A Problem-Solver’s Take on Unlawful Migration

If you really wanted to solve it, how would you tackle the problem of massive unlawful immigration ? It’s not hard to conceive some pretty effective practical means, but they wouldn’t look anything like what’s going on now. Read on.

To solve a problem, the first you must see it clearly. That means looking honestly at real causes and effects.

First, the causes. Once upon a time, our nation was a “shining city on a hill.” Know who said that? It wasn’t some half-forgotten figure from our Founding. It was Ronald Reagan, in 1980, in his pre-election speech.

And then it was true. We had had a little problem with steep inflation, which our Fed eventually solved with ultra-high interest rates. But we were first or near-first in every practical measure of a nation’s success that you could take at that time: GDP, GDP per capita, scientific research (both government-sponsored and private), innovation, new-enterprise formation, farming abundance, and the practical rollout of innovative products for the benefit of the average Joe and Mary. We were even near the top in longevity and health, despite diets heavy in fat and sugar and a whole lot more smokers than we have today. We spent more than double on health care per capita compared to most advanced nations.

Not only was Ronald Reagan right. He was generous. The old Irish charmer wanted to share the benefits of our good life with, in Emma Lazarus’ words, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free[.]” (That’s part of her poem at the base of our Statute of Liberty.)

Reagan then had the full support of his Republican Party (and it was his, enthusiastically) . Why? The GOP was then, unambiguously, the “party of business.” And business, including big farming, wanted cheap labor.

Who could better provide good, diligent cheap labor than people who had crossed the snake-infested Darien Gap and walked, hitchhiked or rode the rails 1,500 miles to our Southern Borden and then hiked through the burning Sonoran Desert just to get here? Who better than workers who did all that to be free from drug cartels, warring gangs, demagogic and brutal left-wing (and sometimes right-wing) dictators, and corrupt and brutal police? Workers who had done all that just for a shot at a life free from arbitrary violence were not about to complain of low wages, cramped quarters and hard working conditions.

Believe it or not, it was Ronald Reagan, not Joe Biden, who opened the floodgates, and with the full, bipartisan support of Congress. Believe it or not, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (also called the Sampson-Mazzoli Act), which Reagan sponsored and pushed through Congress [start clip timer at 1:17], was the very last federal statute for comprehensive immigration reform. It allowed migrants who could prove they had lived here since before January 1, 1982, to seek temporary legal status and to apply for green cards after eighteen months. And here is how Reagan supported this law against charges that it constituted “amnesty” and defended his goal of holding employers who encourage illegal immigration to account.

Since that time, Congress has never addressed the problem of unlawful immigration seriously. Prominent among many reasons was that the GOP wanted two contradictory things. Business, which was the GOP’s traditional constituency, wanted the cheap, eager, docile labor that immigrants from “shithole” countries bring. But the GOP also wanted to expand its “base” among workers. What better way to do that than to claim, loudly and repeatedly, that the unlawful immigrants were not just breaking the law in entering; they were also taking away your job and lowering your wages by increasing the supply of labor.

Politically, this was a win-win. Business got its cheap labor. And workers got the demagogic promise of more jobs and better pay if only the GOP could stem the flow of cheap immigrant labor that made its oligarchs and rich business patrons richer.

How this happened is just as important. Reagan and Congress had been aware that the “underdeveloped” world was a rough and often cruel place. They were also aware that our global reputation as “the city on a hill” was what would later prove to have been its peak.

So they knew they didn’t have to do anything or spend any of their precious money to attract foreign workers. All they had to do was open the doors a crack, and the poor world’s hopeful, eager, strongest, healthiest and smartest migrants from “shithole” countries would trek thousands of miles to and across our Southern borders and become part of our national cheap-labor force.

That’s exactly what happened. That’s how we got some eleven million undocumented immigrants living among us and doing our toughest, dirtiest, hardest and most dangerous work on the cheap.

Donald Trump has claimed that these eager workers come from foreign jails and insane asylums and are murderers, rapists and violent criminals. Maybe there are a few among them like that. But the vast majority are honest workers, and, if the truth be told, more willing to put up with low wages, substandard housing, and poor working conditions than American citizens.

How do I know? First of all, Ronald Reagan himself, in the video clip linked above, chided employers for exploiting undocumented immigrants as cheap labor and wanted to sanction those that do. Second, if even a large fraction of our millions of undocumented laborers were as Trump lied, the business leaders who control the GOP by their huge donations would have closed the floodgates long ago. Anyway, does the average inmate of a jail or insane-asylum have what it takes to walk across the Darien Gap, then 1,500 miles to the US border, and then through the deadly the Sonoran Desert to a place of steady employment, let alone to get and hold a demanding job? I don’t think so.

Trump’s lies contradict the facts of the case. The bulk of the millions of undocumented immigrants who have come to us since 1986 are and have been working hard and quietly, becoming part of our communities, and raising and educating their children for a better life. Criminals and lunatics, by and large, don’t do that.

So there you have the problem, in its full glory. We have some eleven million undocumented immigrants inside our country, the overwhelming majority of whom have helped build our nation, are closely integrated into our communities, and have children and grandchildren who are lawful citizens by virtue of our Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. More than that: they work hard and don’t complain, and they can’t organize lest they be deported. Think maybe that’s precisely what the GOP’s business wing wanted and still wants?

But this essay is not about blame. Since 1986, there’s been enough finger-pointing on this issue to last our entire species for several centuries. We need solutions, not blame. If we want to slow or stem the flow of undocumented immigrants—and that’s an entirely reasonable goal—there are practical ways to do it, and the most effective ones don’t rely on violence or cruelty.

We certainly don’t have to leave the floodgates open forever. But how do we close them?

First, we have to make up our minds. Do we really want to close the floodgates entirely, or just weed out the worst?

Trump claims (inconsistently) that his goal is to kick out only the criminals, “the worst of the worst.” But that’s not what he’s done. You don’t identify, let alone deport, criminals by throwing ICE into immigrant communities to pick up, at random, everyone who looks or sounds foreign (especially Hispanic!) and who doesn’t happen to have a green card or passport on his or her person when suddenly nabbed by surprise. That’s cruel and random terror, not effective policing.

It would be easy to deport criminals if that were the GOP’s real goal. Just go through the public databases of convicted, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated criminals in each state. (We might need some supervening federal legislation to countermand privacy laws for this.) Pick out every single name that even looks foreign. Then run that name through the databases of green-card and passport holders, and run it again through every state’s birth records to exclude birthright citizens who don’t have passports. Then, if you are just a tad kind, you can exclude perpetrators of misdemeanors, particularly older ones, and go after only the recent baddies, including perpetrators of violent or otherwise heinous felonies.

This would not be racial or ethnic “profiling.” Why not? None of it would appear on the streets or directly affect the individuals “profiled.” It would have no consequence for anyone who was not a violent or heinous felon. Innocent people would not even know it had been done: the records of the mostly-computerized culling could be kept a deep secret revealed only to high-level federal officials with a need to know.

Voilá. You’ve deported all the worst of the worst, and you’ve nabbed them quietly by surprise, without disrupting innocent homes, workplaces and communities, and without terrorizing a lot of totally innocent people. Why couldn’t anyone in our federal administration think of that? Could it be that their goal was inciting rage and terror among voters, and not solving the problem?

The bigger problem is what to do about the flood of unlawful migrants who are not criminals. For that, we have to have a policy and understand what caused the problem.

The vast majority of unlawful migrants come in initially under our asylum laws. They come in as refugees, with a legal obligation to go to court to review their claims for asylum. Those claims have to be based on facts that show a reasonable fear of harm or persecution in their countries of origin from which they fled.

To apply that standard, an immigration judge has to review the alleged facts and the evidence for them. So a very easy way to “fine tune” the flow of immigrants seeking asylum would be to raise the bar and specify a higher standard for the facts that must be shown. This could be done by fine-tuning our asylum laws, which Congress has failed to do for four decades.

But there’s an even greater problem today. We don’t have nearly enough immigration judges to review and rule on asylum claims in anything like a timely manner. So the average asylum claimant has to wait years to have his or her asylum claim judged. In the meantime, he or she gets a job, secures housing, melts into a working community, and maybe has children, who automatically become birthright citizens. This is precisely how the vast bulk of our unlawful residents have grown to number some eleven million.

It’s hard even to slow the flow by making would-be migrants wait outside our borders to have their asylum claims judged. If they go back to their countries of origin, they are subject to the same “shithole” government (or criminal activity not stopped by it) that made them leave in the first place. And if they wait in a third country (mostly, Mexico) they are preyed upon by criminals and leeches, including those who “help” them on their way for exorbitant fees.

