Horrific

It's the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.

But a Jewish U.S. Representative calling for the continued starvation of innocent people and children is disgraceful. 

His awful statement will actually cause more antisemitism.

-- Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), in an X post condemning Representative Randy Fine (R-FL), who earlier tweeted "Release the hostages.  Until then, starve away." (28 July 2025)

The Things To Do

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.  Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it.  This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), American philosopher, systems theorist, architect, and inventor, Letter to "Micheal" (16 February 1970), Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker"

Affirmed

Article II of the Constitution establishes the scope of presidential powers.  The President has the power to issue executive orders if they "stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself," on matters that fall within that scope established by Article II.  But one power that the President was not granted, by Article II or by any other source, is the power to modify or change any clause of the United States Constitution.  Perhaps the Executive Branch, recognizing that it could not change the Constitution, phrased its Executive Order in terms of a strained and novel interpretation of the Constitution. 

The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order's proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional.  We fully agree.  The Defendants' proposed interpretation of the Citizenship Clause relies on a network of inferences that are unmoored from the accepted legal principles of 1868.  This runs the risk of "‘extrapolat[ing]' from the Constitution's text and history ‘the values behind [that right], and then ... enforc[ing] its guarantees only to the extent they serve those underlying values.'"  We reject this approach because it is contrary to the express language of the Citizenship Clause, the reasoning of Wong Kim Ark, Executive Branch practice for the past 125 years, the legislative history to the extent that should be considered, and because it is contrary to justice.

-- Majority opinion of a 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth District, affirming a lower court injunction against President Trump's executive order denying citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants (23 July 2025)

Impossible To Please

It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.

-- Jean de La Fontaine (1621 - 1695), French fabulist and the most widely read French poet of the 17th century, Fables (1668–1679) Book III (1668), Fable 1

Check That Lawlessness

This case arises out of the President's unilateral efforts to eliminate a Cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago: the Department of Education.  As Congress mandated, the Department plays a vital role in this Nation's education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year.   

Only Congress has the power to abolish the Department.  The Executive's task, by contrast, is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." U. S. Const., Art. II, §3.  Yet, by executive fiat, the President ordered the Secretary of Education to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department." Exec. Order No. 14242, 90 Fed. Reg. 13679 (2025). Consistent with that Executive Order, Secretary Linda McMahon gutted the Department's work force, firing over 50 percent of its staff overnight.  In her own words, that mass termination served as "the first step on the road to a total shutdown" of the Department. 

When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary's duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.  Two lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing.  Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this Court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the Government to proceed with dismantling the Department.  That decision is indefensible.  It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.  The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.  Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent.

-- Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join, dissenting in Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, v New York, on application for stay, in which the majority allowed the Trump administration to move forward with depopulating the Department of Education (14 July 2025)

Our Tax Dollars At Work

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it.  Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food -- enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week -- are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations.  Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.  (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)

Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me.  The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5, are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them.  They were stored in a Dubai warehouse and intended to go to the children this year.

-- Hana Kiros, "The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food", The Atlantic (14 July 2025)

USAID

Background
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. The aim of this study is to comprehensively evaluate the effect of all USAID funding on adult and child mortality over the past two decades and forecast the future effect of its defunding.

Findings
Higher levels of USAID funding -- primarily directed toward low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly African countries -- were associated with a 15% reduction in age-standardised all-cause mortality and a 32% reduction in under-five mortality. This finding indicates that 91 839 663 all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths). Significant decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.

Interpretation
USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.

-- Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti, PhD et al, The Lancet "Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis" (30 June 2025)

Retreating

To give meaning to our Constitution's bedrock equal protection guarantee, this Court has long subjected to heightened judicial scrutiny any law that treats people differently based on sex.  If a State seeks to differentiate on that basis, it must show that the sex classification "serves important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the achievement of those objectives."  Such review (known as intermediate scrutiny) allows courts to ascertain whether the State has a sound, evidence-based reason to distinguish on the basis of sex or whether it does so in reliance on impermissible stereotypes about the sexes.

