A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

17,000 Bombs

 The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran. 

But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year. 

Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

Bloodline Punishment

 The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.

And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. 

Voting Against Interest

 The New York Times ran an editorial last week reminding us of the looming Medicaid cuts under Trump's big budget disaster that are set to take effect after the midterms, and which are likely to push millions more low-income Americans off of health insurance. 

These changes come on top of the government's recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, as well as cuts to nutrition assistance that already went into effect last year. 

The Day of Reckoning

 The Bezos-ified Washington Post ran a big scary editorial the other day warning about looming fiscal catastrophe, due to the inexorable rise of government spending and public debt. 

On the one hand, I'm tempted to dismiss this as ideologically-motivated alarmism. (One notices the essay points the finger at entitlement spending but does not mention Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, e.g.) Besides, people have been saying for years that we are headed for a debt crisis, yet it never actually seems to arrive. 

The Next Dilemma

 In one of the essays in his collection The Trail of the Dinosaur, Arthur Koestler makes the point that many of the historical dilemmas or controversies that once seemed most insoluble were eventually overcome—not because one side or the other at some point "won" the argument—but simply because new problems emerged that made the whole previous debate seem silly. 

The Crusades didn't end because Christianity "beat" Islam or vice versa. So too, Catholics and Protestants never did manage to exterminate one another in Europe's wars of religion—much as they tried. Instead, in both cases, the two sides first fought each other to a stalemate. And it seemed there was no possible exit. But then, new social circumstances arose that made the whole fight seem boring and irrelevant.