TARIFFS AND DEPORTATION — SCOTUS MAY DECIDE IN TRUMP’S FAVOR

The United States Court of International Trade ruled that President Trump did not have authority to “impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world” and blocked Trump’s prized tariff program. Normally, only Congress can enact tariffs, but Trump had argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gave him the right to introduce the tariffs because the United States economy was in an emergency. What the court ruled was, in essence, that this is not an emergency, and even if it was, the tariffs were not correctly dealing with it.

Trump’s lawyers immediately announced their intention to appeal the decision, and it will probably go to the Supreme Court. Their arguments are twofold.

  1. This is an emergency. “These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base – facts that the court did not dispute,”
  2. The courts have no right to define what is or is not an emergency, and in declaring that the tariffs are not dealing with the situation, the courts are deciding economic policy for the country. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”

So one must ask whether there is a legal definition for ‘emergency’. In fact, the IEEPA actually spells it out: there has to be a threat to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy; the threat must be “unusual and extraordinary;”

However, this definition leads circularly back to definitions. Who defines what is a threat, or what is ‘unusual or extraordinary’?

This is where the Supreme Court may step in. Trump’s buddies may agree with him that only he, and not the courts, has the right to define – as arbitrarily as he chooses — an emergency and how to deal with it.

Immigration

Normally, all persons in the United States, citizens or not, have the right to due process. However, Trump has cited an ancient law that says that due process may be waived if the United States has been invaded by a foreign country. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act. passed in 1798 when America was feuding with France. It permits the president to summarily detain and deport citizens of countries with whom America is at war. 

Trump’s ICE rounded up Venezuelans and deported them to El Salvador, on grounds that Venezuela had invaded the USA and that we were at war with them. Here’s the wording of the AEA:  “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.”

The lower courts ruled that there was no ‘invasion’ and that the USA was not ‘at war’ with Venezuela, and therefore the deportations without due process were illegal.

Similar to the tariff arguments, Trump claimed that the court was overreaching; only the President can determine whether there is an invasion or not. Apparently, if a single Venezuelan sets foot on American soil, the President may consider that an invasion and start deporting thousands of Venezuelans to horrible gulags overseas.

The Supreme Court punted the first time around, but the matter will still come back to them. They will have to determine who has the right to define an ‘invasion’ of the USA, and they may well decide that Trump is the only person with that right.

There may be other cases in which the issue boils down to “Who gets to define *****, the courts or the President, or some other body?”

CAMBODIA’S S.T.E.M. PROBLEM

Let’s face it – STEM education in Cambodia is terrible.

First, some statistics: Countries the world are ranked by PISA scores of 15-year-olds in math and science. Of 81 countries measured (Africa excluded), the average score is 472, while Cambodia scores 336 in math and 347 in science – in both cases dead last, far behind its nearest competitors Dominican Republic and Uzbekistan, respectively. Neighboring Vietnam comes in at 469 and 472, respectively.

PISA itself says:

Since a high ranking on PISA corresponds to economic success, researchers have concluded that PISA is one of the indicators of whether school systems are preparing students for the 21st-century global knowledge economy.

OECD, the organization behind PISA, has published a list of 10 steps that a country may take to improve their PISA scores. www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html.  I won’t delve into these here. Rather I want to suggest another reason for Cambodia’s abysmal results.

My two opening paragraphs show a vicious cycle between school STEM education and university STEM education. Students do poorly in school math, and they graduate, saying, “I hate math and can’t do math.” So they won’t go into math at university level. With no university math graduates to teach high school math, the quality of school teaching is reduced to cook-booking through a textbook and memorizing some definitions and formulas without understanding them.

Poor school education leads to poor higher education which then reinforces the weakness of school education.

This vicious cycle also applies to other quantitative-oriented subjects, like accounting and finance. If university graduates in finance do not even understand compound interest, who is going to teach it to high school students?

I saw a useful solution to this problem in the tiny African country of Lesotho. They imported dozens of American Peace Corps Volunteers to teach math and science. These were STEM graduates from American universities. By teaching real math and science to remote mountain schools, they partially broke the cycle. We had actually real math and science majors at the National University of Lesotho, and most of them went into teaching.

