The worst 4th of July: Evidence of our evil in 50 quotes below

  The Fourth of July:  The Great Delusion

 Given the state of the US with its worst leader in US history plus nearly 100 national and global trends heading in the wrong direction, this will be the most disappointing Fourth of July in American history.

Mostly because it is increasingly being transformed into a celebration of a unhinged president rather than a celebration of the principle of freedom, liberty and justice for all that gave birth to the American experiment.  An experiment that has failed to achieve any one of the seven intentions in the U.S. Constitution's preamble.

"We the People" have failed to institute a republic 

To form a more perfect Union

To establish Justice

To insure domestic Tranquility

To provide for the common defense

To promote the general Welfare

To secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves 

and our Posterity

But the greater disappointment is that 250 years later, most Americans still misunderstand what we are celebrating.  In our minds we are celebrating our "Independence".  But that word and concept was never written into the profound 1776 Declaration.  Its official title was The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.   Most importantly, its central message was not independence. It was freedom from tyranny and government without the consent of the governed.

We believe our “independence” is our nation's highest political virtue. Yet in reality independence is a delusion according to Albert Einstein.

Consider the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and how this needless war affects prices in American stores and is causing a global hunger crisis.  An Ebola outbreak in Africa threatens lives far beyond Africa as Measles is spreading in Texas. Extreme weather events and violent extremists ignore national borders as freely as cyberattacks.  While the evolution of weapons, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology increasingly ties the fate of every nation to the fate of every other.

But long before Albert Einstein described our sense of separateness as an “optical delusion of consciousness”  indigenous cultures understood that everything is connected, interdependent, changing, and vulnerable. 

The founders could not have imagined a world in which a virus could circle the globe in days, a cyberattack could cripple infrastructure from thousands of miles away, or greenhouse gases emitted on one continent could alter the climate of another. Yet these are now practical realities that can and do disrupt every aspect of our lives. 

The challenge of our time is not learning how to become more independent. It is learning how to manage our growing interdependence while preserving freedom, justice, security, prosperity, and posterity. 

 Forty-six years ago, President Carter’s bipartisan Commission on World Hunger warned that widespread poverty and hunger would contribute to future wars, revolutions, genocides, refugees, environmental destruction, and instability. Most of what they predicted is happening.  Eleven years ago, the nations of the world adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in an attempt to address most of the root causes.

Whether we succeed or fail will depend on whether we finally recognize a fundamental Truth that is becoming impossible to ignore: our freedoms depend upon our virtuous responsibilities that extend beyond our political borders.

As we approach America’s 250th birthday, perhaps it is time to stop celebrating the myth of independence and start celebrating our reality of interdependence, plus working to abide by "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and the "Truths" that we should all hold "to be self-evident".  And finally keep our flag pledge of "liberty and justice for all". 

Our future will be determined not by how successfully we separate ourselves from one another, but by how wisely we learn to live together on a small, connected, interdependent, and vulnerable planet.  We have the money, the resources, and all the solutions needed.  We only lack the political will to prioritize the health of people and nature.  And to stop believing that everything we think - is worth killing and dying over.   Freedom must be better armed than tyranny.  But the greatest evils in the world and the most suffering, it believing things that just aren't true. 

QUOTES as evidence. 

“The sad truth...is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.” Hannah Arendt quoted in The Bulwork.

“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” Rousseau

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein

"Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." - Bertrand Russell 

"We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man ... far too little. His psyche should be studied -- because we are the origin of all coming evil." - C.G. Jung   (this came from a 1959 BBC interview when he was asked about the possibility of a third world war.’  If you want the transcript which is even more concerning let me know chuck@igc.org)

"Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."  Friedrich Nietzsche 

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.”  Martin Luther King 

"In times such as these, people should recognize that evil knows no borders, knows no limits and knows no compassion. Those around the globe that value freedom must continue to persevere even in the darkest of times." - Michael C. Burgess

"The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century." - Allyson Schwartz

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."   -- Socrates   (469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty: Simone Weil 

"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil"   -- Thomas Mann  (1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)

“...accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”  Declaration of Independence

"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."  -- George Washington  (1732-1799) Source: Washington's Farewell Address 1796.