There are many possible solutions to this problem. We could let all present non-criminal unlawful residents stay and shut the door to new refugees entirely. We could slow the flow of new refugees by raising the standards for asylum. We could declare a past cutoff date, require all undocumented residents to declare and prove their actual dates of entry, and deport all those who came after the cutoff date. (This is pretty much what Reagan’s 1986 law did.) Except for the first, each of these solutions would require hiring many more immigration judges, so that we could judge asylum claims promptly, before new refugees migrate internally to communities and become part of them or, for those already here, judge their dates of entry.

All these solutions are “legitimate.” All could be made effective without sending masked ICE agents into the streets of mostly “blue” cities to arrest suspects at random, break their car windows (or their bones!), manhandle them, and generally treat them inhumanely.

The violence and cruelty of Trump’s ICE has become a feature, not a bug, of his immigration regime. But it’s completely unnecessary to realize the goals of any of these reasonable alternatives. As any alternative hit the news and became known worldwide, the incentive to immigrate and the immigration flow would drop accordingly.

How do we know? Even before Trump’s return to office, Joe Biden’s change in asylum policy and a dramatically smaller quota for refugees caused the number of border encounters with undocumented migrants to drop sharply.

Why was this so? The most important question any would-be undocumented migrant ever asks is “What are my chances of getting in?” Migrants ask this question before they start their long journey and at every step along it. Change the answer, and you will change the flow, without resorting to violence or cruelty.

As for the mythical Wall, there is no wall so high or dug so deep that migrants can’t climb over it or tunnel under it. If nothing else, the mechanized tunnels that drug cartels have dug, maintained and sometimes used for years to import illegal drugs show that.

In realistic practice, the best way to slow the flow is to have a restrictive policy, maintain it consistently in practice, and publicize the hell out of it. But that only works if the policy is reasonable and consistently implemented. Cruelty is unnecessary and ineffective. After all, the vast majority of refugees are used to cruelty; that’s why they’re seeking a better life.

So there you have it. In theory, restricting, adjusting and even shutting down the flow of migrants into our country is possible. So is deporting whatever fraction of undocumented migrants already here that we think we want to leave. All we have to do is decide how many of them we want to keep, of what kinds (legitimate asylum, h-1bs, seasonal farm workers, millionaires, high-value specialists, etc.), and under what circumstances. Then we must pass laws, adopt regulations and hire the personnel (including immigration judges, counselors, border guards and detention agents) to implement that policy.

Throwing a bunch of militarized ICE agents into our cities, let alone untrained-for-immigration soldiers or National Guard troops, is a child’s non-solution to a serious problem. And throwing them only into “blue” cities is a deliberate non-solution, if only because “red” states have as many or more low-skilled jobs suitable for migrants than “blue” ones.

So why haven’t we done what it takes? Why haven’t we revised our immigration laws in forty years? I would argue that, in all that time since Reagan, the GOP has never been serious about finding a solution.

Opening the floodgates to cheap labor, docile because undocumented, while demagoguing the migrants to gain the votes of native American workers, may have seemed a fine political solution. After all, it has made the GOP what it is today, a viable political party among the working class, despite its cutting health-care and day care to give tax breaks to billionaires and its increasing tolerance for bigotry among our increasingly diverse work force.

But it’s not a serious practical solution. Self-contradictory “solutions” seldom work. What we need is a rational consensus on how much immigration we should have, who (if any) we should deport, and practical-common sense laws and restrictions to achieve those levels. We are not likely to get them with a major party bent on perpetuating a self-contradictory, partly demagogic policy and a President suffering from malignant narcissism (with overtones of paranoia and fanstasies of retribution) and increasingly obvious senile dementia.

If you crave a kinder, gentler and more rational era, watch the two Reagan clips linked above in full, starting the longer one at 1:17.   Note the esteem, if not love, that Reagan enjoyed from members of both parties, and study his warning employers against promoting unlawful immigration.

 

MLK and Saving our Republic in 23 Days

Today is MLK Day 2026. We honor the memory of one of our nation’s greatest leaders ever, who never won an election or earned military brass. Perhaps that intellectual “independence” made him one of our nation’s greatest thinkers ever.

I love King’s memory. I can summon at will the soothing sound of his preternaturally calm, sonorous voice. I can hear him advocating powerfully for “Jobs and Freedom” at the March on Washington in summer 1963. I can marvel at his having predicted, with a brilliant philosopher’s keen insight, exactly what horrors our misguided War in Vietnam would wreak on our nation’s social and economic progress, freedom and equality. (He did this just a year before he was gunned down.) I can miss him as the most noble and selfless of the three victims of assassination in the hellish five years 1963-1968, whose killing by gunfire changed our nation and our world forever, and not for the better.

MLK was a great man in part because he had his head in the clouds and his feet firmly planted on the ground. He was not just a great thinker and a miraculous motivator. He was, at his core, an immensely practical man. Like Gandhi and Mandela, he understood how positive change can come from empathy, understanding and non-violent public pressure. He understood, as much as any of the three, how vital it is to act decisively and at the right time.

That’s why I hope he would forgive me for spending some ink on this, his day, to write again about a practical means to save our Republic and our society from imminent destruction.

We adopted our Constitution’s ponderous and politically fraught impeachment proceedings in 1791. In contrast, we ratified Amendment 25 in 1967, at the height of the Cold War, and we designed it for speed. Advocates for it mentioned all of the following: (1) the need for a quick transition to maintain our nuclear deterrent, (2) the 1963 assassination of JFK, which left the office of vice-president unfilled for fourteen months, (3) Ike’s major heart attack in 1955, followed by abdominal surgery and a stroke, (4) Woodrow Wilson’s near-total incapacitation by a stroke while in office for the final eighteen months of his term, during which his unelected wife ran most of the government; and (5) James A. Garfield’s unconsciousness due to a stroke, for 80 in 1881 days before he died.

In the name of alacrity, Amendment 25 allows the Vice President to remove the President from office and assume the post of acting President immediately, merely by giving, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, . . . [a] written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unlike the ponderous impeachment process, declared in 1791, Amendment 25 does not require an indictment by the House and conviction by the Senate after trial-like procedures, let alone parsing whatever, in today’s vastly different world, constitutes “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Nor does Amendment 25 require a court or any other formal body to decide whether Donald Trump’s increasing senile dementia, malignant narcissism and/or other derangements constitute an “inability” as did the strokes, comas, heart attacks, major surgeries, and consequent failures of consciousness of past presidents. All Amendment 25 requires is that the Vice President and a majority of executive officers declare in writing the President’s “inability” to carry on his duties. If the President objects by his own written declaration, the decision goes to Congress, which must uphold the Vice President’s declaration of inability by a two-thirds vote in both Houses, else it fails.

Congress must decide within 23 days of the Vice President’s declaration—48 hours for notification plus 21 days for action. And its decision is not restrained by legal niceties or procedures; it can be as practical or political as reality demands. Thus Amendment 25 recognizes and incorporates modern realities: the world’s still most indispensable nation cannot remain practically paralyzed by failures of flesh for even as long as a month.

Would JD Vance’s declaration of Trump’s “inability” garner the support of a majority of Trump’s own Cabinet? The probability is growing by the minute, as Cabinet members see, at close hand, hard evidence of Trump’s “inability.” The evidence includes rambling, incoherent tirades, a constant, needy focus on himself, his inability to express a coherent thought other than his own greatness and his need for retribution against perceived opponents, and his willingness to kill people, both abroad and in our homeland, for vague and often incoherent objectives. Cabinet members’ perceptions of “inability” grow also as each sees the probability of having freer rein, under JD Vance as president, to make coherent and effective policy more to his or her own liking.

Congress may be a tougher nut to crack. Republican members are more distant from Trump and his madness than Cabinet members. To save their political skins, many have developed a reflexive subservience that may take time to reconsider. A massive Democratic landslide in this year’s midterm elections may be needed to wake them up.

As for JD Vance as President, it’s difficult to predict what he might do as acting President. But he’s a mere 41 years old, far from senility. His wife is of Indian heritage and a practicing Hindi, suggesting at least that he is not, like Trump and legions of the MAGA faithful, a white or Christian supremacist. Vance is also a graduate of Yale Law School with an apparently good record, while Trump has taken extraordinary measures to ensure that his college grades and standardized test scores remain secret.

MLK knew how to take a calculated risk. He did so, with his own life and body, in organizing and leading the famous “March for Freedom” across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He also took a risk, with extraordinary results, in organizing the 1963 March on Washington and making his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. His whole life proved to be a calculated risk, ending with his own assassination (which he himself had predicted) in 1968.

As I love Dr. King’s memory, I believe he would take the calculated risk of invoking Amendment 25. Of course he would choose the most auspicious time, probably waiting for a Democratic victory in the midterms.

But I have high confidence that he would not fail to use this clear constitutional mechanism to remove a chief executive who is demonstrably destroying what’s left of the Western Enlightenment, along with our nation’s commitment to racial and ethnic equality, our international prestige and support, our once-globe-leading economy, our last remaining chance to stem planetary heating, and our prospects of saving our allies, including Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Europe, from the ravages of emboldened Russia, China and Iran.

Our Right-Wing “Intellectuals” and Trump’s Disabilities

As someone who pretty much lives in my head, I’ve always had a fascination with right-wing “intellectuals.” I read almost every column that Ross Douthat publishes, and a lot more of George Will’s work product than I view as worthwhile after reading.

Douthat is by far the most interesting. He uses lots of abstract words. He uses them not just correctly, but aptly. Sometimes his metaphors or clever use of language makes me laugh out loud. He’s by far the better writer of the two. Reading his columns can be like watching a skilled acrobat defy gravity (and often common sense!) and come out whole.

Douhat’s piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Opinion section is like that. In it, he explains, in great detail, how Trump has alternatively adopted, ignored or eviscerated the fundamentals of “conservative” ideology, in many ways, in his speeches, tweets, threats, promises and actions.

Douthat cites chapter and verse in geopolitics, foreign policy, economic policy, nationalism, and egalitarian policy (or its opposite). Aptly and succinctly, he describes how Trump has vacillated among opposing brands of so-called “conservative” thinking, and sometimes their antitheses, leaving his supporters, detractors and much of the world confused and even stunned. Douthat steps right up to the line of calling this wild inconsistency a “strategy” but never quite crosses it.

The column’s effect on me was profound. Overall, it seemed an attempt to place Trump in the framework of transformational presidents like FDR and Reagan. As such, it seemed the most subtle and therefore persuasive attempt to normalize, if not deify, Trump that I have ever read. I put the Opinion section down and began to wonder whether Douthat himself had gone mad.

George Will, it seems, has gone in exactly the opposite direction. In a series of recent YouTube streaming podcasts, he rants on, speaking rapidly, about what he views (without using that word) as a subtle revolution among Republican Senators and government officials who are, in his view, resisting Trump quietly and procedurally. This resistance, Will says, appears privately, in failing to publicly approve (rather than disapprove) Executive actions, silence (rather than comment, positive or otherwise) on Trump’s repeated reliance on ambiguous or non-existent emergency powers, and requests for Trump’s underlings to provide documents and answers (many of which, and many deadlines for which, are ignored). To Will, all these things are signs of a subtle institutional resistance to Trump which, precisely because it is subtle and quite (if not entirely) mute, will or must prevail in time.

Will’s remarkable podcasts struck me hard. They consisted almost entirely of what David Brooks once described—in a column many years ago about an unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee’s legal writing—as “vapid abstractions.” The abstractions were well-expressed, catchy even, as Will prided himself on short sentences. Some were even thought provoking. But nowhere in his speaking did I find so much as a single fact, let alone a tangible one.

I watched two roughly 25-minute podcasts, one about Mitch McConnell’s alleged rebellion in the Senate, the other about general institutional resistance, without hearing a single reportable fact about what McConnell actually said or did or who or what was behind this alleged quiet senatorial resistance. The closest Will came to reciting actual facts was quoting, without attribution, a few phrases from an unnamed memorandum (or notes in its margins) by unnamed senate staffers questioning the Trump White House’s failing to respond to requests for information or documents, or failing to meet deadlines for responding.

How this weak tea signaled an internal revolt, let alone a viable opposition strategy, eluded me. The image that came to mind was a cadre of anonymous accountants with green eyeshades striding boldly out to meet a group of anonymized ICE agents with their identities obscured, body armor, batons, tear gas, and handguns. I wondered whether Will knows what a fact is (or thinks facts irrelevant) and whether he has ever held so much as a screwdriver in his hand.

Doubthat’s column is undoubtedly a finer example of English prose and deeper thinking. It could be read in a course on English, writing, political science or history to spark discussions so deep that no AI could ever hope to duplicate them. Will’s podcast, however, had one signal advantage: a clear implication, repeatedly made, that what Trump is doing with his increasingly strident invocation of emergency powers and increasing state violence at home and abroad is neither right nor sustainable.

Both columns, however, failed even to identify a possible outcome from the things they deplore. Could it be that Trump has no coherent strategy whatsoever but is operating entirely on whim, solely in a deranged quest for self-aggrandizement, self-gratification, and personal gain? Could both columns, in different ways, validate the rising chorus of qualified professionals who see Trump as personifying malignant narcissism and suffering from rapidly advancing senile dementia much like that which drove Joe Biden from office, but getting visibly worse? Could it be that Trump, in ways that would make us recoil if he were merely the CEO of a profitable company, is functionally insane?

That appears to be the professional conclusion of John Gartner, a clinical psychologist who has been much publicized lately. He has concluded that Trump: (1) is a malignant narcissist who meets the four-part objective test for that disorder; (2) is suffering from rapidly advancing senile dementia (again, according to objective, clearly articulated criteria and based on Trump’s many publicized words and actions); (3) due to his disabilities, is unlikely complete his second term; and (4) does not fall under the purported “rules” against “remote” diagnoses of psychological disorders, which anyway are not held by all relevant professional associations, and which do not logically apply here, where so much of the subject’s relevant behavior has been widely recorded and publicized. (The best and most succinct podcast of Gartner’s conclusions on these points can be found on YouTube streaming TV by searching for “John Gartner Trump Times Radio.” I could not find an online Internet link to this podcast, but there are a number of longer and more diffuse interviews of John Gartner produced by The Daily Beast and other online news outlets.)

So, as we watch Trump’s malignant narcissism and mental degeneration get worse, we won’t get useful hints, let alone a valid clinical diagnosis, from the likes of Douthat or Will. We will probably get the first real hint from Vice President J.D. Vance. He rose, rocket-like, from Yale Law grad and hill-billy author to Vice President, in less than four years. That level of ambition, plus his apparently world-class successful opportunism, suggests that he might move to Amendment-25 Trump as soon as he can do so successfully.

Removal of a president for disability under Amendment 25 is much like impeachment and removal, but without the need for indictment in the House and a trial in the Senate. Under Section 3, all the Vice-President needs to assume control of the Executive immediately is the consent of “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide[.]” (emphasis added). He needn’t even have the entire Cabinet on his side.

There is a catch, however. Section 4 allows the President, acting alone, to countermand the Vice-President’s notice of disability unless the Vice-President can get two-thirds of each House of Congress to back up the notice.

Thankfully, the time scale for this entire process is much abbreviated, as compared to impeachment by the House and removal by the Senate upon conviction. Congress must meet and vote within a mere twenty-three days after the president attempts to countermand an Executive-branch notice of disability.

That’s why, among many other reasons, the upcoming midterm elections are so vitally important. We have what appears to be an increasingly deranged malignant narcissist not only in charge of our national defense, international alliances and economy. He also has his finger on The Button that could blow our entire species away.

If we don’t want to roll the dice for three more long years to see whether that might happen, let alone how badly our economy and international standing might fail in the interim, our best hope is clear. The Dems must win decisively next November, and that win must give Vance and Republicans in Congress enough spine to invoke Amendment 25 and replace the madman. (Sane Republicans should jump at the chance to cooperate, if only to secure a new beginning, plus two more years before the next presidential election to undo the damage caused by Trump’s derangement.)

We all know what ancient Rome’s three mad emperors (Nero, Caligula and Commodus) did to it. We should not be eager to replay that tape, let alone in our age of AI, privatized propaganda, a global economy, a rapidly rising China and ultra-aggressive Russia, and nuclear weapons.

My 2026 Election-Cycle GOTV Donees

The best way (and maybe the only way) to fend off MAGA and save our democracy is for the Dems to win the upcoming congressional midterms decisively. I believe that the best way to make that happen is to support independent, local, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations that find, persuade, and organize first-time, occasional, reluctant and undecided voters and get them registered (if necessary) and to the polls.

I’ve written two longish essays about why I believe this: (1) this one for the 2024 cycle and (2) this one (including some AI analysis) recently. This post honors my promise in those essays (or comments to them) to reveal where I’m putting my own monthly GOTV contributions now.

Here, in alphabetical order, are my GOTV donees for the 2026 midterm election cycle, along with their tax-deduction status:

Advance the Electorate PAC (not tax deductible)
Black Voters Matter Action PAC (not tax deductible)
Coalition for the People’s Agenda (501(c)(3))
Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ old organization) (501(c)(4))
Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Inc. (works to restore ex-felons’ voting rights) (501(c)(3))
Hope Springs from Field (PAC, not deductible)
Mijente (Spanish: “My People”) (501(c)(4))
Movement Voter Project (works with youth, LGBTQ and other marginalized voters) (501(c)(4))
Progressive Turnout Project (not tax deductible)
Swing Left (not tax deductible)
VPP (not tax deductible)

All these organizations are open for donations on Act Blue, the secure, Democratic- and progressive-oriented donation site.

NOTE: According to Google AI, donations to 501(c)(4) organizations that engage in politics are NOT tax deductible, although some of their purely public-benefit activities may be.

For the record, there were four organizations on my previous list that dropped off because I couldn’t find (or recognize) them or a clear successor on Act Blue. They were:

Democracy for America, which seems to have dissolved;
The Democratic National Committee (I don’t donate to the Party anymore.);
The New Georgia Project, which seems to have disbanded after some financial issues; and
The Northeast Arizona Native Democrats, once the GOTV arm of the Diné (Navajo) people.

The last one deserves special mention. I couldn’t find any organization on Act Blue with that name, but there are several different organizations under the general title “Navajo County Democratic Committee” with additional words. I believe “Navajo Country Democratic Committee—Federal” is the most appropriate but wonder whether it engages in GOTV activities. If anyone can inform me in a comment, I’d be grateful. (For reasons why the Northeast Arizona Diné community is vital to any effort to turn Arizona blue, click here).

Finally, I have two (only two!) exceptions to my general rule of not giving to candidates or party organs directly. I’m backing Shawn Harris’ push to win Josh Hawley’s Senate seat in Missouri and Sherrod Brown’s push to reclaim his Ohio Senate seat. I like Harris because he’s a retired Brigadier General, and I think top military officers have learned both to lead and be practical. I’m backing Brown because I know how hard he works; he once called me (when I lived in Ohio) to thank me personally for a $200 donation and listened patiently for ten minutes while I ranted about making nuclear power safer and meltdown-proof.

If you have any worthy additions to this list, and if they appear on Act Blue, please let me know in a comment. Thanks in advance to all.

Diary of a Progressive Epiphany

I’ve always been uncomfortable with calling essays on this blog “diaries.” I don’t think my daily activities, or my thoughts about them, are worth publishing, at least not in and of themselves. But this essay is an exception. If I—an 80-year-old lifetime committed Democrat—can underestimate our Progressive Caucus, mostly through inattention and osmotic absorption of subtle propaganda, so can anyone.

So here goes. Last night, after streaming the PBS Newshour, I clicked through the YouTube app on my Amazon Fire TV Cube, looking for real stuff. I settled on an item entitled “Progressive Caucus Holds News Conference on Defunding ICE.” (Later I couldn’t find this item online on my laptop, so you may find it only on your streaming TV. More on this below.)

I’d seen and read a bit about the Progressive Caucus’ major players but had had only vague and slightly negative reactions. So I thought I would dive in.

The video lasted 45 minutes, but it was time well spent. I got to know some of the Caucus leaders, including Ilhan Omar (MN), Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (TX), Pramila Jayapal (WA) and Maxwell Frost (FL). I got to know them by seeing them in action, not by reading others’ impressions or by running video or audio clips edited with an agenda.

I saw these pols react to genuine press questions, some of which were hostile and hostilely astute. I saw them under fire. I watched them respond with detailed, fluent command of the facts, articulate and persuasive speech, and a good deal of passion and commitment. Their intelligence and skill impressed me as never before. (I reside and vote in New Mexico, so I can’t vote for any of them.)

Discussion covered the ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis just the day before. One or two of the press agents questioned calling her death a “murder.” But two members of the caucus noted that the shooter had shouted (audibly on video) “Fucking bitch!” immediately after the killing.

If I were a juror in the shooter’s trial, I might find that persuasive, if not conclusive, evidence of malice aforethought. It made me wonder whether a faceless ICE agent’s deadly anger or malice is part of the rule of law.

It wasn’t until later, when I tried in vain to find a link to the news conference online, that I looked for and found the title of the YouTube streaming clip. Only then did I begin to wonder whether refusing, as a Caucus, to approve new increases in funding for ICE without legislative assurances that it would observe the Fourth Amendment and make its officers accountable for their deadly acts is the same as “Defunding Ice.”

Epiphanies about individual facts of course were persuasive. But my biggest epiphany was emotional. I was ashamed for having underestimated these rising stars of the Democratic Party and for having failed to keep myself informed. I was ashamed for not noticing earlier that YouTube’s title for the segment was itself subtle propaganda, perhaps deliberately reminiscent of cries to “Defund the Police” after George Floyd’s murder. I was ashamed even to have entertained the notion that the youth of our Dems hadn’t learned anything since then.

And no, I don’t consider myself a “moderate,” even after turning 80. For me, moderation in the face of evil, bullying and routine atrocities is cowardice. And yet, and yet . . . I had let my view of the most promising youth in the Democratic Party become dimmed by the subtle propaganda that now permeates our media like fog in a forest.

For two reasons, I reserve most of my political contributions for GOTV groups. First, I think that money given to the Dems or directly to candidates is mostly wasted on expensive video and audio ads that only preach to the choir. Second, I believe that person-to-person direct contact best moves the needle of reluctant and occasional voters, who will likely decide the midterm elections. And yet I had been inadvertently complicit in this picture of campaign failure by not getting to know the rising stars among the Dems.

But my epiphany has a much more useful lesson. That simple news conference, just 45 minutes, did more to renew my faith in my party and my country—and my fading hope that this, too, shall pass—than just about anything I had read or seen, online or otherwise, during the dismal year now passed.

The lesson seems obvious. No one watches C-span anymore except political junkies. Debates on the floor of Congress have become soporific, both because nothing much happens on the floor, and because the “debaters” are usually speaking to an empty chamber.

In contrast, the News Conference was alive and vital. It pulsated with the rhythm of a group of smart and dedicated people, representing virtually every minority, working together to build a better nation and counteract the cruelty, vulgarity and dismal banality of evil that numb the mind of every observer of politics today, including me. If nothing else, it differed starkly from the today’s White House press conferences by allowing real reporters to ask hard questions and actually trying to answer them, rather than distracting, deluding and dividing.

If I were in charge of the Progressive Caucus, or the Dems generally, I would make sure to have a least one such News Conference per week. I would publish it in full-motion video on YouTube and on a dedicated website, if only to show undecided and reluctant voters (who will decide the next election) what a real news conference looks like. And I would do this every single week, even if I had to pass the collection hat or use Go Fund Me to do so.

Putting Marx to Rest

I recently had an online experience so bizarre and surreal that I just have to put it down on paper. It suggests, if not proves, that many of humanity’s worst agonies of the last 108 years derived from abstract “thinking” so nonsensical, impractical and self-contradictory as to be absurd, if its direct consequences hadn’t been so catastrophic.

There’s a direct line of causation between that dismal “thinking” and all of the following: (1) the Russian Revolution, human history’s second bloodiest after the French; (2) the catastrophic rise and fall of the Russian Soviet Union (formally the “USSR”, or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics);” (3) the USSR’s jackboot oppression, for decades, of Ukraine, the rest of Eastern Europe and the Baltics; (4) the 1930s “Holodomor” in Ukraine, a famine caused by Russia’s forced collectivization of Ukraine’s once-free farming sector, which killed millions of Ukrainians; (5) Josef Stalin’s mass, forced deportation of ethnic minorities, including Koreans, Mongols, and Uyghurs, all over the Soviet Union’s vast territory; (6) the Cold War and its Cuban Missile Crisis, which came within minutes of extinguishing our entire species in nuclear fire; and (7) Russia’s bloody and catastrophic second invasion of Ukraine, still ongoing today.

It’s hard to get a grip on nonsense, precisely because it makes no sense. So bear with me. We’re going to delve into the disordered abstractions of Karl Marx, I hope for the last time ever. In the process, we’re going to see how dangerous the human mind can be when untethered to cause and effect, logical deduction, common sense and history. (Bear in mind that there was and is nothing wrong with Marx’ goals: fairness and economic justice for workers; it’s just that his means for achieving those goals were so abstractly byzantine and incomprehensible as inadvertently to cause some of the most catastrophic upheavals in human history.)

Karl Marx was a German political philosopher who lived from 1818 to 1883, or 65 years. His two great works, now fading rapidly from use and memory were, The Communist Manifesto, an 1848 pamphlet, and Das Kapital (“Capital” as in “capitalism” or “capital stock”). Das Kapital is a ponderous, three volume work, written in high German, containing a vast array of highly abstract wishful thinking, analysis and theorizing. Marx also explored the discontents of the Industrial Revolution, including the human damage of taking young men from clean and healthy farms and homes and putting them into stinking, smoky, and mostly unhealthy factories and there making them work long hours in dangerous, sometimes deadly and mostly “unnatural” manual labor.

On the one hand, Das Kapital is a catalog of the personal evils of industrialization, its harsh effects on as-yet-ununionized and therefore helpless workers, and the rise of a capitalist aristocracy to replace the old aristocracy of land. On the other, it’s a ponderous exploration of an entirely fictional world in which there is no money, workers or the people (as an abstraction) somehow collectively own and run everything, and the absence of bosses somehow lets workers receive benefits “according to their needs” while they generously (and entirely voluntarily) give their all for progress and prosperity “according to their ability.” (All language quoted in this paragraph consists of direct—and oft recited—quotes from English translations of Marx’ work.)

This fictional world was, in harsh reality, the blueprint that Lenin and Stalin used to design the Soviet Union. Far from Marx’ imaginary workers’ utopia, that project left a trail of blood and tears. Russians rose and overthrew their tsar, but they built Soviet Communism over the dead bodies of Russian soldiers, resisters, Kulaks, and czarist Russians, and with the deportation and oppression of millions from ethnic minorities.

Perhaps the most famous of Marx’ bromides is “dictatorship of the proletariat.” With this highly abstract phrase, Marx expressed his view that workers, collectively, should control the benefits, the methods and the means of their labor.

The “proletariat” is a term derived from ancient Roman Latin, referring to Rome’s propertyless underclass. Early nineteenth-century French social philosophers applied it to the underclass of workers in the Industrial Revolution, and Marx took it from there. For present purposes, it’s enough to understand that “proletariat” refers to a whole class of millions of farm and factory workers in an industrializing world.

The intended meaning of the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” is clear on its face: workers collectively should control the factories and industries in which they work. And their control should be absolute and unquestioned, like that of any dictator.

But how? Workers are individuals, millions of them. As history (including our own 2024 presidential election) shows, millions of people are unlikely to agree on anything, let alone on all the details of running a factory, employing each individual worker, and rewarding all properly for their individual parts in the whole.

Marx never says how, except for his abstract wish that each should give “according to his ability” and receive “according to his need.” And he never even addressed an even more perplexing question: how can ordinary workers, who in practice are often less educated and experienced than their bosses, best determine the goals and means of work designed to realize, for example, the benefits of science, when those benefits require long education and skill in abstract thinking even to foresee?

My conclusion was that this phrase is self-contradictory, abstract nonsense. A whole class of millions of people cannot be a “dictator,” who—according to the dictionary definition and numerous dismal examples from real history—is a single individual, almost always a man, ruling absolutely. Only such a man can make myriad decisions, right or wrong, at the drop of a hat. Stalin alone, not some abstract “proletariat,” was who ended up ruling the Soviet Union—the system of government that is now (and one hopes forever!) the single most faithful effort to reduce Marx’ vague, abstract ideas to reality.

My second encounter with the vague nonsense that is Marxist “Communism” came recently, in writing my essay on the ongoing collapse of American capitalism. I referred to Soviet Russia as the single purest example of “Communism” in human history. And I described its two most salient characteristics as: (1) government ownership of all means of production, including all industry; and (2) the forced collectivization of agriculture, in so-called “collective” farms (as occurred in Ukraine and caused the Holodomor).

In response, a commenter cited and quoted a definition of “Communism” from Wikipedia, which contained two points completely unfamiliar to me: (1) control of productive industry somehow by “the people” or an unspecified “collective,” rather than any government; and (2) the absence of money as such. The definition implied that workers, as Marx urged, would be rewarded according to their needs and would give their labor according to their ability, without the need for any currency or other tangible means of exchange.

I checked Wikipedia and found the commenter’s recital accurate. Then I composed an AI prompt for a definition of “Communism” based in historical reality, i.e., actually implemented in some nation’s governance. To my astonishment, Google AI produced a vaguely similar definition, but without the ridiculous abandonment of money. It said that the government, not some vague abstraction, runs industry in most Communist nations. But still it repeated the abstraction that somehow “the people” or a collective runs it.

In fact, worker management was and is a rare exception in the actual history of Communism, especially in Soviet Russia. According to Google AI, “In the Soviet Union, the period of management by employee committees was short-lived and largely confined to the earliest years of the revolution. By the early 1920s, the state transitioned almost entirely to a system of state-appointed officials and ‘one-man management.’” In other words, worker management in the Soviet Union lasted less than eight years out of 74, or about one-tenth of the Soviet Union’s lifetime.

There were exceptions to this rule in Cuba and Vietnam. And employee representation on governing boards does exist in today’s China, which practices “Communism,” in name only but, in reality, is a paragon of state capitalism. Under a Chinese law that became effective in 2024, governing boards of both state and private enterprises must include at least one employee member. In this respect China now resembles modern Germany, which no one would accuse of being “Communist.”

Nowhere, to my knowledge (or Google’s) has any real nation practiced anything resembling Marx’ fuzzy thinking. And to my knowledge, nowhere in modern history has any industrial nation, even for a moment, abandoned money as a means of exchange. Yet somehow, these vague and whimsical products of Marx’ high-German abstractions have penetrated the Internet, our modern Oracle at Delphi, as if they were or have been real.

In the real world, only a handful of nations have even tried seriously to implement anything resembling Marx’ vague and fanciful vision of “Communism.” In order of geopolitical importance and influence on our global imagination, they include Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam (but not today!) and (temporarily) various nations in Central and South America.

To my knowledge, none has ever abandoned money or currency as a means of exchange or tried for more than a decade to implement a “dictatorship of the proletariat” by somehow letting workers collectively control their own destinies through committees or elections. They all have implemented dictatorships the old-fashioned way, by giving male dictators absolute power, including the power to jail and kill, backed by lots of obedient soldiers with guns and sometimes heavy weapons.

Of those dictatorships, Russia’s Soviet Union is the paradigm because it lasted the longest (74 years, from 1917 to 1991), covered the largest geographical area (including Russia’s huge land mass and eleven time zones), and had the most far-reaching historical impacts. Among those impacts were: the subjugation by force of Eastern Europe, a pyrrhic victory over Nazism in WWII, the Cold War and near-self-extinction of our species, and the Soviet Union’s spectacular, public economic collapse in 1991.

The great irony of Marx’ dismal excuse for thinking is how many and how various are the human tragedies and catastrophes it has caused. They include Russia’s two revolutions, Mao’s conquest of China by force, and China’s tragic self-abuse in the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the vast repressions,dislocations and predations that followed—for 74 years in Russia!—the Castro brothers’ rape and pillaging of Cuba (still ongoing), a dismal series of “dictaduras” in Central and South Americas, the near-extinction or our species in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the paralysis of our own American politics caused by Republicans largely successful demonizing as “Communist” every honest attempt to improve the lives of ordinary people, from Social Security, through Medicare and Medicaid, to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s present-day quest to get New Yorkers free, fast bus transit.

The catastrophic effects of Marx’ dismal excuse for “thinking” are self-evident even in our American politics today: the ability of self-interested pols and demagogues to distract millions of workers from their own welfare by getting them to foam at the mouth at the mere mention of “Communism.” Marx himself would not be pleased.

There is an even greater irony. Marx’ ideas were childlike in their innocence and impracticability, but at a wishful level they were true and human. Any child in a working family can wonder. Why don’t my Mom or Dad get paid good wages? Why do my parents’ bosses do such arbitrary things? Why don’t my parents, who actually do the work, have more control over how it gets done? Why do the business owners get most or all the rewards when my Mom and Dad, and others like them, do all the hard work?

Those childish questions are apt and ageless. Since the very first industrial factory opened, they have been valid and unanswered. Marx never really answered them, at least in any practical way. What he did was clothe them in impenetrable high German and turn them into nonsense terms and phrases like “Communism” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose lack of intrinsic meaning and practicality merely repeat the same questions in a more impenetrable form.

So I think it’s time to put Marx to rest, fully and finally. Let’s build a big symbolic coffin. Let’s throw in the original editions of The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and all of Marx’ other works, which collectively have so divided and so maimed our species for so long. (We’ll keep digital copies for the historical record.)

Then let’s light a big fire under that coffin and burn it to ashes. Finally, let’s pledge never to use Marx’ self-invented terminology or nonsensical, self-contradictory “logic” to promote practical ideas for bringing more fairness, equality, and justice to workers and our societies, to demonize those who promote those ideas, or to confuse voters trying to make up their minds.

Let’s forget that Marx ever lived, and let’s try to forget the wars, violent revolutions, despotism, oppression, dislocations, mass deportations, jailing and executions perpetrated on our species in his name, or in the name of the vague, self-contradictory and impractical ideas he foisted on us. Instead, let’s do our best, in innumerable ways involving real, practical and democratic politics, to realize the simple but profound goal of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

That goal is clear. Its meaning is self-evident. It has been around for over three centuries. Realizing it will require implementing the kind of effective and workable democracy of which our Founders dreamed, but which is now failing, perhaps permanently, from its own flaws and internal contradictions.

Nevertheless, the underlying concept is apt, despite the increasingly self-evident failures of our Constitution, drafted with the goal of validating slavery clearly in mind. In whatever society you can imagine, workers, underlings and followers will inevitably outnumber leaders, aristocrats, oligarchs and despots. So a true democracy, in which a majority rules in practice, will have the best chance of realizing Marx’ goals of justice and fairness for workers. Our Founders self-evidently have failed to realize such a democracy, as evidenced by our current despotic president (showing increasing signs of senile dementia) and his cult-like sycophants holding onto office for no discernible reason besides their own personal short-term benefit.

But smart people never let a single failure discourage them. They try again, and again, until they get a good idea to work.

The real way to realize Marx’ goals is to build a true and effective democracy, not to invent a whole new vocabulary of nonsensical and self-contradictory terms. The mission, in essence, is to complete the project begun by ancient Rome. That was left unfinished through the Dark Ages. But it began again when the Enlightenment arose in Northern Europe. It’s to that era—the real origin of modern democracy, human rights, international cooperation and science—that we should look for inspiration now.

AI “Hallucinations” and How to Avoid Them

Everybody’s heard that AIs “hallucinate.” That is, they come up with stuff that sounds plausible but just isn’t so. But how many people have actually seen an AI hallucinate? How many were absolutely sure that its output was wrong in multiple ways? And how many made a note of the hallucination and described it in detail in writing?

Probably AI researchers and developers have done all this. But they have an incentive to keep their work secret (1) to avoid public embarrassment and (2) to get a jump on their employers’s competitors in avoiding hallucinations.

So I thought I would report, in some detail, how an AI served up one hallucination. My example is just one snowflake in a whiteout, but with so little detailed information about hallucinations made public, maybe it’ll help.

Part of this hallucination involves name confusion. My father was a novelist, Hollywood screenwriter and writer for TV. He used and wrote under several names, but his most common published name was Jay Dratler. My name is Jay Dratler, Jr.

In his long writing career, my father penned some memorable turns of phrase, such as “I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” On reading that, my wife wanted to learn more, so she asked Google, on or about January 3, 2026, to produce “dr j dratler quotes.” Google sent the query to its AI to produce an “AI Overview,” which you can read in full by submitting the same prompt. (Google may improve its response as time goes on, so note the date.)

The hallucinating part, verbatim, was this paragraph and its caption:

“On Business & Law (from his academic writing):

“The Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can.”

Let me count the errors in this reply:

1. The first “sentence” is incomplete. Even worse, it implies that the subject of the paragraph is the Bill of Rights.  In reality (see the missing part below), it’s our antitrust law.

2. My Dad never wrote anything “academic” because he never taught. When, late in life, he had a creative dry spell, we urged him to teach, and he replied “I’m a writer, not a teacher.”

3. It was I, Jr., who became an academic and a law professor after careers as a scientist/engineer and a business lawyer.

4. The passage quoted (except for two missing parts and consequent grammatical issues) was not original with either me or my father. It was penned by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in one of his rare antitrust opinions. Marshall’s original passage read in full as follows:

“Antitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise. They are as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free-enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can muster.”

U.S. v. Topco Associates, Inc., 405 U.S. 596, 610 (1971) (Marshall, J.).

5. The final word “muster” in Justice Marshall’s ringing passage is missing from the AI excerpt, marking yet another error in transcription and grammar.

6. My father cannot possibly have even copied this quotation from Justice Marshall’s work, because my father died in 1968, three years before Marshall’s words were published.

7. It was I who quoted Marshall’s work, with attribution, in one or more law-review articles I wrote and published as a law professor. (The AI did get this bit right in the right sidebar, quoting an article I wrote as the Goodyear Professor of Intellectual Property at the University of Akron, Ohio, School of Law. The sidebar actually included my name as author but erred by including it in a summary of my father’s juicy quotes.)

So the AI got things wrong in seven ways. In its defense, I can say that my wife’s prompt, “dr j dratler quotes,” understandably confused the issue. It’s I who have a doctor’s degree (in physics, UCSD 1972); my Dad never finished college but dropped out to write.

So what can one conclude from this short and rather troubling tale? There are at least six lessons:

1. Your AI prompt is absolutely crucial. An AI may grossly magnify small factual errors or inconsistencies. Write your prompts competely, carefully and simply, as if you were writing for a bright sixth grader.

2. Make sure you have the facts that you use in your prompt right, or at least that they’re internally consistent. If you are aware of nuances that might affect the analysis (such as, in our case, two different people with nearly identical names, or the vast difference between writing fiction for entertainment and writing legal analysis), spell them out in your prompt. 

3. Don’t depend on AIs to have mastered the nuances of grammar or writing. (This warning underlines teachers’ common advice: use AIs for factual and background research only, but do your own writing, especially in courses in English or writing.)

4. Don’t depend on AIs to have mastered the nuances of human society and culture, including such things as: (a) fathers naming their sons after them and appending a “Jr.”; (b) one writer quoting another, with or without attribution; or (c) qualitative differences in work and careers, such as the difference between Hollywood screenwriting and academic legal writing.

5. Don’t expect an AI to begin independently writing like a distinguished Supreme Court Justice, let alone like William Shakespeare, anytime soon. If you want your writing to shine, learn to do it yourself, and use AIs only for background and inspiration.

6. Plagiarism may be getting harder and harder to detect, and AIs may increase the temptation to do it. But it still won’t make you smart, or a better writer. Only practice can do that.

PLEASE SEND A LINK TO THIS POST TO TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS WHOM YOU KNOW. AI IS RAPIDLY BECOMING THE BANE OF THEIR EXISTENCE AND A DISTRACTION FROM THEIR REAL WORK. MAYBE THIS POST WILL HELP.

Don’t Fight Evolution. Embrace it.

“Know thyself.” — Ancient inscription on the Greek Temple of Apollo, 525-450 BC, often attributed to Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, all of whom embraced it as a foundation of their “philosophy” or life’s wisdom.

It’s sad, even tragic, that some offshoots of Western religions, especially American ones, have demonized the science of evolution for contradicting the religious notion that God deliberately created Man. But as a microbiology-professor friend (now retired) confirmed, evolution is the foundation of all modern biology, including the discovery and manipulation of DNA, as well as much of modern medicine. And it’s those things that let me and so many other modern people live past 80.

The tragedy deepens when you begin to understand how refusing to take evolution into account has caused much of our modern American health pathology. (“Pathology” is a two-edged word: it covers both the study of disease and the underlying disease itself. I once won a bet with a lawyer for whom I consulted on this very point.)

Three such pathologies are just now coming to the forefront of our national consciousness. First, a rash of popular innovations in our diets—highly sugared, highly artificial and highly processed foods—is causing an epidemic of obesity and “diseases of civilization,” including diabetes and clogged arteries. Second, social changes wrought by our electronic age are depriving people, especially the young, of the social, sexual and familial connections with which we evolved. That leaves them lonely, depressed, solipsistic, unsatisfied, and sometimes suicidal. Third, ubiquitous overuse of artificial plastics and synthetic fibers in our food, clothing and household wares has led us to a place where dissected cadavers show a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic microparticles in virtually every brain examined. Similar microparticles can be found in the Mariana Trench, the Pacific Ocean’s deepest spot. To put it bluntly, we have polluted not just our environment, but our own bodies and our world; and that pollution may be irrevocable, at least in the short term.

Our health-care system, our science, and our governments are just beginning to come to grips with these tragic failings. It may take generations to fix them. But fixing cannot even begin without understanding that each of these grave problems derives from mostly inadvertent neglect of our species’ evolution.

The most important thing to understand about evolution is that it’s a very slow process. Our species’ entire recorded history, about six thousand years, is too short for any significant evolution to have occurred. It took an estimated 10,000 years for Homo sapiens just to replace Neanderthals in Europe, mostly by interbreeding, and over 400,000 years for Neanderthals to evolve from an earlier ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis. The history of our nation, let alone the average human life span, is but a nanosecond in biological evolution, far too short for any evolutionary change to occur.

So let’s examine how inadvertence to our evolution helped create the three societal problems outlined above, and how attention to it might help resolve them.

You don’t have to be a scientist or demographer to have noticed the stark effects wrought by our Western diet, not only in the United States, but also in other English-speaking nations. You just have to have lived as long as I have (80 years) and be observant. I noticed the effects immediately in 1999, when I moved from Hawaii to Northeast Ohio and saw Cleveland. I also noticed them when, in 2023, I revisited New Zealand and Australia after an absence of about a decade.

My own personal observations were striking. In comparing the physiques of people across those transitions in geography and time, I thought that someone might have blown up the figures (mostly of men) like plastic dolls. The explosion of obesity on city streets was breathtaking.

The changes I observed in moving from Hawaii to Ohio were, of course, heavily influenced by changes in group genetics and traditional diet. (The people of Hawaii have large infusions of Asian genes and enjoy food heavily influenced by Asian cuisine and diets.) The changes in time I observed Down Under were most striking. There the general puffiness had occurred despite a general increase in immigration from Asia in the interim. Although I didn’t take a quantitative survey, it seemed that the obesity explosion had occurred mostly in white people like me, rather than in the native Maori and or Australian Aboriginal populations.

What caused the explosion? The causes have been well-researched. Over the past decade, we have seen a dramatic increase in artificial, manufactured foods designed to self-market by appealing to our species’ evolutionary craving for sugar, salt and fat. In the natural environments in which we evolved, those necessary nutrients were often scarce, so our systems and brains evolved to crave them. Modern capitalist marketers learned to exploit those evolutionary cravings to sell artificial stuff, and the rest is history.

One proof of this hypothesis is simple. Societies like Italy and Japan, which have largely stuck with healthy traditional diets lean in meat, fat, and sugar, if not salt, have by and large escaped the obesity epidemic. They also have world-leading average longevities. So it seems that these nationwide and society-wide health problems elsewhere in the “West” are largely a product of unregulated capitalism and weak culture.

The problem of social isolation is similar but harder to crack. We Homo sapiens evolved as social animals. We came to dominate our small blue planet by virtue of our living and working together, despite being small, weak, and poorly armed naturally (small teeth, no claws and no venom). Individually, we are not nearly as smart as our self-anointed scientific name might suggest; but we have managed to act smart by recording and heeding the thinking of the wisest among us, including people like Socrates and Albert Einstein.

Evolution has given us an ability to socialize, communicate and cooperate as no other species on this planet can. And just as evolution makes us crave the sugar and salt necessary to our physical survival, it has made socializing—in homes, families, parties, schoolyards, churches, political gatherings, restaurants, bars, and playgrounds—a great mental and intellectual pleasure in our short lives, in part to facilitate our societal survival. Socializing, in all its forms, is part of what makes life worth living.

It goes without saying that socializing remotely via the Internet is not the same thing. When we meet in person we use all our senses, including touch, smell and nuances of sight and hearing, to understand and appreciate the people around us. No screen, no matter how many its pixels, can duplicate that. Nor can any remote device yet invented duplicate our unconscious sensing of others’ pheromones of happiness, mirth, fear, distress, or lust, let alone the joys of sex. No wonder the pandemic and its forced resort to remote “classes” and “meetings” caused an epidemic of social discontent!

What makes this problem tricky to resolve is that, in our increasingly overpopulated and crowded world, silence and solitude are also things of value, also with evolutionary origins. As people get richer, they generally prefer bigger and more remote homes, in which they can get away (temporarily) from each other and from the noisy world outside. The English Lord’s grand home, with vast empty halls lined with painted portraits of ancestors, is the paradigm here.

The proper balance is by no means obvious. But the fact that healthy societies have lived in crowded cities cheek by jowl throughout human history, including in today’s New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris and London, suggests that some crowding is not, in itself, a sin against evolution.

In any event, it’s clear that a whole generation with social aptitudes and skills reduced by technology and pandemic isolation is not a good thing. The solutions are obvious but not necessarily easy: remedial instruction and enhanced opportunities for socializing, at home, in school, in extracurricular programs, and at work.

The problem of internal and environmental pollution with plastics and other synthetics is, in theory, the easiest to resolve. As a species, we should do all that we can to get rid of them, especially in our food chain and our clothing and in things we put in our mouths or other orifices.

Clothing and bedding, in theory, ought to be simple. There apparently is no shortage of the cotton, linen and other natural fibers that we humans used for centuries before synthetics were invented. At least a neighborhood Costco offers stylish all-cotton jeans and shirts for lower prices than synthetic ones.

Beyond clothing and bedding, change is not so easy. It took me several months just to replace most of the plastic stuff in our kitchens with metal, wood, glass and (for utensils and containers) silicone, which apparently is more compatible with human biology and more biodegradable. But what about all the plastic brushes (including toothbrushes), plastic combs, and little plastic bottles in everyone’s medicine cabinet? What about the ubiquitous plastic bags in our supermarkets, our refrigerators and in our bathrooms?

Polyethylene fragments comprise the majority of the plastic microparticles found in our brains. That can’t be good, as polyethylene is a synthetic material developed by us in the last 75 years, so it could hardly have figured in our evolution. Consequently, our bodies likely have no means to remove it.

It would be easy (and probably less expensive) for supermarkets to replace their polyethylene bags for fruits and vegetables with paper ones. But few have done so. Replacing the ubiquitous plastic cups and cartons for milk, yoghurt and virtually every product that’s wet would be harder, and those plastic containers come into direct contact with our food for long periods of storage in transit (while also getting shaken!), in the supermarket, and in our refrigerators.

As a general rule, flexible plastics are more foreign to human biology than solid ones, due to the plasticizer chemicals (such as BPA) that make them flexible. But absent a complete scientific study of all the myriad plastics now in production and in our food chain, there’s no way to be sure. A rational society would commission such a study ASAP, publicize its results, and outlaw the worst offending materials and uses by regulation.

That may take a long time. For us Americans, in our current state of political paralysis, it would be all but impossible. So, as is often true in our individualistic society, the task of protecting ourselves and our children from this known and increasing threat to our evolutionary biology falls to each of us as individuals. It’ll be interesting to see how more collectively oriented societies, such as China and Japan, respond to increasing recognition of this very real threat.

In the meantime, we can contemplate three self-evident truths. First, we Americans and many “Western” societies are poisoning ourselves and our planet with artificial stuff alien to our evolutionary biology and need to change our ways. Second, our Health Secretary RFK, Jr. is only half crazy. Vaccines and modern science do work, but he’s right that we are poisoning ourselves, largely for the profit of a few, by eating, wearing, and loading our food with artificial stuff wholly inconsistent with our evolution. Third, we need to be a lot more careful in developing stuff incompatible with our evolutionary biology and putting it in our mouths, on and in our bodies, and abroad in our land, rivers, skies and seas.

If not, we might end up like the ancient Romans, who likely destroyed their world-bridging democratic empire by poisoning their elite with lead. In fact, the danger of any intelligent species developing lots of synthetic stuff incompatible with its evolutionary biology may help explain the Fermi Paradox: so many stars with habitable planets in the Universe, but no contact yet with any other intelligent species. Maybe they all destroy themselves by self-administered poisons, within a short time after they first achieve orbital space flight. After all, we probably couldn’t have made space suits without flexible plastics.

The Collapse of American Capitalism

As the decisive political year 2026 begins, the source of our national angst is becoming clearer. It’s nothing less than the collapse of American capitalism. Our peculiar brand of extreme, unregulated, self-promotional,science- and engineering-free, over-the-top capitalism is collapsing of its own weight, not to mention its many contradictions. The discontents and depredations of President Donald Trump’s incipient despotisms are mere symptoms of that dread disease.

Before you click out, consider this. China, which will clearly own our new twenty-first century, is now, by far, the world’s foremost capitalist nation. It’s a robust example of state capitalism. There a vast array of private firms has free reign to produce things and make money, subject to strict regulation by the state in its interest. That simple subjection to government control makes all the difference.

China’s great industrial firms are beating ours, Europe’s and even some in Japan in productivity, price and more recently quality. They are nearly all privately owned and privately run and therefore “capitalistic” in every sense. In this respect, they resemble the robust private firms of postwar US.

After WWII, private industrial firms in our country gave us and the world an astonishing series of innovative products and services. They also vastly expanded our productive and military power. But they were then subject to a legal regime of strict regulation in the public interest, the national interest, and the interest of common sense. Our antitrust laws, unlike now, were then actually enforced. This was the regulated capitalism of FDR and his immediate successors.

Names alone are deceptive. China calls its single ruling political party the “Chinese Communist Party” (emphasis added). But China’s economy today has nothing in common with the clumsy, top-down state control of the entire economy that failed so miserably in the Soviet Union and ultimately caused its economic collapse. In that economy, clueless state commissars would determine, more from political tracts than from data and markets, how many shoes and cars to produce. Even in today’s sorry Russia, Vladimir Putin has abandoned that failed system for a clumsy, mostly private and independent kleptocracy.

As I outlined in a much earlier essay, China’s state control of its many robust capitalists has more in common with China’s own ancient “Mandarin” system of local political and social control than it does with the failed economic systems of Russian and Eastern European Communism. (In some respects China’s ancient Mandarin system resembled our own state-by-state “federalism.”) American propagandists’ continual derogatory reference to China as a “Communist” nation simply misses the mark. They confuse formal titles with reality, a reality they consistently refuse to face. China is beating us at our own capitalist game, and they, like wizened witches of old, fall back on curses and imprecations to turn the tide.

China’s so-called “Communist Party” is, after all, a nation-within-a-nation. Over 100 million strong, it’s larger than modern Germany. So China is now the world’s—and human history’s—leading exemplar of state capitalism, i.e., capitalism strictly regulated and controlled by the state in the public interest. And the state, although now (unfortunately) ruled by a single man (Xi Jinping), is administered by a vast so-called “Communist” bureaucracy much larger than our own. To enhance this divergence, Trump is busy making our own bureaucracy ever smaller.

But I digress. The subject is the collapse of our capitalism, here in the US. The signs and symptoms are everywhere. I will mention just three.