It’s pretty embarrassing to compare Cambodia with Lesotho.

It must be said that Cambodia’s PISA scores have improved. They had been even lower at the previous measurement. Private schools are advertising their STEM programs to attract more students, but many of those STEM programs are just sham window-dressing – buy some fancy lab equipment to show off but never use, or pretend that your students are winning international gold medals (kind of like all those beers). At least, there’s an attitude that it’s good to excel at STEM subjects. That attitude may foster greater interest and incentive in those subjects.

Cambodia must address this problem seriously. The country risks falling behind the rest of the world in science-based achievement. We live in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’. Cambodia must either keep up with this trend, or else be relegated to a producer of agricultural products and other commodities.

WAS BIDEN TREATED?

First, I should say that I find the many attacks on Joe Biden in bad taste. He is no longer a political threat to anyone, so there is no reason to drag his name in the mud. Let’s just drop the matter.

Here’s what I, along with most average Americans, have concluded about the Biden situation, based just on what we hear on the news:

1.Cancers don’t just metastasize into the bones overnight. He must have had this cancer for quite a long time.

    2. Every President’s health is closely monitored with frequent and thorough check-ups. Prostate cancer is one of the first things they check for. His doctors must have known about the cancer and kept it hidden.

    Question:  could the doctors have kept the diagnosis hidden even from Biden himself? Is it conceivable that Biden didn’t know about his own cancer until May of 2025?

    These observations will not change anything; it’s all water under the bridge. There is one issue, however, that should be investigated. That is, if the doctors knew of Biden’s condition and kept it hidden, it looks as though they made no attempt to treat him. That i

    is, they allowed the cancer to progress to an advanced stage without doing anything. In fact, they may have even kept it all secret from Biden himself. I find this behavior reprehensible, and it may even be criminal if the doctors opted not to try to save Biden’s life.

    If true, this is behavior that both Republicans and Democrats should roundly condemn. But when Trump & Co. Try to make political capital from it, and the Democrats push back, the issue becomes relegated to just one more partisan standoff, where each side accuses the other of lying.

    I’m surprised that I’m not hearing in the media any comparison with Woodrow Wilson. He had a stroke during his Presidency, and was basically a vegetable during those final days. But his followers propped him up in bed and pretended that he was still compos mentis.

    In the Biden case, the government was able to continue running without the public suspecting the truth. Why? Because the President had intelligently selected his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President so that the team could carry on the work. That’s actually an important quality of a good leader.
     

    If anything should happen to Donald Trump, could we expect his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President to competently and efficiently carry out the running of the government?

    MUST A SYMBOL REPRESENT SOMETHING?

    Almost all Cambodian homes have a red cloth talisman, called a yantra (or yo-an in Khmer) hanging in their house. It is covered with all sorts of symbols, the most common of which is a squiggly spiral called an ounalome.

    Yantra with dozens of ounalome spirals

    The ubiquitous ounalome is a well-known and revered symbol in Cambodia, but if you ask homeowners what it symbolizes, they have no clue what it means. In fact, the literature tells you that it does have a meaning, namely, the path of life spiraling more and more narrowly upwards, until it reaches the straight path to enlightenment. However, almost no one knows this. It somehow retains its symbolic value, even though its significance it not known.

    Ever since I was in school taking literature and art classes, I have always asked the question, “Must a symbol represent something, or can it stand on its own?” For example, most high school students must discuss the symbolism of the raven in Poe’s famous poem. The discussion concludes with agreement that the raven is a symbol of grief and death.

    I prefer to think of symbols as evoking an inner experience, rather than representing something. Thus, for me, the Raven evokes the grief of the loss of a loved one. It’s like the definition of a Christian sacrament that I learned as a child: “an outward expression of an inner experience.”

    I recall going to a Christmas Eve candlelight service many years ago. At the end, everyone lit and held a candle while Silent Night filled the worship hall. I found tears streaming down my face, as the ritual was so moving, even though I could not have formally defined precisely what the candles and the hymn were representing.