“It is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”   Bill Joy, chief scientist and cofounder of Sun Micorsystems. March 2000

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."  -- John Adams  (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President    Source: John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint:" -  Edmund Burke - Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France

"By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline."  -- Thomas Jefferson  

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.  – Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays [1907]

“Not in the sky, nor in the middle of the ocean, nor in the cave of a mountain, nor anywhere else, is there a place, where one may escape from the consequences of an evil deed.”  – Dhammapada, Verse 127

"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."  -- Paul Johnson  American historian

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberative and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world  untouched."  Justice Robert Jackson  - Nuremberg address

The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.” Ludwig von Mises, Chapter III: Etatism

"When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."  -  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago” 

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.” Simone Weil

"The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions.  The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil.  He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!"  -- Mordechai Anielewicz   (1919-1943) Jewish resistance leader against Nazi oppression in Warsaw, Poland, 1943  

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil:  George Orwell, London. UK. 1941

“Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.”   – Milton Friedman, An Open Letter to Bill Bennett [September 7, 1989]

  “(N)ot only will the United States impose preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses, but the nation will also punish those who engage in terror and aggression and will work to impose a universal moral clarity between good and evil.”  George Bush, 2002 West Point Commencement speech. 

“The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.” Frank Kent

"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."  -- Andrew Jackson  (1767-1845) 7th US President    Source: July 10, 1832, Veto of the Bank Bill

For my own part, I believe that our Constitution, with its absolute guarantees of individual rights, is the best hope for the aspirations of freedom which men share everywhere. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th Century straitjacket, unsuited for this age. It is old but not all old things are bad. The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today ....  – Hugo L. Black, "The Bill of Rights" [1960]

August 02, 2015 "Information Clearing House" -  In the final years of his life, the increasingly radical Black Civil Rights, peace, and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and wrote against what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated.” The first such evil was racism, deeply understood to mean not just prejudiced white sentiments and formal segregation in the U.S. South but the racially separate and unequal functioning of the nation’s basic institutions and social structures.”

The second evil was poverty and economic inequality – class injustice, which King rooted in capitalism. That system, King felt, “produces beggars” alongside luxuriant opulence, necessitating “the radical redistribution of economic and political power.” 

The third evil was U.S. military imperialism – no mere afterthought in King’s critique of the American System. Explaining why he had turned openly against Washington’s monstrous war on Vietnam in 1967, King argued that conscience did not permit him to remain silent on the crimes the “strange [American] liberators” were committing in Southeast Asia. At the same time, he noted, his condemnation of America’s role as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today” (a description that still rings true today) was strongly linked to his struggles against racial and economic disparity in the U.S.

Even of these evils would be resolved if the protection of human rights were made superior to the protection of the rights of governments, corporations and religions. There is one more evil MLK failed to mention. Our protection of the environment, which is essential to all our freedoms, security and prosperity.

"To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it." -Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The beginning of modern evil was when governments began again to intervene in the economic sphere. Every act of intervention turned man from his true purpose."  – Garet Garrett, "The World That Might Have Been" [1945]

"Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."  Arnold Toynbee

"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil."         - Albert Einstein

The Root of All Evil? The God Delusion : Richard Dawkins 

Video explores the unproven beliefs that are treated as factual by many religions and the extremes to which some followers have ... taken them.

"The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."  -- Noah Webster  (1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name. 1833

"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind."  -- Henry Miller  (1891-1980) American writer 

“A new world must be born, a world that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity. This new world must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil; where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect." - Inventor, Nikola Tesla

"Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause . . . True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts." Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

Once we start from this idea, accepted by all our political theorists [that] "The motive force of society is the government"; once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the state is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything.   – Frederic Bastiat, "The Law" [1850]

"The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 

1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 

2. Dupes - a large class, no doubt - each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is "a free government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best government on earth," and such like absurdities. 

3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change."   -- Lysander Spooner     (1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist   Source: No Treason. No. VI The Constitution of no Authority, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1870).

"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."  -- Hannah Arendt   (1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany   Source: On Revolution (1963), ch. 2.

“A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by a majority.” Author Unknown

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." -  Thomas Paine

Let us begin this new experiment following biology and the loving, cooperative, compassionate spirit of our social species.  cw

A vital US agency few Americans are aware of...but effects all.

 

 

Today’s Wpost (6-16-26) article mentioned this agency

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is an institution most Americans have never heard of—but millions have experienced its effects every year through screenings, vaccines, counseling, and insurance coverage decisions.  

The short version:  It was created in 1984 to answer a deceptively simple question: “Of all the things medicine could do to prevent disease, which ones actually work well enough to recommend for people who are not yet sick?”  That may sound obvious today, but it was a major shift in medical thinking then.  [FYI: the first time the AMA met with the APHA regarding nosocomial infections (Hospital acquired infectious diseases - then killing over 100,000 Americans annually) was in the mid 1990s when I was Issues Director for the Global Health Council.]  

Why it was created?  Before the 1980s, preventive medicine in the U.S. was uneven. Doctors often ordered annual tests, exams, and screening procedures because they seemed intuitive or customary—not always because strong evidence showed they improved health outcomes.

There was growing recognition that:

• Some screening tests save lives.
• Some screening tests create more false alarms, anxiety, procedures, and cost than benefit.
• Prevention could improve health and potentially reduce suffering long before expensive treatment becomes necessary.

The model was influenced partly by the earlier Canadian approach to evidence-based preventive care.

The original mission was to develop guidance for primary-care doctors about what should be included in routine preventive examinations.   

What the Task Force actually does?  The USPSTF is an independent volunteer panel (today generally 16 experts) in:

• family medicine
• internal medicine
• pediatrics
• nursing
• preventive medicine
• behavioral health
• obstetrics and gynecology

Their job is not to treat disease.  But to evaluate scientific evidence and answer questions like:

• Should healthy adults be screened for colon cancer?
• At what age should mammograms start?
• Should people be screened for depression?
• Does counseling reduce smoking?
• Should preventive medication be offered for certain risks?

They review evidence and assign grades.   Typical grading:

• A = strong recommendation
• B = recommend
• C = selective use
• D = recommend against
• I = insufficient evidence  

One important nuance:  The Task Force generally evaluates health benefit and harm, not whether something saves money. Cost is intentionally not the main criterion.  

What changed over the decades? 

1984–1989: Creation phase: 

• Initial panel formed and Published the first Guide to Clinical Preventive Services.  

1990s–2000s: Institutionalization:  Reconstituted and updated.

• Became more systematic and evidence-based.
• Support moved under what became the federal health research agency AHRQ. Congress later formally authorized support.  

2010 onward: Huge expansion in influence:

• The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act linked insurance coverage to USPSTF recommendations.
• Services receiving A or B grades became generally required to be covered by many insurers without patient cost-sharing.  

That transformed the Task Force from a clinical advisory group into something that also affects:

• insurance coverage,
• public health priorities,
• healthcare spending patterns.

Examples of influential recommendations over the years:  Some recommendations that affected millions:

• lowering age guidance for certain cancer screenings
• changing advice on daily aspirin use for prevention
• depression screening
• tobacco cessation counseling
• HIV prevention services
• colorectal cancer screening updates  

The deeper logic behind the institution:  To summarize the philosophy in one sentence:  Move resources upstream—prevent illness before paying to manage its consequences.  This idea overlaps with policy making priority on any issue: prevention versus reaction.

But there is also a built-in tension:

• prevention can reduce suffering and future costs,
• yet every preventive intervention also consumes resources and can create unintended harms if overused.

The Task Force exists to try to keep those two realities in balance using evidence rather than intuition alone.   One recent note: the USPSTF has become more politically visible because court cases and administrative decisions now affect its authority and meeting schedule, reflecting broader debates over who should define preventive care standards in the U.S.  

[Applied to rising global health and national security threats this will only cost more lives and more dollars.]

US Debt bomb: Financing Armageddon or invest in Preventing it?

 America’s national debt didn’t appear overnight. It’s been growing for decades and accelerated dramatically in the past twenty-five years. Nearly every discussion reduces the problem to taxes versus spending.  One question deserves urgent attention: Why not invest in prevention?  We’re spending enormous amounts reacting to problems after they become crises.  WTF?

 This absent mindedness must stop.   We know the problem.  An ignore it.   Wake up!  

So called ‘Healthcare’ offers the first and perhaps clearest example of our delusional insanity. “Healthcare spending” is mostly disease care, injury care, and crisis management. We spend heavily treating conditions that in most cases could have been reduced through earlier wiser choices and actions. Obesity-related illness, preventable forms of heart disease, complications from diabetes, smoking-related disease, substance misuse, avoidable injuries, unmanaged stress, and delayed preventive care is one of the greatest thing killing us, our children’s economic future, and our immediate national security.   In the late 1990s after being elected to the Action Board of the American Public Health Association (APHA) I made this observation in a board meeting with the other elected board members. It met with silence. Jesus was right when he said  'The Truth will set you free."  I was not re-elected.  

Not all illnesses are preventable. Genetics, environment, and simple bad luck. And sometimes bad decisions (I've made many. The worst, falling 30+ ft from a tree without dying...but sustained a burst fracture to the L2 vertebrae, then, as a paraplegic, taking a few years to rewire and regain much of my nerve endings from the waste down. - Note to self. Check knots before climbing, and so great to have 'health insurance'!). 

Our nation's healthcare costs are not high just because Americans make bad choices.  Compared with other developed countries, the US also pays higher prices for medical services, medications, administration, and technology.  Bad laws play a key role as well.   But prevention remains one of the highest return investments available.

Every reduction in smoking rates prevents future cancer and heart disease. Good nutrition reduces chronic illnesses. Physical activity lowers medical costs, and moderately intense fitness reduces cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and mental health issues. Cleaner air and water prevent disease before treatment becomes necessary. Early detection is almost always cheaper than late intervention.

This logic extends beyond medicine.  Our national budget increasingly reflects reactive spending to many other problems.

Military spending has expanded not only because of wars but because modern defense is expensive, especially because of lobbying, virtually no audits, fondness of legacy systems quickly obsolete from advances in technology, replacing depleted weapon systems, maintaining global readiness, investing in cyber defense, research on developing autonomous systems and drones, protecting supply chains, strengthening space capabilities, and preparing for new or reemerging threats.

Defense is necessary, but the question is why don’t we spend enough upstream to reduce the conditions that create instability in the first place. High infant mortality rates are the single greatest cause of nation state failure. American can’t be first in the world when over 10,000 children die each day from cheaply preventable malnutrition and infectious disease.

Our delusion of independence keeps us from investing more attention.  And easy successes are invisible due to lack of media coverage.  Compassion doesn’t sell.  And no one holds a parade for a war that never happened. A disease stopped from being pandemic isn’t newsworthy.  No one thanks an engineer for infrastructure that didn’t collapse.   No one notices a genocide that didn’t happen because a nation’s economy improved, or a weather system didn’t create chaos.  Yet these invisible successes are among the greatest sources of prosperity.

Worse yet, interest payments now add another layer to the challenge. Debt itself creates future spending obligations. Money spent servicing yesterday’s decisions cannot be invested in tomorrow’s opportunities.  This is not an argument for austerity. It is an argument for wisdom.

A healthy society requires defense, emergency response, hospitals, jobs, and the capacity to deal with crisis.

A wise society would ask: “What investments reduce the need for tomorrow’s expenses?  Preventive budgets include:

Public health.

Education.

Infrastructure.

Scientific research.

Community resilience.

Environmental stewardship.

Early childhood support.

Mental health.

Diplomacy.

Preparedness.

The old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is ignored and America’s debt challenge is simply - we the people elect leaders that are reactionary budgeters.  Way too much of what we spend arrives after the damage is already done.