The first is “financialization.” Vast sectors of our national economy, and vast legions of workers, are now engaged in careers that can only be described as pushing paper for the purpose of making money without producing anything tangible, or, for that matter, any non-financial service like fixing your car or computer, building a house, or cleaning your teeth.

A prime example is the so-called “private equity” firms that have exploded in number and wealth since the turn of the century. They buy up everything from local radio stations, houses and apartments, to rural hospitals, then load them with debt to finance the purchase. Later, if they don’t kill them outright by driving them into bankruptcy, they sell them for a quick profit while squeezing their local management, workers and customers for cash. The raped firms they leave behind soon wither, decline or die, or they succumb to a later wave of financialized consolidation.

A second example of financialization is the stampede to cryptocurrencies, including the President’s own. Crypto purports to offer a digital replacement for money. But do we really need one when the Internet, credit cards, and online services like PayPal and ApplePay have already brought digital speed and convenience in finance to virtually every type of transaction? The only extra “benefit” of crypto that I can see is secrecy—a thing most valuable in fields of “commerce” like bribery, drug-running, gun-running, laundering money from crime, and secret financial speculation. Who but financial speculators with inside information needs a currency that fluctuates like tech stocks?

In 2006, Richard Nixon’s data man, Kevin Phillips, published a book that everyone concerned about our national future should read. Its title, American Theocracy, is misleading. Only one of its three sections is about the rise of evangelicals in American politics. The most important and probably least-read section concerns so-called “financialization.” It describes in detail, and with available historical and statistical analysis, how the financialization, in turn, of Holland, Spain and Britain brought their respective globe-spanning empires down from global economic power and influence to their present low-influence senescence.

Holland, Spain and Britain are still around and still mostly democratic. But anyone who thinks the exact same aging process isn’t happening to our nation, just as Phillips predicted but at Trump’s trademark Warp Speed, hasn’t been paying attention.

The second clear symptom of economic decline is a dismal crash in the rate of real innovation. What do I mean by real innovation? Loosely speaking, I mean innovation in tangible things or products, not just software. Although a useful tool, software is not “innovation” in any field of science or engineering that I know. It’s just an automated and therefore faster way of performing experiments or implementing and organizing business and administrative ideas. Or, as in the case of Uber, it’s an automated way of capturing (for bosses) workers’ gains in efficiency by simple logistics or by exploiting instantaneous market trends, such as charging higher fares when there’s greater consumer demand for a specific route.

During the late nineteenth and the last century, we Americans made or rapidly adopted most of the innovations that make our modern world. They include electric lighting, airplanes, electric grids, voice recording, broadcast radio, antibiotics, television, high-altitude flight (with pressurized cabins), rocket ships for space flight , digital computers, transistors, chips full of tiny transistors, minicomputers, microcomputers/PCs, MRIs, CAT scans, cells phones, smart phones, genomic medicine, and now “designer drugs” conceived by computers analyzing possible chemical compounds.

Yet since Apple introduced the first smart phone nearly twenty years ago, I can’t think of any physical invention (except perhaps genomic medicine and designer drugs) that we Americans produced or rapidly adopted that is remotely comparable in economic potential to any of those in the previous paragraph. All that we have introduced—and we have done so massively, with astronomical levels of investment—is more software to run the machines and systems that we already have. We have made no major breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine or related engineering. (Practical exploitation of the strange physics of quantum mechanics is still years away.)

More important, the software stuff that we have produced has many undesirable side effects. They include: the destruction of our trusted media, the rise of social media and the decline of belief in common facts, the greatest political divide since our civil war, and a concentration of wealth unseen in America since the First Gilded Age, which brought us the Great Depression. Perhaps the most important software innovation is the advent of AI, but that is a decidedly two-edged “advance,” as discussed below.

The third and final symptom of the collapse of American capitalism is the main subject of this essay: promo. Call it “promotion,” “marketing,” “advertising,” “public relations” or what you will. It’s the process and the technique of persuading people—be they customers or voters—to want, buy and do things they otherwise wouldn’t want, buy or do. In the social and political sphere, it’s better known as “propaganda,” but it’s basically the same thing. Viewed honestly, it’s the art and science of getting people to believe things that just aren’t so and thus to do things not in their own interest, but in the “information” providers’ business, financial, political, personal, or practical interest. It’s the modern art of public deception and persuasion in all its forms.

The first thing to know about promo is that, in most cases, it involves no direct benefit or any efficiency gain. The dismal presidency of Donald Trump is both a product and an extreme exemplar of promo. Take, for example, the informal name of his recently prized legislative achievement: “The One Big Beautiful Bill.” What does it do? The promo name suggests that it does everything necessary all at once. It’s like the title of that manic hit movie “Everything, Everywhere All at Once.” Even the bill’s staid, formal title provides no further information. It’s “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14.”

In fact, the bill lowers taxes on the rich and reduces government regulation, thus moving us back toward the over-the-top, unrestrained capitalism that produced the Robber Barons and led to the First Gilded Age and the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will, by 2034, increase the national deficit by $2.8 trillion while raising incomes of the highest 10% of earners by 2.7%, due mainly due to tax cuts, and lowering incomes of the lowest 10% by 3.1%. So it would rob the poor to make the rich richer, while vastly increasing an already swollen national debt. With an effect like that, it makes good sense to have a promo title that sounds good but conveys no real meaning.

It gets worse, much worse. The Internet’s original promise was to put the sum total of human knowledge and information at the fingertips of every person on the planet. Now that “human knowledge” is degenerating into rampant promo in virtually every sphere, with disinformation and lies rising in volume to rival true stuff. Let me give an example.

In the Internet’s early days, the Boolean search logic that every computer nerd knows was supposed to let consumers find any product they needed in seconds. For example, if you wanted a six-inch, adjustable, curved crescent wrench made of aluminum, not iron, you could type the following in search engine’s search field: “crescent wrench” and (“curve” or “curved”) and “adjustable” and “six-inch” or “6 in.” and “copper” but not “iron.” In the Internet’s early days, your search results would match all those criteria and appear in order of the closeness of their matches. Today, due to the “miracle” of promo, your search results are mostly useless because they appear in the order in which vendors of wrenches have paid the search engine to prioritize their products. The result is like going into a hardware store, asking a clerk for the wrench you want, and having her point to the tool department and say “Go look!”

All this promo must do something for the vendors because they pay for it. (Although common sense says this all may be a commercial stampede, there must be some data that keeps vendors paying.) But for the customer this promo stampede reduces all the power of the Internet and digital computers to next to nothing. They might as well not have been invented. And this conclusion holds without regard to the numerous product ads, often winking and blinking in full-motion video, to distract your attention from the search results themselves.

In theory, the advent of AI could provide a cure. Most AI engines now provide honest answers to search requests for specific products or services, often with useful supplementary information. And since AI engines are more powerful than simple search engines, their results can be both more precise and more useful, as well as promo-free.

But how long will this advantage last? In my experience, most AI engines are free of charge. (The only one yet to insist that I pay was Anthropic’s Claude, and then only after I tossed it some pretty sophisticated legal queries.) Yet news media tell us that AI providers are investing hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars in vast data centers and the means to power them, in what seems the biggest financial stampede since the dot-com and 2008 bubbles.

How can this state of affairs continue without massive advertising and promotion—even under-the-cover slanting of results—invading the “pure” logic and utility that AI mavens are touting now? Pretty soon, runners in the AI stampede are going to have to start showing financial results before the bubble bursts. And the most likely source of money is more over-the-top promo. I can already visualize results of serious scientific and legal inquiries appearing surrounded by blinking videos of nude pole dancers singing catchy odes to expensive cars, scotch, wristwatches and ladies’ handbags.

This is not the capitalism of the railroads, the automobile industry, the airline industry, the pharmaceutical industry or even the early movie and television industries. It’s the capitalism of a self-indulgent, self-regarding, under-educated, over-egoed and exploitive computer/financial class that has no clue about physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine or the histories of successful human societies. It’s a recipe for the most rapid decline of a successful capitalist democracy in human history.

Enter China. Not only does it have the second (to India) largest population of any single nation on Earth. Not only are its literate people generally imbued with the discipline of having had to learn humanity’s most complicated written language. Not only is its misnamed “Communist Party” a huge, struggling meritocracy of people imbued with patriotism and national fervor, derived in part from a 75-year rise from abject poverty and disorder to the “world’s factory” and soon the world’s research laboratory.

The essence of today’s China is a vast state-capitalist nation, ruled by smart, practical leaders (many of them trained as engineers) whose main motivators appear to be not their own private wealth, but their nation’s advancement. If you’d ask me to compare the leadership of China’s elite with the “leadership” of our tech-bro class and the likes of Elon Musk, I’d say there isn’t even a contest. Intelligence, experience, practical knowledge, genuine scientific curiosity and real patriotism beat ego, self-regard, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment as useful character traits and motivations every time.