    In fact, I would argue that the analysis of the meaning of a symbol moves the center of operation from the right brain to the left brain. In this way, the right-brained, holistic experience of the symbol is diminished. Thus, I would argue that the more explicit and obvious the meaning of a symbol is, the less effective it is as a true symbol.

    I used to puzzle over the lyrics of (Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan’s songs. Many of his lines seem to make no sense, and yet the listener comes away with an overall experience.  I used to try to figure out the lyrics to “All along the Watchtower”, which starts with the line:

    “There must be some kind of way outta here, Said the joker to the thief ”

    What the heck does it all mean? And yet, the overall effect of the song is quite powerful.

    Tom Taylor, in an article in faroutmagazine.co.uk, says it succinctly:

    it is the ambiguity and philosophical scope of such songs that makes them stand out as masterpieces in the world of modern music. 

    I once had to memorize a French poem by Paul Verlaine, and one line has always stayed with me:


     Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
    Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint    .

    “Poetry is where the vague and the precise come together, as best described in a ‘gray song’.”

    All those literature classes where our left brains analyzed the ‘meaning’ of poems somehow missed the point. It is the holistic right-brain experience that counts, not whether a symbol represents this or that. Does the lotus represent yin or yang? I don’t care. It is a flower that evokes a sense of beauty within us.

    WHAT I’M NOT HEARING ABOUT JUDGE DUGAN

    Did she obstruct justice or not?

    The media have been eerily quiet about the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, the judge who ushered a defendant out the back door of the courtroom while ICE agents were waiting to arrest him at the front door. The government then arrested Dugan for obstructing justice.

    That arrest seems, at first glance, perfectly logical. Dugan did, indeed, prevent ICE from arresting the defendant. Case closed?

    However, several disturbing questions are not being answered —  let alone asked — by the media:

    1. Even from the rear exit, the defendant had to enter the public main hallway or take the elevator or go out the main door of the building. He had no chance to escape, and she knew it. The ICE agents quickly caught him, so the ‘obstruction’ of going out another exit from the courtroom lasted only a matter of seconds. Not much of an obstruction, I’d say. Can you really label this an ‘obstruction’ at all? A felony?

    2. Why was Dugan arguing with the ICE agents visibly standing by the front door (still outside the courtroom and therefore still legally in a public space)? I think this is an important question. Here are two scenarios:

     A) Was Dugan upset that the agents were intentionally intimidating the judge, the defendant, and everyone else in the courtroom? She would be justified to be angry with this outrageous but perhaps legal display of intimidation, but not justified in obstructing them.

    B) Was Dugan claiming that the agents were there illegally? Apparently they showed a warrant to arrest the defendant (for a crime unrelated to the crime for which he was on trial). However, that warrant was issued by ICE itself, not by a judge. This appears to me to be illegal. Let me elaborate:

    It is absurd for any body — police, ICE, you or me — to issue its own warrant. They  must first go to a judge to show probable reason to arrest. Or perhaps they could claim that some misdemeanor, like a speeding ticket, doesn’t require a warrant. But issuing their own fake warrant is acting in bad faith. In fact, issuing the fake warrant would be a crime in itself. If Dugan saw the fake warrant, she would be legally justified in trying to avoid a false arrest.

    If the police broke into your home with a fake and illegal warrant for your father’s arrest, you would be within your rights to resist that crime by ushering your father out the back door. It sounds to that something like this may have happened in Judge Dugan’s courtroom.

    3. What happened after Dugan’s arrest? Was she arraigned and charged before a judge? The media say that she was ‘released’, but they don’t make it clear whether she was set free of charges, or whether she was released on bail, to face charges later. The media are not mentioning her current status: free or charged?

    Now the whole event seems to be out of the news cycle and forgotten. Here are my conclusions:

    The ICE behavior was simply staged theatre. They didn’t need to stand visibly and intimidatingly in the door of the courtroom. Highly improper, but legal. However, they showed only an ICE warrant, not a real one, so Dugan was correct to claim they had no right to be there.
     

    Judge Dugan delayed the arrest of the defendant by a few seconds. Her arrest for ‘obstruction’ and (perhaps illegal) perp walk sound like more theatre. Vintage Trump — stage an event for the cameras to show that you are serious about arresting immigrants and clamping down on ‘woke’ judges.
     

    Trump and Cash Patel and Pam Bondi have made their point to their MAGA cultists, and the case may well disappear, especially if Dugan can show that ICE agents were in her courtroom illegally.

    “He hates the same people we hate.”

    Anyone outside the US would think that Trump is in serious trouble. His promise to reduce the price of eggs on day one has backfired, and even his most hard-headed cultists are beginning to see that the tariffs are raising prices, not lowering them. His promise to end the Ukraine war within 48 hours has also backfired, as he is now saying he’s going to ‘give Ukraine a pass’. Signalgate has mushroomed into such a scandal that it is almost universally held that Hegseth & Co.  have probably made hundreds of hackable calls and divulged volumes of top secret information to Russia and China.

    And yet, Trump’s overall approval rating remains constant around 50%. (even though on certain issues it has tanked.) The majority of Americans are pretty much OK with all these scandals. How can this be? How could anyone tolerate such awful behavior?  I watched an interesting discussion on CNN’s ‘Smerconish’. He pointed out that Trump has masterfully diverted public attention away from the disasters mentioned above to the areas where he is strongest. To wit:

    1. Immigration/racism.  The deportations to El Salvador have focused the news cycle on the deportation of many innocent men to that concentration-camp gulag . All non-Aryan, of course. ICE kidnaps a Hispanic with tattoos, declares without evidence that he is a terrorist/gang member, and ships him off to the Gulag forever. This action should be beyond the pale for any democracy-loving American, but it isn’t. These non-Aryans are all horrible people — ‘rapists and murderers’, ‘dog and cat eaters’, ‘poisoning our blood’, ‘worse than animals’. Hooray for Trump! Ridding us of these non-white vermin. How dare those ‘woke’ courts try to protect these awful people?

    Proud American patriot

    Here’s a thought:  suppose ICE randomly rounded up 1000 non-Aryans, declared them terrorists, and ‘disappeared’ them to the gulag. Suppose that only 2 of the 1000 were later found to be criminals, while the lives of the other innocent 998 and their families were forever ruined. Would Trump & Co. still boast, “We got rid of 2 dangerous criminals. Americans’ lives are safer now. You should thank us.” ?

    2. Eastern private universities.  Hotbeds of ‘woke-ism, these institutions have DEI practices that accept and hire blacks and women and foreigners. Americans hate these liberal, elite seats of woke indoctrination. Hooray for Trump! Attacking these effete libtards and expelling or deporting those snowflakes who disagree with good ol’ Aryan American policies. Of course, he would never attack any of those red-state, jock schools like Alabama or Ohio State. In fact, I was hoping that when Trump invited the OSU football team to the White House, the mostly Afro-American OSU team (How DEI can you get?) would refuse in order to call out Trump’s blatant racism.

    3.  The IRS.  Everyone hates the IRS. The more Trump cuts back or eliminates the IRS, the more we can cheat on our taxes without being audited. Hooray for Trump! Allowing us to underpay our taxes and cause the US public debt to skyrocket.

    Trump has managed to focus the news cycle on these three issues in order to mask his gross failures. He hates the same groups of people his followers hate. This emotionality allows them to support illegal and unconstitutional acts simply out of blind hatred. Anything Trump does to persecute these hated groups is fair game. Courts, the Congress, laws, and the Constitution must not get in the way of these noble actions. Call Trump a dictator if you will, and point to his moral failings, but he is ridding America of this scum, because the courts, etc. are not doing their job.

    To these supporters, Trump is coming out smelling like a rose.

    TRUMP’S TARIFF FORMULA AND CAMBODIA

    Trump slapped Cambodia with one of the highest tariffs, because, he claimed, Cambodia poses 97% tariffs on the US. When you look at a list of Cambodian tariffs on US imports, you see meats and food products at 15%, with other products at 7-15%, nowhere near the 97% calculated by the Trump team.
     

    So I went looking for the Trump formula, which is

    This formula has nothing to do with a country’s tariffs, but rather, its trade balance with the US.  So I looked up Cambodia’s trade figures, which show 320 million in exports to the US (xi in the formula), and 12 billion in imports (mi in the formula). That’s about a 3% ratio of exports to imports, so the Trump claim would be that Cambodia charges 97% tariffs on American goods.

    This despite official figures showing most tariff items  at 7-15%, making the 97% claim look ridiculous.

    I started reading about other countries. Lesotho had the highest tariff on the list, because its exports of diamonds far outweigh imports at virtually 0, since Lesotho imports most food, etc. from South Africa.

    Also Vietnam:  Vietnam-US bilateral trade in 2024 neared US$150 billion, with Vietnam enjoying a substantial surplus of US$124 billion.

    But then the penny dropped. Wait a minute! Cambodia has a huge deficit ratio with the US, while Lesotho and Vietnam have surpluses. In fact, if you look back at that formula, you see that  xi – mi for deficit Cambodia is actually negative. The formula calculates that Cambodia has a negative tariff of 97%, whatever that might mean.

    I can only conclude that that erudite formula has no meaning at all, but uses all those fancy Greek letters to impress readers and make it appear that the designers had some idea what they were doing, which they obviously don’t.

    So why should Cambodia, with its trade deficit, and Vietnam, with its trade surplus with the US, be lumped into the same high tariff rate of about 46% assigned by Trump?

    The answer is found in one word: China. Trump doesn’t want China evading tariffs by channeling its goods, or producing them through Southeast Asia. Therefore, he slaps a high tariff on all Southeast Asian countries so that they cannot be used as staging by China.

    I’ve got news for you — China is going to use Cambodia anyway. China will be making a lot of products which it can no longer sell to the US, and will be looking for other markets. Cambodia, on the other hand, may not be able to import its meat and food from the US, so it will turn to China. Thus, a greatly increased trade between China and Cambodia can be expected.

    Trump is using the trade war as a personal bargaining chip, in hopes that countries will concede something to Trump’s personal bank accounts. Already, Cambodia’s leaders have written to Trump, bending the knee and begging him to lower the tariff, expressing their willingness to cooperate with the almighty Trump.
     

    THE CONTINUING SIGNALGATE COVER-UP

    The media continue to focus on trivial questions such as “What is the definition of ‘classified’?” The Trump administration, with media complicity, has done a masterful job of steering discussion away from the central issue — that of posting sensitive information over unsecured platforms. I have yet to hear anyone ask either of the following questions:

    1. Who authorized the illegal use of Signal for sensitive conversations? That person has broken laws and should be in jail.
    2. Who illegally set the default of Signal to destroy the messages after a certain time? That person has broken laws and should be in jail.

    A third and much more important question is the extent of other Signal communications. The media are reluctant to ask this of government officials, and the one or two attempts at it (e.g. Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs) are met with stonewalling and embarrassed dodging. That suggests that the practice is much more widespread than they are making out.  In addition, the 18 players in the Signalgate leak were quite complacent and at ease with the method, as though they had used it many times, and no one raised any questions about its legality or danger.

    I think it’s fair to conclude that hundreds, if not thousands of messages have been, and continue to be posted over unsecured and hackable platforms.  This raises a couple of important questions or speculations.

    1. If the White House has been using hackable platforms, the Russians and Chinese certainly know this. If so, they have said to themselves, “Hey, we can hack that.” and they certainly have tried and succeeded. Even if they haven’t managed to hack the encryption of the Signal messages, those messages are downloaded and de-crypted into dozens of private phones, where they are fair game for hackers. (Remember the outrage at Hillary’s private server?) Consider that if even one of those 18 private phones (e.g. the guy who was in Moscow at the time) had been compromised, the entire conversation would be known to the Russians. Even Goldberg’s phone might have been tapped.

    I suspect that the Russians did indeed hack that Signal chat, but they decided not to act on it, because any action would reveal how far they had penetrated the communications system.

    2. If hundreds, even thousands, of sensitive conversations have been sent via Signal and intercepted by the Russians, what other top secret information do they have? They possibly know everything that has happened within the White House ambit.

    Are Congressional Republicans also in on the scheme? I suspect so. They are going to extremes to stonewall questions about investigations, not just to placate King Trump, but because they themselves are guilty of crimes and of knowingly leaking sensitive information.

    The media are complicit in this cover-up. I’m sure that many more brilliant and analytical minds than mine have at least entertained thoughts similar to mine. But the media are avoiding those questions like the plague. They appear to be bending the knee (just as the Washington Post, CBS, and NBC have already done) to Trump, almost as if he let it be known that they’d ‘better not go there’.

    I’m not normally a conspiracy theory advocate, but this one seems to have legs. Someone – probably Trump himself — has intentionally broken laws to authorize a hackable system that has almost certainly enabled the Russians (and Chinese and others) to intercept hundreds of top secret messages. The more Trump & Co. Make absurd statements to hide this issue, the more I believe they have something really big to hide.

    Finally, this clear cover-up of crimes, with its obvious lies and distractions, is damaging to my feeling about all the other events in Washington. It lends credence to my fear that many other issues — Covid origins, vaccine effectiveness, etc. — have been tainted by the government. It makes me less willing to believe anything that comes out of Washington, or from the media, who are in the thrall of Trump.

    Now a strange thing has just happened. I was surprised to receive an unsolicited message that AI has added two paragraphs to the above. I will include them here, but you should realize that they are AI work and not mine.

    It raises a troubling question about the integrity of our institutions and the information they provide. When trust erodes, concerned citizens like myself find it increasingly difficult to navigate the complexities of governmental narratives. It feels as though we are being gaslit, led to believe that our doubts are unfounded when, in fact, the patterns of misinformation suggest otherwise. This skepticism extends beyond just the current administration; it permeates my views on broader political discourse, complicating my ability to engage with policies that affect my daily life.

    As I scrutinize everything from economic reports to health guidelines, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is influenced by political agendas rather than genuine public interest. The implications of this distrust are significant, breeding apathy and division among citizens. If we are to find a way forward, a robust dialogue that embraces accountability and transparency is essential to restore a sense of faith in our governance and the media.

    SIGNAL-GATE — THE REAL QUESTION

    I’m quite amused to watch the Trump team squirm to lie, downplay, cast blame, etc., to get off the hook for the egregious leak of secret information. The media are going berserk painting the administration as a bunch of incompetent bumblers.

    However, the Trump team is craftier than that. They have managed to focus the inquiry on two questions:

    1. How did Goldberg’s name get added to that list?, and
    2. Was the leaked information classified?

    The media have taken the bait, and they devote their whole time to those questions. Trump may be successful in framing the issue as one of incompetence. They are relatively safe in assuming that no one will find out how Goldberg’s name was added. As for classification, no one formally ‘classified’ the data. Even in the case of including the name of a secret CIA operative, no one actually declared this information as ‘classified’. So the media go round and round seeking answers to the two questions, without ever getting a satisfying answer.

    I suspect that the end result will be the firing of Waltz. That will dismiss the whole incident as an innocent case of inadvertent neglect, and the whole story will disappear from the news cycle.

    No, all this is a distraction from the real issue, which I am not hearing: what were all these top-ranked people doing discussing sensitive information over an unsecured line, on their private phones, that could be hacked? All these people were well aware that using an unsecured line is illegal. It is doubly illegal when they willfully alter Signal’s default of preserving messages, to delete the messages, as law requires that messages be retained.  This is not incompetence; it is a planned effort to break the law and go around the ultra-secure government system.

    No one in that room questioned the use of an unsecured line. Indeed, they were complacent and comfortable using it, as though they were quite used to the method. This suggests that many other chats and messages are sent through unsecured means. In fact, maybe ALL White House communication is done through unsecured means. This needs to be investigated, but I think I know what the answer will be.

    If all or most of the White House messages are unsecured, then Trump must be aware of the fact, and in fact he must use those unsecured lines himself, which means that he must have approved of the method, and probably ordered that Signal be used.

    Now why would Trump approve or even order the White House staff to use (illegally) lines that are hackable on private phones, as opposed to the secure government procedure? The prima facie answer is that Trump wants someone to hack the messages. And who might that ‘someone’ be? Well, Putin is the first name that comes to mind.

    I’m suggesting that it is at least possible that Trump ordered White House staff to use an illegal system that Putin could hack into, giving Putin access to all secret conversations at the White House. How about members of Congress? Or the Pentagon? Do they all use Signal, as ordered by Trump? Is it possible that Putin knows all our military secrets? The loyal cronies, all of whom are aware of what is going on and how illegal is, won’t dare blow the whistle. Indeed, they are safe because they were ordered by the President to break the law, and the President cannot be prosecuted. (Reminds me a bit of Nazi prison guards.)

    All this speculation is outrageously monstrous, but I feel that the rabbit hole is pointing in that direction. That is why the Trump team is going to such lengths to focus on the questions of Goldberg and classification, in order to avoid some really serious and intentional breaking of the law. If my suggestions are even 1/10th true, then Hillary’s emails, the Mar-a-Lago documents, and the addition of Goldberg to the list, pale into insignificance.

    One final question: if it is shown that Trump is indeed enabling Putin to access all our secret data, will his MAGA cultist cronies still support this criminal behavior? All indications are that they will allow this to continue.

    CREATIONISM DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN’T EAT PORK

    Christians have framed the religious argument as one of creationism versus science. They point to the increasing confusion in science and the weirdness of quantum theory, as opposed to the clear observation that this complex universe couldn’t have created itself.

    So for the sake of argument, let’s accept that the universe was created.

    First question, by whom or by what? Christians assume that God is not only human, but also a white male, and that He lives in the sky. He is old and has a white beard. (Old? Like billions of years old?) That by no means follows from the acceptance of creationism itself. The universe might have been created by a committee. If by one entity, I prefer to call God ‘It’.

    Why does God have a white beard and long hair, and why must ‘He’ wear a robe?

    Second assumption: God must have had a purpose in creating the universe. That doesn’t follow, either. Maybe It was only playing around, or maybe It had created thousands of other universes, of which our own was just a flawed model to be abandoned for a better model.

    Third assumption: humans hold a special place in God’s plan. That doesn’t follow. We have language, but all sorts of critters have special abilities. Octopuses and dolphins and other oceanic creatures that we know little about have some amazing powers. Even bees can see wavelengths of light that we cannot sense. To say that God gave Man “dominion over the beasts” is arrogant in the extreme.

    Fourth assumption: Man can know and understand God’s plan. Man (or at least some men, like priests or prophets) can communicate with God and receive instructions as to what Man is supposed to do, such as declare war on other countries who worship the wrong gods, or enslave peoples with dark skin.
     

    Fifth assumption: God is good. God has a moral dimension. That does not follow. Maybe God is evil and Its plan is to create as much pain and suffering as possible. After witnessing pain, cruelty, and suffering, we might think that an evil God is a pretty reasonable assumption. “Why did He lose…six million Jews?”
     

    Sixth assumption: God intervenes in Its creation. It creates earthquakes and tsunamis that kill thousands of people. In fact, people can even ask God to intervene, to the point where two opposing football teams each have a ‘team prayer’ asking God to help them annihilate the other team. But as the Doors once said, “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.”

    And finally, God has told some people not to eat ‘unclean’ pork (Did God create pigs?), while to others It has said not to eat beef, or hundreds of other taboos that vary widely from religion to religion. All these petty rules are believed to stem from the original observation that the universe is an amazing thing, and peoples have leapt to conclusion after conclusion after conclusion — all non sequiturs — that have nothing to do with the original creationism. How could this happen?