Today, the Court considers a Tennessee law that categorically prohibits doctors from prescribing certain medications to adolescents if (and only if) they will help a patient "identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex."  In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition "identify with" an identity "inconsistent" with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient's sex.  Male (but not female) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like boys, and female (but not male) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like girls.

Tennessee's law expressly classifies on the basis of sex and transgender status, so the Constitution and settled precedent require the Court to subject it to intermediate scrutiny.  The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise, inexplicably declaring it must uphold Tennessee's categorical ban on lifesaving medical treatment so long as " ‘any reasonably conceivable state of facts' " might justify it.  Thus, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to mere rational-basis review.  By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.  In sadness, I dissent.

-- Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join, dissenting in US v Skrmetti, Attorney General for Tennessee, in which the majority upheld a Tennessee law denying gender-affirming care to minors (18 June 2025)

Background Circumstances

Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  Under our Title VII precedents, a plaintiff may make out a prima facie case of disparate treatment by showing "that she applied for an available position for which she was qualified, but was rejected under circumstances which give rise to an inference of unlawful discrimination." Texas Dept. of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U. S. 248, 253 (1981).

The question in this case is whether, to satisfy that prima facie burden, a plaintiff who is a member of a majority group must also show " 'background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.' " 87 F. 4th 822, 825 (CA6 2023) (per curiam).  We hold that this additional "background circumstances" requirement is not consistent with Title VII's text or our case law construing the statute.  Accordingly, we vacate the judgment below and remand for application of the proper prima facie standard.

-- Justice Jackson, for the unanimous Supreme Court of the United States in Marlean A. Ames, Petitioner v Ohio Department of Youth Services, in which the court ruled that cases of reverse discrimination require no higher standard of proof than other discrimination cases (5 June 2025)

Very Nearly Allied

To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied, and, in spite of the finest maxims of morality impressed upon the mind, whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of, and I have yet to learn how it is possible to prevent its being excited.

-- Catherine II of Russia aka Catherine the Great (1729 - 1796), Empress of Russia for more than three decades, Memoirs of the Empress Catherine II (1859)

Until He Has Tried

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.  The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), American philosopher, essayist, and poet, Essay "Self-Reliance"

Born Or Naturalized, Redux

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

-- Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, proposed by Congress in 1863 and ratified in 1868

[I see I previously ran this in 2018, but I guess we need periodic reminders.]

Happy Easter

I'm currently hanging out in a cabin close to Lake Carlyle in southern Illinois. We don't have the whole clan together this year, but I've got a couple of kids and a few grandkids here for the occasion.

I hope you all enjoy the holiday weekend.

No Young Man

No young man believes he shall ever die.

-- William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830), English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners (1821-1822) "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth"

Makes Up In Height

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

-- Robert Frost (1874 - 1963), American poet, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, Title of poem (1942)

Living Messages

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

-- Neil Postman (1931 - 2003), American author, educator, media theorist, and cultural critic, The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) Introduction

Not Young Enough

I'm not young enough to know everything.

-- Sir James Matthew (J. M.) Barrie (1860 - 1937), Scottish novelist and dramatist, The Admirable Crichton, Act I (1903)

A Peculiar Talent

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it.  The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

-- John Jay Chapman (1862 - 1933), American writer and essayist, Memories and Milestones (1915) page 110

Merry Christmas

For the holidays I made a few pies and a few hundred cookies and candies, including a few dozen Christmas cookies which were then decorated by my grandkids.  At dinner time we had 21 people, including kids, grandkids, sons-in-law and other significant others.

I hope the season is treating you well, and that 2025 will treat you even better.

May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back.  May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Eustress

The term eustress means "beneficial stress" -- either psychological, physical (e.g., exercise), or biochemical/radiological (hormesis).

The word was introduced by endocrinologist Hans Selye (1907-1982) in 1976; he combined the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and the English word stress, to give the literal meaning "good stress".  The Oxford English Dictionary traces early use of the word (in psychological usage) to 1968.

Eustress is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings.  Hans Selye created the term as a subgroup of stress to differentiate the wide variety of stressors and manifestations of stress.

-- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia