Francisco (he served in that office from January 2011-January 2019) publicly announced that he was seeking treatment for alcohol use disorder. The treatment was successful; he has been a recovering alcoholic for more than 18 years.

Like most human beings, Gavin Newsom is not a saint. Unlike many in public life, however, he has proactively discussed his sins and shortcomings in public, always seeking to become a better person. Remember, if the rewards of Paradise were reserved only for perfect, blemish-free people, it would be the emptiest piece of property in the universe. What we are about to “learn” and “hear” about Governor Newsom in the weeks, months and years to come should be considered far more a testament to how much his possible success scares his political opponents (some of whom are Democrats) and far less because he is a blot on society. No one without ego, drive, the ability to deliver a coherent and positive message and raise vast amounts of cash has the slightest chance of becoming POTUS. As much as we may decry and even revile the motivation and tools in the political tool box of people who seek the nation’s highest office, we do well to remember just how how grueling and quixotic the trek truly is.

We’ve never had a successful politician named Gavin. Indeed, up until recently (unless you were a San Franciscan, a political geek or baseball fan) the only Gavins that came trippingly to the tongue were actor Gavin MacLeod (Capt. Merrill Stubing on "The Love Boat”) and right-hander Gavin Floyd who pitched for 5 major league baseball teams from 2004 to 2016, finishing with a career record of 74-76. As of today, Gavin Newsom is the most famous Gavin in both the United States and likely the world. Gavin is a name of Welsh origin, it carries the meaning “white hawk” and all the virtues long associated with that bird of prey. Considered symbolic of love and steadfastness, the white hawk is a fitting spirit animal for Gavin’s most famed namesake: Sir Gawain of the Knights of the Round Table. This heroic figure of Arthurian legend is most known for his loyalty, bravery, and knightly perfection. He was immortalized in an anonymous late 14th century poem (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) that follows him as he embarks on a quest for honor a mysterious challenge from the supernatural Green Knight. Through trials of courage, honor, and moral integrity, Gawain’s journey explores the complexities of knightly virtue and human frailty.

Who knows? Might there be a “white hawk” in our future?

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categories / 2028

#1, 055: The United States of Amnesia

November 04, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

First and foremost, a confession: I am not a Marxist. Period. End of confession. Why in the name of erudition am I making this avowal? Because I am about to quote from Karl Marx’s 1852 monograph The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: to wit, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Paraphrasing the German Idealist G.W.F. Hegel, Marx’s intention in this essay was to discuss how historical events can echo - but with a lesser, more pathetic quality - the second time they happen. Well, dear reader, we are currently in the throes of a severe and moronic political crisis that affirms just how insightful and dead-bang on were die Herren Marx und Hegel: to wit, when history does repeat itself – as inevitably it shall – it tends to have a lesser, more distressing quality the second time around.

The current political crisis is well-known to a majority of Americans. While the government is shut down, Congress is on permanent holiday; while millions of families are in real danger of malnutrition and having to decide between paying rent or forgoing medical care, POTUS is gearing up to have his DOJ “repay” him $230 million for legal expenses and having his billionaire best buds cough up hundreds of millions of dollars in order to create the largest banquet hall on the planet. And to top it all off, our fearful leader is actually giving serious thought to constructing an Arc de Trump meant to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

To make matters worse, whenever questioned about anything going on within the regime, House Speaker Mike Johnson displays a raging case of amnesia. Sun Sentinel opinion writer Pat Beall snarkily summed things up in a recent piece in the following manner: Dinner with the president and his crypto BFFs? “I don’t know anything about the dinner.” Presidential crypto grift? Same. Quatar jet? Shutdown layoffs? GOP police funding cuts? Whatever it was Eric Trump said this week?

To the best my knowledge - and after extensive research - there are no historic rankings of house Speakers; of who were the best best of the best all the way down to the worst of the worst. It is, as with most things in the realm of American history, a matter of political weltanschauung (worldview) and partisanship. To my way of thinking, the best of the best was Joseph Gurney Cannon (R. IL) the man known during his speakership as both “Uncle Joe” and “Czar Cannon." He exercised exceptional control during his 7 years (1903-1910) as Speaker; he effectively had total control over the agenda and debate proceedings of the House. (n.b. He also chaired the House Rules Committee). Eventually, there came a political revolt, led by a small group of Republicans who managed to curb his power. In many ways his experience mirrored the more recent frustrations of far-right Republicans who, during the first Trump Administration, voiced interest in lessening the institutional power of both the speaker and the House itself. Although some could fault Cannon for the dictatorial manner in which he ran the House, he did manage to keep Theodore Roosevelt (whose presidency ranks in the top 10) from eviscerating and castrating the purpose and perquisites of the House . . . the one thing our current Speaker has utterly failed to do.

Other upper-echelon Speakers include

Henry Clay (Whig-KY): “The Great Compromiser,” was a staunchly anti-Jacksonian who eventually became leader of the Whigs . . . who were the liberals of his day and time. He was the only person to be elected Speaker during his first term in the House after having previously served two brief terms in the U.S. Senate. During his 6 non-consecutive terms as Speaker, Clay reshaped the office by actively setting the House’s policy agenda—especially his “American System” of economic expansion, high tariffs, and investments in the nation’s infrastructure—while pursuing more direct political objectives. He was also the first Speaker to be appointed to a presidential cabinet, servicing as U.S. Secretary of State in the administration of John Quincy Adam.
Sam Rayburn (D-TX), who wielded the gavel for a record 17 nonconsecutive years. He left a permanent legacy; one of the main buildings housing legislative offices adjacent to the Capitol bears his name. More importantly, he was a master negotiator, credited with raising the prominence of the Democratic party and supporting the budding career of LBJ.
Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-MA) who, despite being a deeply partisan Democrat, managed to also be a paragon of bipartisanship. The relationship between the highly-progressive Speaker and the ultra-conservative President Ronald Reagan was a model of what the executive and legislative branches can accomplish when political partisanship takes a backseat to what’s in the best interest of the commonweal. The two Irishmen often had to walk a fine line between capitulating to a popular conservative POTUS and maintaining his party interests in the midst of the Cold War.
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Likely the best “wrangler” of votes in the history of the office, the first female Speaker routinely found the proper leverage points to keep party legislators in line, while also trying to secure votes from members of the opposition. As but one example, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, Speaker Pelosi helped drive through the deeply debated legislation. The sweeping health care policy passed the House on Nov. 7, 2009, with a vote count of 220 to 215. It needed 218 to pass. Today, she is routinely considered the “worst of the worst” by MAGA Republicans, who, afflicted with amnesia, forget the disasters which were Dennis Hastert (an admitted serial child molester), Newt, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, and the current wielder of the gavel Mike “I know nothing” Johnson. Political historians predict that she will be known as one of the most successful Speakers of all time.

Here’s where Marx/Hegel’s nostrum about history repeating itself “first as tragedy, second as farce” comes into play. Or, we can go back even further, to the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes. In that book, Koheleth, the self‑named author, states a profound truth in Chapter 1, Verse 9: "What has been will be, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun" Koheleth's verity, which extends to both the political and the religious realm, might well serve as the epitaph for the second Jewish person to serve in Congress, Lewis Charles Levin of Pennsylvania. For the major issue that obsessed Levin and made his brief moment in the political spotlight has resurfaced time and again. In Levin's day, it was called nativism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century it was termed populism. Today it goes under the name MAGA, or, as one current historian calls it, "the cult of national patriotism." The issues Levin raised in his day on the national political stage (roughly 1845-51) - prayer and Bible in public schools; keeping America free of foreign influence; strengthening moral values; keeping illegal immigrants from coming to America - are once again staples of American politics in the 21st century.

Equal parts crusading moral zealot, paranoid conspiratorialist, and agitating dogmatist, Levin fashioned a barely coherent political philosophy that sought nothing less than "the attainment and preservation of America's `national character.'" As he declared early in his first congressional term in 1845, "I go for everything American in contradistinction to everything foreign." In the end, he proved himself to be remarkably unsuccessful in achieving his aim. But . . . and this is an enormous ‘but’ . . . he did manage to give rise to a political party known in the mid-19th century as the American Party but ever since as The Know-Nothing Party.”

From the way Lewis Levin railed against paupers, drunks, Catholics, and those who "had not been sufficiently long in the country to have lost the odor of . . . steerage," one might have taken him for some priggish Backbay snob. Far from it. Although little is known about his antecedents or early life, it is clear that Lewis Charles Levin was the son of Jewish parents. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 10, 1808, Levin spent the first sixteen years growing up in a city that was home to early-nineteenth-century America's largest Jewish population---somewhere between 600 and 700. From his later actions, it is clear that Levin felt like an outsider and tried desperately to escape from his Jewish past. Although there is no concrete evidence that he ever formally converted to another religion, he did become an advocate of Protestantism and married two non‑Jewish women, Anna Hays and Julia Gist.

Levin graduated from South Carolina College (University of South Carolina) in 1824. Infected with wanderlust, he spent the next fifteen years earning a precarious living as an itinerant Christian preacher and teacher, settling variously in Maryland, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Somewhere along the line he read law and was admitted to the bar in several states. In 1839 or 1840, Levin---by now married to Ann Hays of Kentucky---moved to Philadelphia, which, notwithstanding his disaffiliation, was then home to some 1,600 Jews.

In 1842, Lewis Levin purchased a newspaper which he called the Temperance Advocate. For the budding journalist, the subject of temperance was an early passion. His speeches and articles against the evils of drink brought him to the attention of like‑minded souls; in 1843, he was elected president of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society. In this capacity, Levin continued speaking out against drink, the stage, and anything that in his estimation led to the creation of a less puritanical society. Like a Sunday‑school preacher, he distrusted man's natural impulses. Without discipline and self‑control, he feared, American society would collapse beneath the weight of its immorality.

Levin sold the Temperance Advocate in 1843 and purchased a larger paper, the Daily Sun. Now he added the evil of foreign influences to his arsenal. Levin was not alone in disparaging foreigners. In the 1840s, America began playing host to wave after wave of European immigrants. Their arrival served to fan the flames of dislocation, uncertainty, and intolerance. As a result, many Americans, looking for scapegoats to blame for political, fiscal and social dislocation, became attracted to the burgeoning nativist movement. This movement, which would eventually coalesce into a national political party, sought to identify and promote a purely American ethos. Foreigners, particularly Irish Catholics, became easy scapegoats in a highly confusing time. Levin took this antipathy and molded a paranoiac fantasy whereby the monarchs of Europe were plotting to take over America by means of the spiritual influence of the Catholic Church. In an article he wrote in his Daily Sun, Levin claimed that the monarchs of Europe were planning “. . . to people the country with Catholic immigrants, in order to provide for the contingency so patriotically prayed for . . . of our government changing to a monarch - whereby his holiness (the Pope) will have a King ready, sprinkled with holy water, to mount the throne in the name of Catholic liberty! Levin even gave rise to a canard that turned into a conspiracy: that the Pope was secretly digging a tunnel under the Atlantic to attack America!

America has long been a country with a penchant for both amnesia and conspiratorial fears. As the preeminent American historian Page Smith (under whom I studied back in the 1960s) noted in volume IV of his massive A People’s History of the United States: If there is something in the American character especially susceptible to notions of conspiracy it may stem from incapacity to deal with the unanticipated and coincidental quality of history itself. Americans have been generally inclined to think of themselves as being in control of their individual and collective destinies. Inexplicable or irrational events, hard times, or even natural disasters must, it was thought, be capable of explanation. Better a shaky conspiracy theory than no explanation at all.

In 1844, Levin published a broadside entitled A Lecture on Irish Repeal, in Elucidation of the Fallacy of Its Principles and in Proof of Its Pernicious Tendency in the Moral, Religious, and Political Aspects. In it, he attacked both the Irish "Repeal" movement (the fight for the repeal of Ireland's union with England and Scotland) and its leader, Daniel O'Connell. Levin claimed that in establishing Repeal Clubs throughout America, O'Connell and his minions were actually establishing beachheads for an eventual takeover of America by the papacy. Levin uncovered "a nefarious plot to debauch and contaminate the institutions of the United States and to set up a monarchy." His pen dripping with vitriol, Levin concluded that "The Irish Catholic vote is to be organized to overthrow American liberty. The extensive ramifications of Repeal Clubs have suddenly become affiliated societies, to carry out the intentions of His Holiness, the Pope!"

Fueled mainly by the diatribes of journalists, propagandists, and pamphleteers like Levin, the nativist movement continued to grow. In the mid-1840s, a new political faction, variously called the Native American Party, American Republicans, or the Know Nothings, came into existence. Wherever and whenever they held their conventions, violence against Catholics and Catholic churches was sure to follow. The party attracted followers by raising the fear that immigrants posed a concrete threat to the American way of life. When Levin and his cohorts added the issue of Bible in the public schools, their ranks swelled dramatically. One plank of the Native American Party's platform boldly proclaimed: We maintain that the Bible, without note or comment, is not sectarian---that it is the fountain head of morality and all good government and should be used in our public schools as a reading book.

The Bible to which the nativists referred was, of course, the King James (Protestant) version, which, they claimed, the Catholics wanted excluded from the schools. Levin's diatribes to the contrary, this was simply not the case. As one Catholic bishop of the time stated, "I do not object to the use of the Bible provided Catholic children be allowed to use their own version." Levin retorted that the King James Bible was actually a nonsectarian book! He and his nativist allies pushed for what they called "Bible Education"---a program of learning that would inculcate proper moral values and promote Americanism. Underlying all of this was, of course, an implied attack on the Catholic Bible, the Catholic Church, and Catholics in general. Although the nativists attracted numerous followers, their appeal remained largely among a narrow segment of society. With regard to the Catholic versus Protestant Bible issue, one observer of the time wryly noted: "A large majority of the Protestants who fought out the question of reading the Bible in the public schools . . . would not have known the difference between the Protestant and the Catholic Bible if it had been placed in their hands."

In July, 1844, Levin was indicted by a grand jury for inciting to riot. He made political capital by claiming that he had actually tried to stem the violence which had taken place in Philadelphia's Southwark district; moreover, he claimed, the indictment was part of a "Popish plot." His name prominently before the public, Lewis Charles Levin declared his candidacy on the American Party ticket for Congress from Pennsylvania's First District. During the three‑man campaign, Levin kept hammering away on the "pernicious foreigner" issue. Levin's standard stump‑speech message from 1844 sounds hauntingly familiar even after more than a century and a half: "Unless a remedy be found to impede the influx of foreigners in the United States, the day [will] not be distant when American‑born voters find themselves a minority in their own land." Largely on the strength of this message, and his public notoriety, Levin captured the First District seat. Shortly after his election, he stood trial on the charge of "riot, treason and murder." He was found not guilty.

Levin served three terms in Congress, during which time he became one of the least popular men on Capitol Hill. In speech after speech, Levin subjected his colleagues to rancorous attacks on the Catholic Church. When members of the House challenged him or took him to task, Levin would simply accuse his antagonists of being "paid agents of the Jesuits who hang around this Hall." At one point Levin attempted to win Southern support for the American Party by claiming that the abolitionist movement was inspired by the Pope and his agents! Most Southerners, offended by Levin's bravado and naked political opportunism, turned away in disgust.

It has long been a truism in Congress that the best way to succeed on Capitol Hill is to make oneself an expert on a single issue or area of interest---farm price supports, foreign policy, defense, etc. For Levin, given his unique political pathology, the area of expertise, not surprisingly, was immigration and naturalization. Levin proposed changing the naturalization law to require a residence period of twenty‑one years in order to qualify for American citizenship. Moreover, he pushed a concept he called federal citizenship, whereby the federal government would be granted the exclusive right to determine qualifications for voting. After a prolonged and rancorous debate, the House concluded that Levin's proposal was unconstitutional; it usurped the clearly enumerated right of the individual states to set voting qualifications. Levin's hatred of immigrants was so great that he opposed a bill setting minimum passenger-space requirements for transatlantic ships bearing newcomers to America. The bill's sponsor, Representative George Rathbun of New York, argued that current overcrowded conditions on the ships were ". . . a revolting spectacle, a disgrace not only to our laws and our country, but to humanity itself." In speaking out against Rathbun's proposal, Levin sarcastically suggested that the legislation be amended to read "A bill to afford additional facilities to the paupers and criminals of Europe to emigrate to the United States." Levin's diatribe notwithstanding, Rathbun's bill passed overwhelmingly.

Levin and his cohorts attempted to turn their nativist faction into a national political party but met with little success. Levin easily dominated the Native American Party's three national conventions, held in 1845, `46, and `47. The party's demise can largely be blamed on Levin himself. By resolutely demanding that "birth upon the soil be the only requisite for citizenship," Levin caused an irrevocable split among his nativist colleagues. By 1848, the Native American Party was finished as a political force. Levin should have seen the handwriting on the wall. He was easily defeated for reelection to a fourth term in 1850, and returned to Philadelphia, where he took up the practice of law.

In the last years of his life, Levin's tenuous mental makeup got the best of him. He spent at least the last three to four years of his life as a patient in hospitals for the insane in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Lewis Charles Levin died in Philadelphia on March 14, 1860 at age fifty-one, thus ending both a tortured life and a sorry chapter in American political history. Levin was buried in the nondenominational Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. His wife, Julia, tried to raise funds for a monument to his memory, but someone connected with the campaign absconded with the funds. To this day, no tombstone graces Levin's final resting place. Julia Gist Levin and Louis Levin (his son) converted to Catholicism in 1880.

What caused Levin’s party to become nicknamed "The Know-Nothings” was that party leaders ordered its rank-and-file members, when asked by non-members about any and all party doctrine, to say they "knew nothing.” Despite attempts to resurrect the name and officially run candidates for office, it has never again become a ballot-qualified party.

Nonetheless, the "amnesiac” defense continues to thrive in MAGA land. As mentioned in the early paragraphs of this week’s post, Speaker Johnson is the modern embodiment of the I know nothin strategy in American politics. Me thinks he must have spent his childhood watching reruns of Hogan’s Heroes (to my mind one of the most tasteless sitcoms in all broadcast history) and learned to imitate "Sgt. Schultz” who made I know nothing! the show’s most memorable phrase. (Somewhat hauntingly, John Banner, the actor who portrayed Schultz, was, in real life a Viennese Jew who fled Europe shortly after the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria to Nazi Germany. Another cast member, Robert Clary [who played the character “Cpl. LeBeau) was a French Jew, who as a child, was interred in a Nazi concentration camp.).

This past Sunday’s edition of Sixty Minutes featured Norah O’Donnell’s extended interview with IT, held at Mar-a-Lago. At one point in the interview, just after POTUS was railing about Joe Biden’s use of an autopen “in order to give pardons” (thus suggesting that, like a puppet, he did not know what he was doing) O’Donnell asked him about last month’s pardon of crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao (“C.Z.”). He had pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering in 2023, serving four months in prison and then agreeing to step down as the chief executive of Binance, the crypto exchange he co-founded. His companies have partnered with firms linked to Trump on new digital-currency projects including Dominari Holdings, where his sons sit on the board of advisers and which is based in Trump Tower.

When asked about why he pardoned Zhao even though government prosecutors had sasid he caused “ significant harm to U.S. national security, Felon47, gave an answer that would have caused Lewis Chas. Levin to beam: “I don't know who he is. . . I have no idea who he is,” only that he had been told that the businessman was a victim of a witch hunt by the Biden Administration. POTUS went on to say, My sons are involved in crypto much more than I-- me. I-- I know very little about it, other than one thing. It's a huge industry. And if we're not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.

The historic Know Nothings did manage to run one candidate for president in the 1856 election. That man was Millard Fillmore who served as the last Whig POTUS from 1850-1853. Generally ranked by historians as one of the 3 or 4 worst presidents, he came in third, receiving a less-than-resounding 21% of the popular vote - a mere 8 electoral votes - losing the election to Democrat James Buchanan.

Had he won, America would have been run by a bunch of racist, xenophobic, Bible-thumping reactionary amnesiacs. Hmmm . . . wonder what that would have been like.

Not really . . .

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categories / All Politics All the Time, American History, The Regime

#1,054: Tariffs are Not America's Pastime

October 26, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

As I sit here in my library, about to begin writing this blog, I’m wearing one of my L.A. Dodger tee shirts . . . this time a blue one emblazoned with the name OHTANI across the interscapular region. I’m drinking coffee from a blue Dodger mug. Last night, while watching Dodger ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto become the first pitcher to hurl consecutive complete games in a postseason since 2001, I was adorned in a grey L.A. Dodgers: 2024 World Series Champions shirt. Here in the library, sitting on a ledge just to my right is a bust of Thomas Jefferson and a beautifully framed octagonal photo of silent movie icon Clara Bow. Sitting between them is a plaque proclaiming Dodger Stadium: 2,694 mi. The plaque, like the tee-shirts and jerseys (which include “Kershaw,” “Betts,” and “Valenzuela” are all courtesy of my slightly-older-sister Riki (Erica). To be a member of the Stone family means being a fanatical “Bleed Dodger Blue” partisan. And that we are. . . in spades.

Throughout the day, and while watching the early innings of last night’s game, part of my brain was going over possible topics for this week’s blog. Unlike during the presidencies of Obama and Biden, when selecting things to write about wasn’t all that difficult, the era of the Regime presents far, far too many hebdomadal possibilities. Among the subjects I considered were:

The $20 (or $40) billion gift to the right-wing, fiscally inept Milei administration in Argentina; of how it would drive a stake through the heart of the American beef industry and only serve to enrich the billionaire hedge fund friends of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (himself a former hedge fund manager who once served as chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management [!]) who have been buying up Argentine bonds at an alarming rate. Those wishing to better understand why the Regime is investing so heavily in a failing South American economy, I urge you to read Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s piece from October 9.
Speaking before the press the other day, IT claimed the the federal government owes him ‘a lot of money’ ($230 million) for federal investigations during and after his first term. He further declared himself the arbiter of whether or not his own administration should pay him damages, telling reporters that any such decision “would have to go across my desk”. In a somewhat lighthearted moment proving G-d knows what, he said “It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” The situation has no parallel in American history, as Felon47, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department. “What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.” BTW: IT told the press he would donate any such funds to charity. “I’m not looking for money,” he told reporters. “I’d give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money.” All those who believe this, raise your hand.
Speaking of lying, our Beloved Pigeon (an historic epithet for Mussolini) announced before he tore down the entire East Wing of the White House in order to build a gilt $300 million, 90,000 square foot ballroom, that it would not interfere with the historic look of the grounds. White House officials then told CBS it was always the case that the East Wing would have to be modernized to enhance security and technology, but that during the planning process, it became apparent that the best option would be to demolish the entirety of the East Wing. Compare this ballroom to the one at Mar-a-Lago. ITs ballroom is about 20,000 square feet and seats around 700 people for dinner ,about 1,000 standing. It’s one of the largest private ballrooms in the country. According to the most recent reports, the new ballroom will be 90,000 square feet. That’s more than four times larger than Mar-a-Lago’s, and could hold somewhere around 3,000-4,000 people depending on the setup. Now mind you, the entire White House itself is only about 55,000 square feet. Forget the fact that Felon47 claims that he’s getting his billionaire friends to cough up the gelt for all the gilt. This is history being destroyed.

As last night’s game progressed, I continued pondering what to write about. And then came an ad from up in Toronto . . . the home of the Dodger’s World Series opponent, the Blue Jays. It dealt with an address former President Ronald Reagan gave back on April 25, 1987 in which he said, “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while, it works, but only for a short time. . . .High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation from foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars . . . .Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs. This so angered IT (who had previously made a friendly bet with Ontario Premier Doug Ford over the outcome of the World Series) that he not only cancelled further trade talks with Canada, but imposed an additional 10% tariff on all Canadian goods. To add insult to injury, he also called the ad a complete fake: They fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like Tariffs, when actually he LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY. . . . Thank you to the Ronald Reagan Foundation for exposing this FRAUD.”

Actually, the Ronald Reagan Foundation (which is located within jogging distance of my sister’s home in Southern California) opened its files and provided an actual video capture of The Gipper’s radio address:

I for one do not believe that Pouter Pigeon ever placed a wager in favor of the Dodgers. Afterall, they are in Los Angeles, which is in the State of California, which is also home to San Francisco . . . 3 places high on his ‘must take over’ list. Now, ironically, his pique for the good folks of Toronto is just about as high . . . if not higher. By running the ad at the end of every game (there are a maximum of 5 to go), Canada is essentially hitting a Grand Slam. I for one hope they play the ad at the Super Bowl in 2026. And if, G-d forbid, the Blue jays take the World Series crown from the L.A. Dodgers, I somehow doubt IT will be inviting them to the White House. Then too, should the Dodgers win, they will likely refuse the invitation.

Baseball is, without a doubt, America’s Pastime. Tariffs, swindles, misappropriation of funds, making sure your friends and family add to their personal billions . . . are nobody’s pastime. . .

. . . Unless you are a member of the inner circle of a malevolent cult; then these things are nothing more than unspeakable sins.

GO DODGER BLUE!!

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categories / America's Pastime, The Regime

#1,053: Did You Hear the One About the Psychiatrist Who Went to Heaven?

October 20, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

First things first: yesterday Annie, Nurit and I attended a historic, energetic, colorful, and totally peaceful “No Kings” rally along University Drive in downtown Coral Springs.. My guestimate is that there were about 2,500 people along the route, which stretched for about half-a mile, mostly on the east side of the street (the shady side . . . remember, this is sunny South Florida!) The placards, tee-shirts and costumes were about as creative as humanly possible. Altogether, there were people of all ages, colors and languages in attendance, not to mention the hundreds of drivers honking their horns in solidarity. Standing and waiving my two-sided sign, I couldn’t help but remember the first protest rally I ever attended . . . a “No War Toys!” protest held on Santa Monica beach back in the summer of 1964. For many, rallying, protesting and resisting is not for sissies; it is a lifelong obsession.

Many of us attended a similar event back in June, but the months since have seen IT make a truly dizzying array of changes in quick succession. This time, the crowds included a new round of protesters, those who said they were outraged over immigration raids, the deployment of federal troops in cities, government layoffs, steep budget cuts, the chipping away of voting rights, the rollback of vaccine requirements, the reversal on treaties with tribes and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Despite what the White House press office claimed, this turned out to be the single-largest protest rally in American history.

I know that whenever I attend a protest rally (and I’ve been doing it for more than 60 years now), I remember the words of Rabbi Tarfon:

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirke Avot, 2:16)

Hate to say it, but I don’t think the work will ever be finished. Over the past 250 years, America has always had a kind of split personality; a bifurcation of both intention and identification, if you will. Our very Constitution is an attempt to keep that bifurcation - between rich and poor, landowner and landless, “blueblood” and "illegal” - from becoming a chasm of societal necrosis. It is precisely because of our historic bifurcation that we have a bicameral federal legislature: the House was meant to represent the people; the Senate was a sop to the wealthy. That is also why we have a tripartite federal setup: legislative, executive and judicial . . . with the legislative coming first.

Nonetheless, what’s been going on since a (supposed) billionaire descended on a gold-encrusted elevator back in 2015 to announce that he was running for POTUS is something Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest of the Founders could never have imagined . . . let alone been prescient enough to set up safeguards against . . . to wit, a "leader” who simply doesn’t give a sh-t about anything or anyone but himself.

To the MAGA leader and his family of followers, the U.S. Government is no mere piggybank; it is their personal mint; a tool for making them richer than Croesus, the last king of the ancient Lydian Empire. What makes things even more deplorable is that he - and his closest followers - are now likening him to both the savior of Christianity and the Almighty coself* (co being my "he/she” pronoun for the Divine).

Want proof? Well, just a couple of days ago, POTUS’s son Eric, told podcaster Benny Johnson that we should all thank his dad for " . . . keeping Budweiser trans free, Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL and for 'saving G-d’.” This is way beyond chutzpah; it is outright blasphemy. Eric the Egregious actually told the podcaster “We’re saving Christianity. We’re saving G-d. We’ve saving (sic) the family unit. We’re saving this nation. I mean, DEI is out of the window . . . We have a return to people going to church.” AAArgh!

Not to be outdone, just days before the nationwide “No Kings” rallies, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals. Back in April Leavitt claimed that her boss was behind a ‘spiritual revival’ in the U.S. and helping people move ‘closer to G-d.’ Who in the hell is she referring to? The man who has spent less time in church than the founder of “American Atheists,” the late Madeline Murray O’Hair?

Somewhat ironically, during the 4 months between the June 14th and October 18th rallies, I’ve been immersing myself in reading the late novelist Upton Sinclair’s jaw-dropping 11-volume Lanny Budd series . . . an utterly brilliant (though lamentably long-forgotten) work of historic fiction. Between 1940 and 1953, Sinclair wrote this series of novels featuring a central character named Lanny Budd. He was the son of an American arms manufacturer who moved in the confidence of world leaders, not simply witnessing events, but often propelling them. Lanny has often been characterized as the antithesis of the “Ugly American”: a sophisticated socialite who mingles easily with people from all cultures and socioeconomic classes. What originally drew me to the series was that it covers western history from WWI through McCarthyism about as well as any textbook could ever hope . . . and yet be totally entertaining.

Here comes the irony: right now, I am immersed in the 5th volume of the series, Presidential Agent, in which Lanny becomes a secret agent in the employ of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Upon meeting FDR, we listen in as the great man tries to impress Lanny with just how terribly busy he is . . . and what his enemies say about him. I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem. Lanny responds by saying;

Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyse G-d?

FDR: No. Has that something to do with me?

Lanny: St. Peter explained that G-d was suffering from delusions of grandeur . . . He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt!

The president threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens. . . .

From what I’ve learned through research, this was actually a well-known joke in 1936 . . . after FDR won a second term, beating the pants off of Kansas Governor Alf Landon 60.8%-36.5% (523 electoral votes to a mere 8). Considering those who are touting the Beloved Pouter Pidgeon as the true Savior, the satiric bot mot still works rather well.

Make no mistake about it: FELON#47 is neither the savior nor the redeemer . . . let alone a leader of a country. What he is is the leader of a cult; a man suffering from unmistakable mental deficits and an ego thinner than tissue paper. That so many of his followers believe every word he says - or remain mum in the face of what they know to be his many shortcomings - is traitorous . . . to say the least.

NO, G-d Almighty does not want to be IT; what Co wants - or demands - is for all of us to be patriots, and thus fearlessly live up to the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship . . . which includes voting, rallying and resisting autocracy.

Rabbi Tarfon spoke the absolute truth:

It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it."

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categories / American History, Power to the People!, The Regime

#1,052: Action is the Antidote to Anxiety

October 12, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

This past week has been worthy of Charles Dickens’ opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

To say that the past 168 hours have been weird to the max is an overstatement. Consider that many of us - for the first time ever - are actually in agreement with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on an issue. “What issue?” you ask. Precisely this: the Republicans’ “Big Bad Bill” which has started putting the cost of health care well beyond the means and hopes of millions upon millions of American taxpayers. . . and is at the heart of the current federal shutdown.

Never mind the fact that Greene - a.k.a. Capitol Hill Karen - enthusiastically voted for the bill’s passage; as of the other day, she’s up in arms. It seems she’s finally become aware that it will affect her own adult children, who will no longer be able to afford health insurance. Now, suddenly, she’s ashamed to be a MAGA-ite. Well sorry Marge; just because you have taken this most anti-MAGA stance (for which I do sincerely applaud you) doesn’t erase all the gruesome, heartless things you’ve done and said in your racist, Islamophobic, anti small-d democratic political career. Hell, even a broken clock is correct twice every 24 hours.

Then, of course, there is the breathtaking news that finally, finally, after more than 2 years, the war between Israel and Hamas just might be coming to an end; that Israeli hostages - both living and deceased - will be returning home in a swap for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian prisoners currently being held in Israeli prisons. As of this morning (Sunday Sept. 12, 2025) Israel and Hamas have signed a cease-fire agreement to free the remaining hostages in Gaza. But the future is murky: Many of the plan’s ambitious ideas for postwar Gaza have yet to be negotiated.

Yes, there are certainly hopeful signs on the horizon . . . for which POTUS and his negotiating team (Miami neighbors Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff) should be applauded. What they have accomplished has taken place largely behind closed doors and away from the cameras . . . where traditionally, the greatest strides in diplomacy have always taken place. Joining in on the diplomatic sessions with Kushner and Witkoff (both of whom made their billions in international real estate and venture capitalism) in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh were the Qatari P.M., Sheik Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Egyptian foreign minister Badr Abdelatty, Pakastani PM Shehbaz Sharif, and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin.

As much room as there may be for rejoicing, one must keep a couple of things in mind. First, as recently as February of this year, POTUS spoke freely about his underlying motive for bringing “peace” to the Middle East. In a meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu, he spoke of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in order to develop Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” He called on Egypt and Jordan, in particular, to absorb the displaced population, while the United States would “own” the seaside territory. In a Fox News interview, Trump further clarified that the relocation of the Palestinians would be permanent, with no right of return. Remember this: the man is at base a deal-maker, not a diplomat. And that fact alone throws several cups of cold water (at the least) onto the smoldering passion for peace in the Middle East.

Second, remember that whether or not he and the international community will actually succeed in bringing the war to an end, he is still the man who is currently:

Overseeing the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers;
Keeping members of the military from receiving their pay;
Ordering National Guard troops into Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon either “in order to protect those cities from dangerously high crime rates” or “to protect ICE agents from being attacked by left-wing Marxists.” This may be nothing more than a pretext for implementing the Insurrection Act . . .
Sanctioning retributive prosecutions against the likes of former FBI Director James Comey and NY Attorney General Letitia James and likely California Senator Adam Schiff;
Calling for the imprisonment of mayors and governors who have publicly called him out;
Is enriching himself and his family to the tune of at least $5 billion in their latest cryptocurrency venture;
Joining hands with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in pushing unproven (and unsound) advice around Tylenol and various vaccines;
Issuing an executive order purporting to go after “domestic terrorism,” and authorizing punishments for even tenuous connections to speech the regime doesn’t like.
And on and on and on . . .

These are indeed anxious times. And while there is, to paraphrase Ernest Thayer’s Casey at the Bat, “Some joy in Mudville,” (i.e. MTG’s turnaround on the “Big Bad Bill” and the return of the hostages from Gaza) it must not cause anyone into thinking that, in the words of yet another poet (Robert Browning) G-d’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. One good act, one political volte-face does not - nay, cannot - make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear . . . as our British cousins used to say. However, sometimes the opposite can be true. Here, I am thinking of the late Senator Edward Kennedy who did an awful lot of political good during his life. And yet for many, all that good has been nullified by precisely 4 words (which many can no longer identify): “Chappaquiddick” and “Mary Jo Kopechne.”

In any event, anxiety currently abounds, and there is an early-stage trickle of resentment beginning to be expressed all over the country. As one might expect, the greatest, most audible resentment comes from America’s center-left. And yet, there is beginning to be heard and felt a deepening of pique and displeasure from the center-right as well. More and more, we are hearing the words TRUMP MUST GO! THE MAN’S A MENTAL CASE! and WHAT ABOUT USING THE 25TH AMENDMENT!

Someone far wiser than I once wrote that “Activism is the antidote to anxiety.” I firmly believe this to be true; I’ve seen it happen in Berkeley, Chicago, and along the National Mall in years past. It can happen again this coming Saturday, October 18, 2025.

I’ve been pushing the national “No Kings” day of protest for quite some time. Once again, I’m urging one and all to join in, SIGN UP and attend a rally in your neck of the woods. Our presence, our signs, our voices and our activism can relieve the anxiety. Let Mr. Speaker Johnson proclaim that everyone at “No Kings” protests is a terrorist bent on showing that they hate America and are pro-Hamas. He is, as Grannie used to say, “Full of canal water.”

Peaceful public protest is as American as apple pie.

Come on out and engage in a slice of patriotism.

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categories / Power to the People!

#1,051: Optimist, Pessimist, Realist, Activist

September 25, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

Despite the fact that most even semi-literate people have heard (and perhaps even used themselves upon occasion) the expression The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty - no one knows who first gave it voice. In 1908 a precursor of the expression appeared in a Minnesota newspaper with an acknowledgement to a journalist identified as “David Dodge of The New York World”, in which a fictional Professor of Mathematics named Dr. Nix, used wordplay to generate a “curious paradox”. The joke hinged on the equivalence of “half full” and “half empty”. The words “pessimist” and “optimist,” however, were not mentioned. Then there are those who are absolutely certain that its creator was Baron Josiah Charles Stamp (1880-1941), an English industrialist, economist, civil servant, statistician, writer, and most importantly, one-time director of the Bank of England. On April 4, 1935 “The Daily Telegraph” of London printed a quip delivered by Baron Stamp during a speech the previous evening: “Sir Josiah Stamp gave this definition of an optimist and a pessimist when he spoke at the dinner of the Society of Incorporated Accountants and Auditors in London last night: An optimist is the man who looks at his glass and says it is half full. The pessimist is he who looks at it and says it is half empty.”

In Hollywood, there are lots of people who firmly believe that the quip started with Ted Healy (1896-1937), who was the creator of “Ted Healy and His 3 Stooges,” (yes, those “Three Stooges”) who once, when speaking to a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle about the gas tank in his car, remarked that he “couldn’t tell whether the gas tank was half full, or half empty, because the needle pointed half way.” Well, regardless of who was originally responsible for this bon mot is irrelevant; what matters is the fact that there is a germ of truth in it.

I gave thought to this aphorism while sitting and praying in shul throughout services for the two days of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After more than 45 years of being the officiant (call it the ‘driver’) at High Holiday services, today was the second time I was a mere ‘passenger,’ by which I mean a congregant. Fortunately, I was sitting next to my dear friend Shepsl, who has been my gabbai (second in command) for as many years as I can remember. Shepsl isn’t a rabbi; nonetheless, he’s as well trained as one, but permits me to look flawless . . . which is an amazing skill. Anway, while sitting next to him and his wonderful partner (whom I introduced to one another years and years ago), I had the rare opportunity to listen to the rabbi give his sermon . . . instead of having to deliver one myself. He was speaking about life lessons on this Holy Day, the first day of the Jewish New Year 5786.

One of the major - and most memorable - aspects of services for Rosh Hashanah is a long recitation of our sins (חֲטָאִים khah-ta-eem), shortcomings (פֶּשַׁעִים p’sha-eem), and offenses (עֲבֵרוּת ah-vay-rut) and our resolve to - with G-d’s assistance - make more moral, positive and productive versions of ourselves in the coming year. Mind you, this prayer, which is repeated again and again throughout services, is recited in the first person plural (We), as opposed to the singular (I), for indeed, we are all in the same boat together.

Despite all the terrors, tortures and troubles the Jewish people have suffered throughout our millennia as a people, we tend to be historically optimistic. We have long understood as the moral of an ancient of an ancient tale teaches גם זה יעבור (gahm zeh ya-ah-vore) "this too shall pass.” The tale, a story about King Solomon and his eldest son Rehoboam (Heb., רחבעם - R’khav-ahm) who was a depressive sort. The young man’s extremely wise and caring father understood the reason for his son’s depression: he never thought he could be as smart, as great or as accomplished as his father the king. Solomon realized that merely telling his son not to worry - that everything would work its way out - wasn’t enough. And so, he had a servant go to the royal jeweler and make a two-sided coin . . . one side made of sapphire, the other of ruby. The servant instructed the jeweler to etch the words גם זה יעבור (“This too shall pass”) on both sides of the coin.

When the coin arrived back at the palace, King Solomon summoned his son and told him that he had a very special gift for him; one he would not be giving to Rehoboam’s brother, Menelik nor his sister Tapat. He told Rehoboam to take the coin and grasp it in his closed palm, red side up. “When things get so far down and you feel like you’ve hit rock bottom,” his father told him. I want you to look at the red side of the coin. Open your hand and read me out loud what you see inscribed on it,” the king said. Opening his hand, the young man read the inscription: גם זה יעבור. “Is this really true?” Rehoboam asked. “Will things really get better?” “Yes indeed,” King Solomon told his son. “Things will get to be so good, so bright and positive that you will entirely forget how bad things used to be.”

“Now,” the King continued to his son, who was beginning to show signs of a smile on his face, “When you feel like you reached the top of the greatest mountain in the world and that everything is as rosy as can be, I want you to learn the lesson etched into the blue side of the coin . . . turn it over now, and please read the words aloud.” Rehoboam obeyed his father, slowly opening his palm and turning up the coin’s blue side. “גם זה יעבור,” he read aloud. “It says the same thing . . . you mean that even the good times will pass?” he asked in amazement.

“Yes,” his father said, placing his hand on his eldest child’s shoulder. "It is the most profound wisdom in the world . . . hold it close for all your days . . . it is the gift of balance. . . never forget its meaning . . . let it penetrate your very mind, heart and soul. . . ”

In these extremely trying times, when a pernicious insanity has beset much of humanity, This too shall pass is an extremely good bit of wisdom to hold close. Far too few can honestly claim that the glass is half-full . . . which is, of course, another way of saying half-empty. For as long as I can remember, I have had a different approach and understanding to Baron Stamp’s formula. To wit, I have been neither a thorough-going optimist nor a deeply neurotic pessimist. To my way of thinking and experience, so long as there is something . . . anything in the glass, that makes me a realist . . . a person hopefully imbued enough strength, fortitude and conviction to be an activist in both the best and worst of times . . . and everything in between.

Since the beginning of secular year 2025 we have been witness to the wholesale plummeting of both individual and communal rights in the country. The upsurge in the number of non-citizens who have been “disappeared off the streets” by masked and heavily-armed ICE troopers, then spirited away to secret holding facilities (all without access to legal counsel or lawful judicial procedure), for the purpose of deporting them to third-world countries that are little better than penal colonies has been both shocking and dispiriting. The rationale for this is that most are members of organized criminal gangs responsible - as POTUS recently averred, "the overdose deaths of more than 300 million Americans.” (FACT: there were a maximum of 62 million deaths from all causes worldwide in 2024).

In the first 8 months of 2025 (equal to the last 9 months of 5785), we have witnessed Health and Human Services (HHS), under the command of RFK, Jr., take a wrecking ball to:

America’s healthcare system, cutting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding for medical research;
All but eliminating vaccines for Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Whooping Cough, as well as questioning the efficacy of Polio vaccines, and,
Stressing to America’s pregnant women that taking Tylenol (Acetaminophen) during pregnancy can lead to autism in newborn children (Medical science says this is absolute twaddle).

(n.b.: I for one find it both ironic and ghoulish that our beloved Pouter Pidgeon made his announcement about the relationship between Tylenol and Autism from the Roosevelt Room, the only part of the White House named for a President who suffered from Polio . . . a vaccine which RFK, Jr., and POTUS have questioned).

In the first 8 months of this administration, we have seen the virtual decimation of USAID, thus spurring both an alarming spike in world hunger and a heartless drop in universal health . . . not to mention putting a black mark on America’s reputation in the world.

In recent weeks we have begun to see a rise in prices for everything from artichokes to zucchini, as well as a worldwide drop in sales of United States-grown soybeans . . . which is about to impoverish an awful lot of farmers in America’s heartland. Blame it on the IT-mandated tariffs which might well lead to trade toxicity. We have also had to listen to POTUS “bloviate” in front of the United Nations about the “lie” that is Climate Change, how the rest of the nations of the world are “going to Hell,” claiming that Christianity is the most endangered religion on the planet and turning a supposed eulogy into an hour-long diatribe against his enemies. (n.b. bloviate, BTW is a word invented by America’s 29th President, Warren Gamliel Harding who, up until the election of Felon47, ran the lamest, most corrupt and least progressive administration in United States history.)

Yes indeed, it would appear that America had hit its historic nadir . . . and I’ve left out dozens upon dozens of further examples of this blunders, faux pas and outright mindless misdeeds .

But . . . and there’s always a but . . . we would do well to feed our frustrations with fuel provided by wise-old King Solomon:

:גם זה יעבור
THIS TOO SHALL PASS!

This is simply not the time to wallow in the pessimism of the glass that is half empty. At the same time, we cannot afford the optimistic lunacy of seeing the glass as being half full. Rather, it is time for realism; for taking heart in the fact that at least there is something in the glass. And that something is beginning to show . . . in lower federal courts holding POTUS and his allies’ feet to the fire; in a small, growing handful of libertarians finding their voice (e.g. Senators Cruz and Paul in the recent FCC imbroglio over Jimmy Kimmel); in corporations and universities beginning to stiffen their spines against political and monetary blackmail; in the results of nearly every special election, in which voters have given overwhelming defeats to MAGA-espousing candidates. And especially in America’s historic secret weapon: WE THE PEOPLE.

Now is the time to use the realism of there being something in the glass and turn the tide through ACTIVISM. If you are currently unaware . . . or haven’t given it much thought or commitment . . . on Saturday, October 18, 2025, there will be another nationwide NO KINGS MOBILIZATION. I cannot urge you strongly enough to make plans to attend a rally in your neck of the woods. Just go to https://www.nokings.org/ and find where you can join up for a few crucial hours of activism.

Together we can make a mighty difference.
Together, we can make our voices heard.
Together, we can begin to turn the tide.
Together, we can rebuild America; not through negativism, but through good old-fashioned American ACTIVISM.

Be sure to make a sign, bring a bottle (or a case) of water, and an umbrella, and, if you are able and of a mind, a guitar as well.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS!!

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#1,050: Blessings & Curses

September 15, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

This past Wednesday’s gruesome assassination of ultra-conservative influencer - and IT ultra-ally - Charlie Kirk at (allegedly) the hands of shooter Tyler Robinson on the campus of Utah Valley University, has sent shockwaves throughout America and indeed, much of the world. Even more, it has uncovered much of what is most grisly and wickedly conspiratorial - as well as most mendacious and mind numbing - about early 21st century culture here in the land of Washington and Lincoln, Jefferson and Obama. It should be obvious to all but the pathologically insane that no one, regardless of their politics, obnoxious opinions or utter lack of empathy, compassion or truthfulness (à la the murder victim Mr. Kirk) should be taken out in a public killing. No child should have to face life without a father; no spouse without their mate.

Was the deceased a public menace who put the lives of everyday men, women and children in imminent danger? Rhetorically speaking, perhaps; I mean he was a cheerleader for cruelty, who possessed a vicious genius for making outlandish statements such as:

“It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other G-d-given rights,"
"I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage."
"Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years."
If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
“The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”
“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
At a “Turning Point USA’s" Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas this past June, attended by more than 3,000 mostly school-aged young women and girls, Kirk called upon women to abandon careers and education to "submit to a godly man” and raise “more children than you can afford.” At one point he touted the idea that American society should “bring back” the “Mrs. Degree,” a concept dating back to the mid-19th century, in which women attended college with the intention of finding a husband.

Within 24 hours of Kirk’s murder, the 31-year old’s martyrdom was already well on its way to being etched in stone. In her first encounter with media after his murder, his widow, Erika Kirk, vowed to continue her husband’s movement, and said that “the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry. . . .The evil-doers for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they’ve done. They killed Charlie because he preached a patriotism, faith and of G-d’s love. They should all know this. If you thought my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you have unleashed across this country and this world.” Mind you, her comments were made even before Tyler Robinson’s arrest . . . at a time when many public figures and political influencers (including IT) were blaming the ‘radical left’ for Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Many on the right have asserted that American political leaders and participants are far more endangered by “highly-armed liberal crazies” than patriotic Christians on the right. After reading those kind of statements, I did a little research and could only come up with one major crime that fit this stereotype: the 2017 shooting at a ballfield near D.C. where Republican members of the House were practicing for an upcoming charity softball game. Then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (who survived) and 4 other house members were shot by liberal activist James Hodgkinson from Belleville, Illinois. Hodgkinson, 66 was killed by police officers on the scene. Aside from this, I have yet to find another such incident. Yes, there are the 2 recent attempts on the life of the president; one man is on trial and the other was shot dead by the police before anyone could determine what - if anything - were the political underpinnings of his ghastly deed.

On the other hand, the number of shootings, bashings, failed kidnappings and outright murders on the part of ultra conservatives against Democrats (all of whom are labeled either “ultra-liberal,” “Marxist” or “child murdering”) needs to be counted on the fingers of several hands:

June 14, 2025: A masked man dressed as a police officer went to the home of the Minnesota House of Representatives’ top Democrat and fatally shot state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband as police tried to stop what Democratic Gov. Tim Walz later called “a politically motivated assassination.” The same man had just shot and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife at their home, police said. A list found in the gunman’s abandoned car largely included names of Democrats and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood or the abortion rights movement, including Rep. Ilhan Omar and Sen. Tina Smith.
April 13, 2025: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro – with his wife, their four children, two dogs and another family – were forced to flee after someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the governor’s mansion, severely damaging the home hours after the family hosted a Passover seder. The suspect said he targeted the Democratic governor in part because of what he believed were Shapiro’s views on the war in Gaza, search warrants show.
October 28, 2022: a man who reportedly had compiled a list of people he believed were “systematically and deliberately” destroying American freedom and liberty broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, planning to kidnap and hurt her, authorities said. The Speaker was not at home at the time of the attack. Instead, her husband, Paul Pelosi, was bludgeoned by a hammer, which cracked open his skull.
January 6, 2021: Minutes after a fiery speech by Trump filled with false claims and a call to his followers to march to the US Capitol and “fight like hell,” thousands broke into the Capitol as Congress gathered to certify Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Captured on live television, rioters attacked the Capitol and breached the Senate floor. (BTW: During the insurrection members of the mob, from inside the Congressional building went in search of V.P. Mike Pence, whom they sought to hang. On his first day in office in January 2025, the Pouty Pidgeon pardoned all those who were found guilty and sentenced for their criminal misdeeds.)
October 8, 2020: The FBI announced the arrests of 13 men suspected of orchestrating a domestic terror plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and otherwise using violence to overthrow the state government. Some labeled the attempt an example of stochastic terrorism, where violent rhetoric by prominent figures inspired the plot. 9 perpetrators were convicted and sent to prison. In June of this year, IT publicly stated that he was giving consideration to pardoning the imprisoned. This brought an immediate response from Gov. Whitmer. As of today, no pardons have been granted.
January 8, 2011: Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords suffered a serious brain injury when a man shot her point-blank in the head while she met with constituents outside a grocery store near Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed in the attack and 13 wounded. Giffords, a Democrat, was the sole target in the attack. The shooter pleaded guilty to 19 charges in exchange for the government not seeking the death penalty. He was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years, with no possibility of parole.

As of this morning (Monday, Sept. 15), the news stream has meandered in the direction of Tyler Robinson having lived “for at least a year” with a “transitioning” roommate. Most of these “reports” are coming out on social media, rather than legitimate news, sites. If indeed, Robinson’s roommate is/was transitioning has yet to be proven, and is really nothing more than a voyeuristic sidebar that proves little. (It does, however, bring up memories of the mesmerizing 1975 dark comedy Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. In the film [which was based upon a real-life incident that occurred in August 1972], Pacino plays “Sonny,” a Vietnam veteran turned bank robber determined to steal enough money for his partner Sal (John Cazale) to get a sex change operation.)

As shocking and depressing as the murder of Charlie Kirk is, the manner in which the White House has been treating it is even more so. Where virtually no words or expressions of sympathy, empathy or concern were coming forth from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time of the murders in Minnesota, the arson in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the hammer attack in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco or last week’s school shootings in Evergreen, Colorado, Mr. Kirk’s body was flown to his home upon Air Force Two, accompanied by Vice President J.D. Vance. POTUS immediately issued a proclamation stating: The flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, September 14, 2025. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same length of time at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

Moreover, POTUS announced that he would be awarding Charlie Kirk the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom . . . the same award which, over the years, has been bestowed upon such diverse people as:

Scientist Jane Goodall
Actor and Parkinson’s Disease activist Michael J. Fox
Former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former British P.M. Margaret Thatcher
TV’s Mr. Rogers
Walt Disney
Helen Keller
Journalist Edward R. Murrow
Musician Duke Ellington
The late Ambassador and New York Governor Averill Harriman

Precisely what Charlie Kirk accomplished in his brief life that merits him being included in this rarified group is beyond my ken. . . . but I’m not stupid. He is being groomed as a future icon for the post-IT era.

It has long been my habit to see what the weekly Torah reading was at the time of various historic (or history-grabbing) events. Sometimes what I learn sends chills down my spine. The murder of Charlie Kirk is one of those haunting times. For the week of his murder, פָּרָשָׂת הַשׁבוּעַ (parsashat ha-shavua . . . “The Weekly Torah Portion”) was none other than כִּי־תָבוֹא (ki tavo Deut. 26:1-29:8). In this reading, which prescribes various rituals that were to accompany the presentation of the first-fruits and tithe of the Sanctuary (among other topics) we find a brief section (27:15-28:14) in which a list of various “solemn dooms” and blessings are enumerated before the entire congregation of Israel. According to Tradition, the Levites stood round the Ark of the Covenant, in the valley, midway between Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal. They would first turn toward Gerizim and pronounce the Blessings, and the whole multitude would on the slopes answer Amen. Turning then to Mt. Ebal, they would pronounce the Dooms, followed by the same response.

In going over this section, I was stunned - but not overly surprised - to find that one of the dooms (or curses) spoke directly to Charlie Kirk. For in Chapter 27, verse 18, we read: אָר֕וּר מַשְׁגֶּ֥ה עִוֵּ֖ר בַּדָּ֑רֶךְ וְאָמַ֥ר כָּל־הָעָ֖ם אָמֵֽן “Cursed be the one who the causes the blind to go astray . . . and all the people responded AMEN!”

What in the world does this curse have to do with Charlie Kirk? If we take the words literally - “at face value” - likely nothing. Ah, but those who study (as oppose merely ‘read’) the Hebrew text, we have dozens - if not hundreds - of interpretations debated and discussed over hundreds upon hundreds of years. (Most regrettably, the vast majority or these commentaries are not in English, but rather in Aramaic and medieval rabbinic Hebrew). Well, it turns out that in this case, to be “blind” goes well beyond the scope of mere biology or optics; it can mean, variously, “unlettered,” “uneducated,” “naive,” “gullible,” “unwary,” and “exploitable” . . . among many, many other synonymous terms.

In other words, much of what the late Mr. Kirk was engaged in during his brief life was exploiting the “blind” - filling the holes, gaps, fears, and uncertainties with tons of untruths. That is to say convincing people who feel that life has cheated them by pounding into their heads that Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, aliens, LGBTQ+ people, non-Christians like Muslims, Jews and Hindus, etc. are all plotting to replace them . . . good white Christian males . . . with a “new-found” understanding of what is good and what is evil, of where the blessings and where the curses emanate from. This is, according to the Bible, a sin of gigantic proportion for which we must say “This is אָרוּר . . . cursed!”

It is both sad and frightening to report that much of what and who is/are MAGA, are committing this dooming sin on a daily basis: leading the blind astray by the power of their presence and a ton of ill-intentioned charisma.

The only blessing that comes to mind at this juncture is one which paraphrases Tevye the Milkman’s Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof: “May G-d bless and keep such as these . . . FAR AWAY FROM US.”

And let us all say “AMEN!”

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1,049: The Epstein Files . . . It's Likely NOT What You Think

September 05, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

The Epstein Files, Phase I: Issue or Smokescreen?

Way back in 1949. Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics to a topical ditty he called The Merry [Little] Minuet. Harnick, (1924-1923) who, in collaboration with composer Jerry Bock, wrote some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello,” started out life composing satirical songs made popular by the likes of “The Kingston Trio,” and the recently deceased Tom Lehrer (a.k.a. “The J.D. Salinger of Satire”). In a sense, Harnick was godfather to such musical satirists as “Weird Al” Yankovic, Randy Newman, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, John Prine (the “Mark Twain of songwriting”) and currently, Randy Rainbow. Harnick’s “Merry Minuet”, which lists many of the world’s political woes back in the post-WWII era, began with four introductory lines which were never recorded nor played in public:

There are days in my life when everything is dreary
I grow pessimistic, sad and world weary
But when I am fearful and tearfully upset
i always sing this MERRY LITTLE MINUET . . .

It goes on to proclaim:

There’s rioting in Africa
La, la la, la la, la la
They’re starving in Spain
La, la la, la la, la la
There’s hurricanes in Florida
La, la la, la la, la la
And Texas needs rain
La, la la, la la, la la

It never ceases to amaze me (who frequently performed this song at anti-war rallies in the 1960s) just how timeless it is . . . a hallmark of great satire. After several stanzas depicting the world’s woes, it ends with the lyric:

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away!

“So, what in the world,” I can hear you ask, “does all the above, have to do with “The Epstein Files” and our beloved “Pouter Pigeon?” Only this: misdirection. Satire, whether in prose or music, often works as a “double-reverse” - pointing out that that which at first seems clear-cut or obvious to “true believers” - is anything but.

Over the past several months, a wide array of polls have pretty conclusively shown that Americans are paying far more attention to the Epstein Files imbroglio than just about anything else. Goodness knows, it is frequently the lead story on the nightly news - perhaps with the exception of Fox. Signs indicate that upwards of 47% of those who voted for IT in 2024 disapprove of their leader’s handling of the Epstein case. Many journalists, op-ed writers and even political bloggers keep alive the notion that so many of ITs current spate of Executive Orders and midnight ramblings are meant to keep attention away from his handling of the Epstein controversy. . . such actions as:

· Moving the U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama

· Sending National Guard Troops into Washington, D.C. and strongly hinting that he would repeat this action in several “blue” metropolitan areas

· Expanding his immigration policy to give free rein to ICE agents to conduct enforcement actions in and around houses of worship and other “sensitive locations”

· Threatening to cut $126.4 million in disaster relief to California unless the state enacts voter ID laws

· Preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California over a transgender athlete’s participation in a sporting event.

· Urging SCOTUS to overturn a federal appeals court ruling which invalidated his most punishing global tariffs, thereby permitting him (not Congress) to regain control of his economic strategy, and

· Issuing an executive order directing the Justice Department to prosecute cases of flag burning that may incite violence. .

The above are really a smokescreen to divert attention away from the Epstein Files case, which includes having moved convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell from a highly restrictive federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida to a minimum-security prison for female offenders in Bryan Texas, and delivering a tranche of documents to the House Oversight Committee which then released them to the public . . . documents which had already been seen by the committee during the Biden Administration. And while there is certainly a “double reverse” at work in all this, it is highly likely that it’s not all the presidential actions keeping public attention away from the casus Epstein, but rather vice versa . . . using the salacious Epstein quagmire to keep public attention from what the regime is really doing: implementing the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S. Called Project 2025, this is the political initiative par excellence to utterly reshape our federal government and consolidate executive power in favor of far right-wing policies, all the while declawing Congress, gutting many executive branch offices and pretty much ignoring the Federal Courts (save SCOTUS when they do something Pouter Pigeon likes).

(n.b. It should be noted that in his first 8 months back in the White House, Felon47 has issued precisely 198 executive orders; that works out to 329 per year. By comparison, in the 8 years he served as POTUS, Barack Obama issued 275, which worked out to an average of only 35 per year, and in a little over 12 years, FDR issued 3,726 . . . 307 per year. Of course, FDR served as POTUS from the earliest days of the Depression, created the New Deal, and was Commander-in-Chief during WWII. Source: The American Presidency Project)

During the 2024 presidential campaign, then-candidate IT was repeatedly asked about Project 2025; what he knew about it, had he read it, and would he use it as a partial blueprint should he be elected in November. In early July 2024, he (or his ghost) wrote in a Truth Social post that he had “no idea who is behind Project 2025.” He went on to say that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” and that “anything they do, I wish them luck, but have nothing to do with them.” Unsurprisingly, he was, as per usual, lying through his teeth. Remember, this is the man who now claims that he barely knew Jeffrey Epstein . . . or anyone else he ever palled around with or campaigned for who then lost.

For a man who claimed little if any knowledge of Project 2025’s aims and goals . . . and derided the few he "had heard about” . . . it should come as no surprise that since January 20, 2025, the Pouter Pigeon and his merry band of enablers have already enacted 47% of the project’s most jarring, most authoritarian, objectives. Breaking down their “successes,” we find that the regime has fulfilled 100% of its 6 goals for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); 92% of its 13 objectives for the White House; 9 of its 21 goals (43%) for the CDC, 75% of its 11 objectives at the Department of State; 61% of its 18 objectives at the DOJ and 57% of 15 objectives at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

You may or may not agree with me about this “double reverse” - e.g. using the 24/7 Epstein Files news cycle to divert attention away from the evisceration of the oldest and most successful representative democracy in the history of the world. Hey, I have a pretty thick skin, and after having spent more than half-a-century participating in, and writing about politics, I understand there will always be those who think I just may have a point to share, and others who firmly believe I am nothing more than a tool of the old Weather Underground. Such is life.

But please consider . . . what if I am right? Are you sanguine with the Executive Branch taking away our rights and freedoms by force-feeding us a toxic diet of sex and sin?

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#1,048: Pouter Pigeon: The Art of the Kneel

August 20, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

Hope your week has provided you and yours with a few tranquil moments away from all the Sturm und Drang (German for “storm and stress”) of the disaster that was/is Alaska. Up until his departure for the summit, POTUS pledged that any peace between Russia and Ukraine had to be preceded by a cease fire. Indeed, in the days and weeks preceding his meeting with pale clothing moth (the literal translation of Putin’s KGB nickname) IT swore on a stack of Tolstoy’s War and Peace that without an immediate cessation of hostilities, Russia would face “severe consequences.” By the time he landed just outside of Anchorage, those two words had been stricken from his vocabulary.

In less than 24 hours, he had broken from a strategy agreed to with European allies for a cease fire, to adopting Putin’s preference for pursuing a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine’s ceding unconquered territory to Russia. And mind you, this wouldn’t be a swap; the Ukraine doesn’t occupy a single verst of Russian territory. Unless you forgot, it was Russia who attacked the land of Sholem Aleichem . . . not vice versa.

Unless one is a clone of The Who’s “Tommy” (e.g. “deaf dumb and blind”), one cannot give POTUS a grade above F+ for his summit with Vlad: about the only positive thing one can say is that when he left Alaska, it was still the 49th State of the Union. Goodness knows, it was just about the only thing he did not cede. In terms of how IT deals with Putin, it has long been the case that the farther away he is from him geographically, the more chest-thumpingly bellicose he sounds; but then, the closer he gets to him in physical reality (like on a tarmac, sharing a ride in The Beast, watching a military flyover or sitting opposite him behind closed doors), the more politically pliant he becomes. In other words, he morphs from being Mr. Art-of- the-Deal, into Comrade Art-of-the-Kneel.

The summit in Alaska had an eerie Neville Chamberlain-like quality about it, although Anchorage can’t hold a candle to Berchtesgaden in terms of physical quaintness. The choice of venue was significant: there are few places outside of Russia where Vlad can go without being arrested . . . I mean, ever since the man was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, he is subject to arrest in at least 125 countries around the world. But to invite him to Alaska, have that U.S. Air Force flyover, give him a red-carpet reception, a hardy handshake and a lift in The Beast . . . and then permit him to speak before POTUS at the post-meeting presser, is more than a שאַנדע (shanda . . . that’s Yiddish for shame or disgrace); it is an out-and-out פאַרלעגנהייט (farlegn’heyt . . . embarrassment. About the only thing missing was IT mouthing the words "peace for our time.” Appeasement is appeasement. Kneeling is kneeling.

(A brief digression: You might have wondered what, who and why the use of the term Pouter Pigeon in this week’s title means. Simply speaking, Pouter Pigeons are ornamental breeds of the rock dove, valued for their very unique appearance. There are countless varieties of them. Many ornithologists believe they were bred for a single purpose: to dazzle the eye of the beholder. The largest of them are about 16 inches high. They come in many colors and are likely descendants of the wild rock pigeon. Charles Darwin wrote about how distinct this breed was way back in 1868. What distinguishes all of them - regardless of size or color - is the nature of their crop: when excited, they throw out their chest and actually get a pouty look. In his novel Between Two Worlds, (the second of his 11 historical novels in the “Lanny Budd” series written between 1940 and 1953), author Upton Sinclair wrote about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose nickname was “Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon.” The Fascist leader was wont to thrust out both his chin and chest when making a point, and then talk on and on and on . . . sort of like you-know-who. And so, I’ve decided to append yet another nickname to #47: Pouter Pigeon; partly for his preferred public posture, and partly for his fascistic tendencies. Now, back to The Art of the Kneel. )

From Anchorage, Pouter Pigeon headed back to the people’s gilded palace, awaiting the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I cannot imagine what must have been going through POTUS’s muddled mind. on the flight back home. Perhaps “I’m one step closer to Putin . . . what-a-guy!” Or maybe, “Oops. Did I just lose the Nobel Peace Prize?” For a man who left D.C. proclaiming the need for an immediate cease-fire before even considering what any future security arrangement might entail, to one returning home with the belief that there is no need for a cease-fire and to just get on with the final next step, he sure would need to rehearse his best Pouter Pigeon punim. I wonder how much sleep he got the night before his meeting with President Zelenskyy and 7 deeply pro-Ukraine European leaders. I wonder if he dreamt about the last time the Ukrainian President had a confab with him in the Oval; about how V.P. Vontz and far-right reporter Brian Glenn repeatedly chided him for not “suiting up,” and how he treated the more diminutive man like a petulant child . . . going so far as to bring the tete-a-tete to an early, hasty ending. At that visit, he accused Zelenskyy of not showing enough gratitude for all that he - the Pouter Pigeon - had been doing on Ukraine’s behalf. It must have been a listless night.

It’s obvious that his last visit was on the mind of Zelenskyy as well. This time, his mode of attire was quite a bit more presidential, and he began by thanking POTUS for arranging the meeting with himself and 7 European leaders (United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte). All the leaders treated their host with respect, but nonetheless stood firm in their belief that a cease-fire was essential before any further discussion. Some differences did break through. Chancellor Merz of Germany argued for a cease-fire to be put in place before further negotiations with Russia, but was somewhat rebuffed by the Pouter Pigeon. Then too, President Macron of France suggested he was skeptical that Putin was dealing in good faith. “I am not convinced that President Putin also wants peace,” he told reporters at a news conference.

All the participants appeared to agree with a plan to arrange direct talks between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin (a “Trifab” in Pouter Pigeon’s lingo) while other issues are worked out, such as the precise nature of the security guarantees for Ukraine, and what if any territory Ukraine might be willing to cede. During the meeting, POTUS went to call Putin in order to bring him up to date. In boxing terms, that call was a “low blow” - against the rules of battle.

It is still unclear if Vlad would directly participate in talks with the Ukrainian president. When asked by the press whether the U .S. would send American troops to Ukraine as part of any peacekeeping effort, he did not answer the question directly, but said that the U.S. would “help them out.” “We’ll be involved,” Pouter Pigeon said.

Within hours after the meeting at the White House, Russia launched hundreds of drones and missiles, targeting energy and transport infrastructure into the industrial city of Kremenchuk in central Ukraine’s Poltava region. As of this writing, POTUS has yet to issue a statement about the renewed attack that left more than 1,400 residences and more than 100 businesses without power. Instead, he has been more fully engaged in sending individual states’ national guard troops to police some of the nation’s largest cities; arguing that he will do everything in his power to eliminate voting by mail (something which he himself has been doing for years); and blaming former President Biden for Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine more than 3 years ago. (We can assume that he either does not remember - or ever knew in the first place - that Russia has been trying to reassemble the former Soviet Union for more than a decade . . . including prime land in the Ukraine. He may not understand or fear Putin’s expansionist intentions; Europe does . . . which is why they so strongly back the Ukrainian cause).

Pouter Pigeon’s attention to all t these other issues are, of course, intended to keep public attention away from the ongoing debacle concerning release of the Epstein files . . . which could be a political IED in his path.

A suggestion Mr. President: quit dreaming about receiving that Nobel Peace Prize. It simply ain’t gonna happen; no way, no how. Hey, if Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama could win one, why not you? Among the thousands of reasons we could give, there’s only one that matters:

Teddy, Woodrow, Jimmy and Barack stood tall in their approach to the future. You are far, far more comfortable kneeling down.

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#1,047: Painfully, Angrifyingly Ironic

August 11, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

Every Monday and Thursday morning I go online, connect with an internet provider called CIRBI (Center for IRB Intelligence), and spend several intellectually challenging hours working with a wonderful group of medical specialists, research scientists and ethicists. Our task is rather clearcut and simple: vetting and improving on new, modified or continuing medical protocols and clinical trials . . . all with the purpose of making as sure as possible that the investigative drugs, devices or medical procedures before us are safe, show promise of success, and won’t cause undo harm to those men, women and children who volunteer to participate in medical trials. For every hour we are online, we spend on average at least 2 hours studying medical documents provided by pharmaceutical companies, university med schools, or independent laboratories. Out of all the many fields I engage in during any given week, this . . . belonging to and participating in an Investigational Review Board (IRB) . . . is, by far, the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding of them all. During any given teleconference, you might find us engaging in the study of anything between new chemotherapeutic drugs, advances in treating multiple sclerosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy, or the development of new flu or COVID vaccines for next year. Working alongside all these brilliant, deeply humane folks over the past dozen years has been . . . and continues to be . . . a deeply rewarding and humbling experience.

One of the clinical trials we were vetting just this past Thursday involved a phase 2a, randomized, observer-blind study to evaluate the immunogenicity and safety of a mRNA-based multivalent seasonal influenza vaccine in adult candidates 18 years of age and older. If you don’t understand what all this means, don’t worry; it won’t be on your final exam! What you do need to know and understand is that every flu or COVID “season,” requires a different vaccine. Why? Because viruses change (mutate) from season to season. This change is called antigenic drift, which consists of small changes in the genes of influenza (or COVID) viruses. In other words, this season’s anti-flu virus will simply be out of “style” next season; hence, a new vaccine is required.

In all the years I have served on various IRBs, rarely – if ever - have we engaged in political conversation. Heretofore, politicians and bureaucrats provided the tools to make research possible, while the medical community provided the science. I regret to say that this inviolable separation has again and again been seriously breached.

Today, we are increasingly seeing medical dictates being handed down from on high by people who have neither a scintilla of medical training nor knowledge. What these people do have is a political agenda. Case in point: our discussion on the new mRNA-based multivalent seasonal influenza vaccine. Just 2 days before this meeting, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his plan to cancel $550 million in funding mRNA vaccines being developed to counter viruses that cause the flu and COVID-19. You had better believe that as we discussed this new anti-flu virus, there was an air of frustration, anger and disbelief at the irony and stupidity of it all.

From where I sit, Secretary Kennedy knows as much about science, medicine, infectious diseases and virology as I do about Periplaneta americana (Linneaus) . . . namely, cockroaches. (Oh, and by the way, one of the most widespread fears in the world is called Katsaridaphobia": namely, the fear of cockroaches.)

In his statement announcing the drastic cut in virus research, Kennedy said his team had “reviewed the science, listened to the experts and acted. [T]he data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVIS and flu.” Precisely who these “experts” he consulted with is anybody’s guess. Last June RFK fired all 17 members of a committee that issues official government recommendations on immunizations, replacing them with people who have criticized the safety and efficacy of various vaccines. Kennedy also said his department was shifting the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.” What in the world this means is anyone’s guess. He also claimed that mRNA vaccines can help “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effect of the vaccine.” I gotta tell ya: from all I have read and learned over the years, viruses mutate regardless of whether or not vaccines exist for them.

In matter of plan fact, the development of mRNA vaccines to target COVID-19 was critical to helping slow down the pandemic and saving millions upon millions of lives. Peter Lurie, a former US food and Drug Administration (FDA) official told the BBC that Kennedy’s latest gambit would essentially force the US medical community to be in the position of “. . . turning its back on one of the most promising tools to fight the next pandemic.”

Kennedy has also expressed doubts about childhood vaccines, including those against polio and measles, that have been the mainstay of childhood immunizations for decades. Believe it or not, he has described the COVID shot as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”This is, of course, stuff and nonsense. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the first eight months of 2025 show the most cases of measles diagnosed since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, as well as being the diagnose cases in more than three decades. As of July 7, 2025, 1,281 cases of measles have been reported, more than the 1,274 cases reported in all of 2019. As for polio, which had all but been eliminated by the year 2000, it is once again on the rise in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to a report on NPR, “Global health officials say there's real concern that those numbers could balloon and that polio could reemerge in other countries as well in the wake of the dismantling of USAID” (United States Agency for International Development). It should be noted that since all-but dismantling USAID, the Regime has announced that it will burn nearly $10 million worth of contraception drugs and devices in Belgium. Are we to believe that this is the way patriotic politicians bring down the federal deficit? Or is it merely pandering to fundamentalists and holy rollers? It surely has nothing to do with science, humanness, or smart medical practice.

For years before becoming HHS secretary, RFK, Jr. spent much of his time championing the hairbrained (and overwhelmingly disproven) canard that vaccines - most notably MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) - cause autism as well as other disorders in children. There are various arguments that have been advanced about whether or not this is scientifically der emes (Yiddish for “the truth”). One of the most famous (and fatuous) arguments was advanced by the British gastroenterologist/fraudster Andrew Wakefield, back in 1998. In that year, he published an article in The Lancet (the British equivalent of JAMA), in which he claimed that through his own “exhaustive clinical research”, he had concluded that the MMR vaccine definitely caused autism. Six years after Wakefield’s article, a London Times reporter, Brian Deer, made some devastating allegations about Wakefield’s research to the editors of The Lancet. It turned out that Wakefield had been given $100,000 by a personal injury lawyer to write the article, in order that some the solicitor’s clients could sue the vaccine manufacturer in the British courts. When it was brought out at trial that five of the eight autistic children anonymized in Wakefield’s study were actually clients of Barr, the doc’s name was struck from the UK’s medical register, and The Lancet retracted the article. (In 2020, journalist Deer published an utterly fascinating narrative of the case entitled The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. His text begins with an epigraph taken from Walter Scott’s 1808 work Marmion: “O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive . . . “

Could Sir Walter have had a premonition that one day, a deceiver by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would come along to weave his own tangled web?

There is, I write with a mixture of both pain and anger, a deadly serious contagion in our midst; a contagion that no vaccine can staunch: to wit, the distrust - if not outright fear - of science and expertise. It is being forced upon society by both the self-professed “very stable genius” and members of his administration. This distrust has burrowed its way into several areas of government, from health care to trade, the economy, climate change and international relations. Social scientists call it denialism: I call it anti-intellectualism.

While anti-intellectualism and populism are nothing new in American life, there has hardly been an administration as seemingly committed to these worldviews. Anti-intellectualism is a general distrust of experts and intellectuals, the rejection of scientific thinking, education and the pursuit of knowledge. It can be expressed by dismissing art, history, literature and science as impractical or politically motivated. Remember back to the pandemic: Rather than allowing an extremely competent leader (Dr. Fauci) to provide Americans with prudent advice regarding the spread of COVID, IT suppressed the truth about the virus and the importance of wearing masks to contain the spread. The anti-intellectual efforts contributed to mass confusion and inefficiency in addressing the problem. Then too, remember back to the earliest days of the first IT go-around: one of the very first things he did was to announce America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. So far as he and his fellow puppets were told to believe, climate change was a conspiracy on the part of left-wing socialists and communists . . .

Historically, anti-intellectualism has been a tool of the right far more often than of the left. Historically, progressives have fought against big business, big banks, Wall Street and the Blue Bloods. Ironically, today, the elites (at least the billionaires amongst them) are in control, and a high percentage of the least educated are on their side . . . supporting policies and practices which are frequently far more harmful than beneficial.

Undoing all the angrifying, counterintuitive shots across the bow of America perpetrated in the name of MAGA cannot and will not be accomplished the day Pumpkin Punim is replaced by someone else. That will take a long, long time; perhaps a generation. Nonetheless, I do find a measure of solace in the knowledge that because he is such a raging narcissist, and it’s never dawned on him that he’s mortal, he hasn’t taken the time to groom a successor.

I urge all physicians, nurses, scientists, bio-and medical-ethicists as well as caretakers and caregivers to gather, clad in their scrubs, whites and wearing their stethoscopes in whatever cities, towns, or regions where they may work or reside, and let it be known that we are all bound by the same oath: “First, do no harm.”

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#1,046: After a Century, We Are Still Inheriting the Wind

August 03, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

Clarance Darrow & Wm. Jennings Bryan (1925)

Off and on for the past several months, I have been spending a lot of my “free time” (?!) boning up on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” which pitted renowned defense attorney Clarance Darrow, against the “Great Commoner” (and Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson) William Jennings Bryan. The case at hand, State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes, dealt with whether or not Scopes, a substitute high school science teacher and football coach at a public high school in Dayton, Tennessee, had violated the state’s recently passed Butler Act (which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible) by teaching his students Darwin’s theory of Evolution . . . despite the fact that he never mentioned Darwin by name, and was teaching out of a state-approved textbook entitled Civic Biology.

Tracy, Morgan & March in “Inherit the Wind” (1960)

My “boning up” on the case - one of several “trials of the century” I am covering in an 8-week course entitled “From Court Room to Cinema” also includes the showing of Stanely Kramer’s 1960 masterpiece Inherit the Wind, starring two cinematic warhorses: Spencer Tracy (as the Darrow character, now named Henry Drummond) and Frederic March (Matthew Harrison Brady). Included in the all-star cast are Gene Kelly (playing a fictionalized H.L. Mencken now named E.K. Hornbeck), Dick York as Bertram T. Cates (Scopes) and Harry Morgan as Judge Mel Coffey.

In preparing for this 2-part lecture, I have also read myself ragged. Among the books I have devoured are:

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson (1997)
Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial by Marvin Olasky (2005)
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet (2008) and the latest (and in my opinion the best):
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple (2025).

The more I have been researching and thinking about the era in which the Scopes trial took place – as well as the personalities, cultural, political, economic and religious trends of the time – the more I have been astonished at how many similarities there are. The late teens and 1920s were a time of increased political and moral bifurcation. It was a time of fear: the fear of immigrants, of moral relativism, of "commies and socialists” (on the part of smalltown and rural Americans) and fear of what Mencken referred to as the ‘booboisie’ . . . a swathe of the American public he characterized by what he termed “the banal ideas and cautious, stupid habits of mind of the great masses and inferior men. [sic]. He saw them as complacent, conforming, and susceptible to mass delusions. It was the age of barnstorming evangelists and radio preachers such as Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson and William Jennings Brian - people exemplified and satirized by Sinclair Lewis in novels like Babbitt, Main Street and Elmer Gantry. It was an age of Prohibition - except for those who had enough money to have it shipped across the Canadian border; a “Jazz Age” the young fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald who rolled their stockings, bobbed their hair, petted in rumble seats and always had a hip flask hidden on their person.

Ecstatic fundamentalism - in which the literal word of the “authorized” Holy Bible (the specific version likely depending on the church and pastor) - and the necessity of converting as many "heathens” as humanly (or divinely) possible, were keystones of the era. This necessity was perhaps best summed up by Wm. Jennings Bryan at a rally the night before the Scopes Trial was to begin, in which he told more than 3,000 devoted believers that "The Christian church should wake up and carry the gospel until everyone shall know the truth.”

Anti-Immigration and eugenics walked hand-in-hand to make sure that America would remain a white Christian nation. President Calvin Coolidge maintained, in his simple folksy way, that “America must be kept American.” There were too many immigrants, too many foreign-language speakers and foreign-language newspapers, and too much miscegenation. The “melting pot” (a term coined by the Anglo-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill for his 1908 Broadway hit of the same name) was, to millions, a false theory. While the eugenicists were planning to eliminate, through breeding the “bad” aspects of human character in order to generate a utopia populated by the “better” sort of humans, politicians and paramilitarists were doing their darndest to rid America of unwanted aliens . . . frequently through mass raids and illegal deportation. Combining Christian Nationalism with eugenics, well-known leftwing journalist McAlister Coleman satirically noted “The new front is the religious front, and there will be no peace until every last girl and boy in every last public school is taught to believe, with no mental equivocation, that the Fundamentalist whale swallowed a White, Nordic, Protestant Jonah.”

The prototype for our current Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was A. Mitchell Palmer, who served under President Woodrow Wilson. Palmer (1872-1936) was best-known for spearheading the eponymous raids whose sole purpose was to round up those he claimed were “reds” (i.e. anarchists, communists, socialists and other political radicals) and then deport them back to Russia . . . and generally without a trial. Most of those he and his troops rounded up were Jews from Eastern Europe. To do so, Palmer created a small division within the D.O.J. to gather intelligence on the radical threat and placed a young (24 years old) Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized every scrap of intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. The apex of Palmer’s time as Attorney General (and that which he believed just might get him elected POTUS in the 1920 election) was his “Soviet Ark” campaign of 1919 and 1920.

On June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which became the primary instrument for prosecuting opponents of American involvement in what was then known as “The Great War” (WWI). The law included a provision making it a crime to interfere with military operations, which included the draft. This provision was broadly interpreted to mean that criticizing the war was illegal because it would encourage young men not to cooperate with the draft. The Espionage Act was amended and strengthened, on May 16, 1918, by the Sedition Act, which in even broader terms also made it a crime to criticize the government. On December 21, 1919, the ship USAT Buford (renamed the “Soviet Ark”) left New York City, carrying 249 alleged alien radicals, the best-known of whom were birth-control advocate Emma Goldman and her longtime companion, the anarchist Alexander Berkman who, in July 1892 had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, general manager of the Homestead steel plant.

Indeed, the anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual, pro-Christian nationalist 1920s, are hauntingly similar to the age of IT and MAGA. Up until a week ago, I had not entertained any thought of turning my research on the Scopes “monkey trial” into a blog post. But that changed this past Monday, July 28, when I read in The Hill about a memo released that morning by The Regime that aimed to “protect religious expression among federal workers.” According to the 5-page memo, released by the Office of Management and Budget, federal workers "can attempt to persuade coworkers about why their religious beliefs are 'correct.’” The memo further outlined that such actions should not result in disciplinary or corrective action, including displaying in the office bibles, religious artwork, jewelry, posters displaying religious messages and other indicia of religion such as crosses, crucifixes and mezuzah. (Actually for sake of both consistency and correctness, the last word should have been 'mezuzot,’ the plural of mezuzah.)

The memo, which listed the OMB Director Scott Kupor (who is Jewish) as its primary author, also said one or more employees should be allowed to engage in individual or communal religious expressions and that employees can engage in conversations on religious topics “. . . including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature . . . . During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request,” the memo added. “An employee may invite another to worship at her church despite being belonging to a different faith.”

It seems to me that the Regime has dressed up the memo as a victory for religious freedom. But advocates for religious freedom of speech and even people of faith (myself included) see it as yet another step toward something far more sinister. As much as OPM, Scott Kupor, the task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” (headed by A.G. Bondi) and the White House faith office (headed by televangelist Pastor Paula White) is selling this as giving federal workers legal cover for talking about their religion, it is, in truth, the implementation of Christian Nationalism in this country. William Jennings Bryan would be proud.

The vast majority of the examples of permitted activities in the memo are related to Christianity, such as instructions that an employee may display crosses, rosary beads, or invite colleagues to church for an Easter service. There is one mention each of an employee displaying the Star of David and a mezuzah, symbols of Judaism. No other religions are mentioned. The memo’s focus is overwhelmingly on the ability of Christians to promote their religion without pushback, despite the fact that Christianity is already the dominant religion in the United States: 63% of American adults identify as Christian as of 2024, according to Pew Research. That’s because in the MAGA version of Christianity, the rights of white conservatives and IT supporters, who are likely to be evangelicals, are of the most importance and they’re the ones under attack.

We all should have seen this coming. Back on February 6 of this year, PumpkinPunim announced plans to establish the above referenced taskforce and a presidential commission to protect Christians from religious discrimination. The announcement came as he was addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, where he laid out multiple steps he was planning to take to address what he described as attacks on religious liberty and on Christians in particular. “While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares,” he said. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God.” At the same time, he announced that he was creating a White House Faith Office to be led by the Rev. Paula White, who had been serving as his “religious advisor” for several years.

As both a practicing and reasonable well-read Jew, this sort of thing halts me in my tracks and sends chills up my spine. For those of us who are Jewish, the very idea of someone - anyone - attempting to interest us in joining their religion is both frightening and anathema. We belong to a tribe that has rarely - if ever - engaged in proselytization. Our feeling has long been that “Judaism is the best religion in the world . . . for Jews.” We simply have too many collective historic memories of forced conversions. It has happened to the Children of Israel time and time again in our past, and by G-d, we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.

On Tuesday August 12, beginning at 2:30, I will be delivering a 2-hour lecture on the Scopes Trial at Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter. 1 week later (August 19), I will be showing the 1960 film Inherit the Wind in its entirety. On Thursday August 14 and 21, I will be delivering the same lecture and film at the FAU’s Boca Raton Campus beginning at 3:00. If you are interested, please contact FAU’s Lifelong Learning Division.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from a verse found in the Biblical book Proverbs (11:29). In Hebrew it reads:

עֹכֵ֣ר בֵּ֭יתוֹ יִנְחַל־ר֑וּחַ
(aykhayr baytoe, yin-na-kha-ruakh), which translates to say:
”The one who brings trouble on his house will inherit the wind.”

The classic commentary understands this to mean that “A fool who spends his/her life trying to be in charge of everything and everyone in his/her life will end up troubling those who are closest, and at the end of life, will have nothing to show for it. It was just as true in the time of King Solomon (who history tells us was the author of Proverbs) as it was in the time of William Jennings Bryan and A. Mitchell Palmer who sought to determine who was a worthwhile human being, what should be taught and in what manner should we pray until our very time . . . when the forces of plutocracy are once again enacting the sins of the past.

President Wilson said that his motivation was to “Make the world safe for democracy.” I fear that the current regime, to borrow a pun from H.L. Mencken, unknowingly seeks nothing more than to “Make the world safe for hypocrisy.”

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categories / The Coming Autocracy, Religion and Politics

#1,045: Zelig Eshhar: A Giant Amongst Us

July 27, 2025 / Kurt F. Stone

You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for British writers Aldous Huxley (best known for Brave New World and The Doors of Perception) and C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters and his 7-volume The Chronicles of Narnia). Not because they were unknown, unsuccessful or unread, for such is certainly not the case. Both men sold tons of books, saw many of them turned into motion pictures, and one - Huxley - was honored with having a seminal rock group (The Doors) take its name from one of his books by a grateful a turned-on fan named Jim Morrison.

The reason I feel sorry for them is pretty much the reason I feel badly for the recently-deceased Israeli Immunologist Zelig Eshhar. “Who in the hell is Zelig Eshhar?” I can hear you ask, “ . . . and what does he have in common with two British authors?” The answer to the first part of the question forms the basis of this week’s post; the answer to the second part is pretty simple. Both Huxley and Lewis had the bad fortune of passing away on November 22, 1963: the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. On just about any day ranging from, say, April 12, 1945 (the death of FDR) to June 5, 1968 (the day RFK was assassinated in Los Angeles), Huxley’s and Lewis’ deaths would no doubt have been frontpage-above-the-fold headlines, all across the globe. But no: their passing barely received notice on the back page; that which Grandpa Doc would have playfully referred to as being “beneath the truss ads on page 97.”

Zelig Eshhar, PhD, had the bad luck to pass away during a month in which more than a half-dozen celebrities shuffled off this mortal coil; the list includes such well-known people as:

The “Prince of Darkness,” John Michael “Ozzie Osbourne”,
Singer Concetta Rose Maria Franconero (Connie Francis),
WWE wrestling legend Terry Gene Bollea (aka “Hulk Hogan”),
Cosby Show alum Malcolm Jamal Warner,
Jazz legend Chuck Mangione,
Composer Lalo Schifrin (“Mission Impossible”),
60’s teen idol Robert Cabot “Bobby” Sherman,
Brian Wilson, the front man for “The Beach Boys” and
M*A*S*H actress Loretta Swit, aka “Hot Lips Houlihan.”

Whereas the vast majority of people have no problem identifying the celebrities listed above, most folks - with the possible exception of Epidemiologists, Immunologists, Oncologists or those who engage in Medical Ethics - have the slightest idea of who Zelig (Lipka) Eshhar was. And while Professor Eshhar’s contributions to society were neither entertaining, hummable nor particularly understandable, they did affect the lives of millions upon millions of people all over the world . . . and perhaps for the rest of time.

So just who was this man, and why do I refer to him as a “giant amongst us?”

Zelig Lipka was born on Feb. 25, 1941, in Petah Tikva (Hebrew for Door of Hope), in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, and grew up in Rehovot (Hebrew for Wide Expanses). His parents were both from Poland; his father, Jacob, was a truck driver who brought agricultural products to market, while his mother, Sarah, was a teacher. At age 18, Zelig, (now named Eshhar [אשחר], Hebrew for the Buckthorn plant, which is found all over northern Israel) enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) and joined a brigade on a kibbutz. After his military service he stayed on at his kibbutz, where he started his scientific career as a beekeeper.

Between 1963 and 1968 Eshhar earned his B.A. and M.A. in biochemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a PhD in chemical immunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. His doctoral dissertation was on the role of T-cells. (T cells are a type of white blood cell called lymphocytes. They help the body’s immune system fight germs and protect us from disease. There are two main types: Cytotoxic T cells destroy infected cells. Helper T cells send signals that direct other immune cells to fight infection.) Dr. Eshhar went on to study at Harvard Medical School under Baruj Benacerraf, who would share the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery that the strength of an individual’s immune response is controlled by a group of genes.

While at Harvard, Dr. Eshhar began to focus on cancer as a target for T-cells. In an interview he gave to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2017, Dr. Eshhar was quoted as saying “Benacerraf discovered a distinctive molecule that characterizes the cancer cells, and he wanted to get a handle on it. That was my task, and I gained recognition when I succeeded because no one had done it previously.”

After years of doing research at both Harvard (Dana Farber) and the National Institutes for health, Dr. Eshhar returned to the Weizmann Institute. In his research, Dr. Eshhar learned that by enlisting the help of “a receptor that sits on the T-cell and binds with molecules of the foreign invader (e.g. a cancer cell), the binding activates the T-cell’s killer mechanism, which eradicates the alien cell. Eradication occurs, for example, when a virus invades a body cell.”

T-cells and antibodies in patients and animals are part of the immune system, capable of distinguishing tumor cells from normal cells. These cells, however, are not enough to fight the cancer cells, which manage to “evade and avoid them,” as Dr. Eshhar explained it. The end result is cancer and an immune system that is not efficient enough to thwart it.

Dr. Eshhar’s eureka moment came when he decided to combine the antibodies with the T-cells, he said: “Two are better than one.”

Dr. Eshhar turned what had been a theory into a reality. He wound up extracting the T-cells and genetically engineering them to include a molecule that has the cancer recognition skills of both the antibodies and the T-cells. The modified T-cells are then injected into patients.

In making this combination, he was able to produce a hybrid known as a “chimeric antigen receptor T-cell . . . the short version of which is “CAR-T”, which essentially grabs onto the antigens (proteins) that appear on cancer cells. When reintroduced in to the bloodstream of a subject who has a blood cancer (such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma or multiple myeloma) these newly-created T-cells have the ability to target and destroy cancer cells. To date, the process has shown itself to be extremely effective.

According to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “Eshhar’s invention was no minor tweak in the lab; it was a conceptual leap. The notion that these genetically engineered immune cells could be re-engineered to home in on cancer,transformed what once seemed a distant vision into an imminent reality.” Dr. Gottlieb, (himself a survivor of Hodgkin’s Disease) currently sits on the board of on of the American Enterprise Institute and various pharmaceutical companies. Next year, HarperCollins will be publishing his new book, “The Miracle Century: Making Sense of the Cell Therapy Revolution” in which he writes extensively about Dr. Eshhar and the creation of CAR-T therapy. I for one am excited about reading his book.

Ever humorously humble, when asked to describe himself during an interview, he answered, simply: “I am a PhD and a doctor of mice.” When asked to estimate how much money he thought he might make from selling the rights to his patent for CAR-T therapy, he flatly stated: “I am not a banker and I don’t know the laws,” I don’t know how much I will get. I prefer not to relate to this. Research is what interests me, to improve the treatment and make it more effective.”

May Zelig Eshhar’s memory be a blessing for all those who worked with him and all those who will find hope and health in the future.

Indeed, there has been a giant amongst us . . .

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categories / The Giants Amongst Us

:גם זה יעבורTHIS TOO SHALL PASS!

:גם זה יעבור
THIS TOO SHALL PASS!