Our nation’s success should be measured not by how effectively we react to crises.  But investing to prevent crisis in the first place.  GDP does not measure progress or wisdom. It measures a nation’s overall wealth, not its overall health, or our civic wisdom.

 Environmental prevention demands the same wise long-term investment. Climate change, biodiversity loss, water shortages, soil degradation, pollution, and ecosystem disruption increasingly function like delayed invoices rather than distant or hard to imagine environmental concerns. When prevention is delayed, societies pay later through disaster recovery, rising insurance costs, damaged infrastructure, agricultural losses, migration pressures, health impacts, military instability, and economic disruption. Whether one views climate change primarily as an environmental issue, a national security issue, a public health issue, or an economic issue, the principle remains the same: Everything is connected...except our budgets and our wisdom.  And prevention is always less expensive than repair. The question isn’t whether society will pay, but whether we choose to pay earlier through preparation and mitigation or later through reaction and recovery, or economic default as a nation.  It’s possible.  And it is also preventable. 

We can roughly estimate savings from prevention efforts, but we cannot calculate it precisely.  “Quality of life” and culture are not directly convertible into dollars. We can make a reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimate.

 Over the last twenty years, total U.S. healthcare spending has been roughly $60–70 trillion cumulative (public + private combined). Recent years have been nearly $5 trillion annually.   The US typically spends about 17–18% of GDP on health, while many comparable industrialized democracies spend roughly 10–12%.   If the U.S. had spent at the average level of peer countries while maintaining comparable outcomes, a rough estimate suggests:

• Lower-bound estimate: about $10 trillion saved over 20 years
• Middle estimate: about $15–20 trillion saved
• Aggressive estimate: $20–25+ trillion

These are rough scenario estimates, not audited calculations.  But there is a second part of this question that matters even more:  Would those savings come from Americans simply becoming healthier? Not mostly. But research consistently suggests that America’s higher spending is also driven heavily by higher prices, administrative complexity, fragmented insurance structures, expensive technology adoption, and payment incentives—not just unhealthy behavior. Americans do not necessarily visit doctors more often than peers; but we often pay more when we do.  But culture does matter.

 Around the end of the Cold War, Carl Sagan argued that the US had spent on the order of $20 trillion (in then-current dollars) on the Cold War arms race and military buildup. He said that was roughly twice as much as the value of “everything in the US except the land.”   Today both of those numbers would likely be doubled. And most of the military spending will never be used...and if it were... there would be few people or dollars left to invest in anything.  This more than any other issue represents the insanity of humanity.  Simply because we as human beings have not yet learned to be the landlord over our mind’s lethal mental constructs that once helped our social species tribes thrive - like religion, politics, and economics.  But now simply justify the mass murder of our human family members -when we have the wealth, and technological capacity to maximize both human and environmental health -- to create heaven on earth - without risking AGI creating hell on earth.

It may not be too late to prioritize investment in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  But too few - often very smart Americans - don't even know they exist.

Freedom, Security, or Independence: Our inescapable Trilemma! We can only have two.

 

For 5 decades I've studied two newspapers a day, multiple magazines each week and month.  Then the internet came.  OMG.  Think of any policy issue that is outside our persistent freedom/security dilemma.  

Thomas Paine's 1776 Common Sense pamphlet published 6 months prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  He asserted that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the freedom and security of people.  The concept of interdependence back then was only recognized by indigenous cultures and some religions. 

Anyone who questions this is vastly ignorant of universal principles. Albert Einstein asserted the word Independence is a delusion.  The invention of nuclear weapons should have convinced us of this. But the UN Charter was founded on the same delusion as our U.S. Constitution.  

And there is no greater representation of humanities' trilemma. Every policy debated fits within this reality.  Now, AI will be our last chance to get humanities survival on a solid foundation...and quickly adapt our governance systems to this reality.  

Now, potentially catastrophic, both US, China and a few other governments are in a race to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). And whoever creates it first will likely dominate the world militarily economically, and politically if AGI doesn’t dominate all of humanity first.  

And that could happen in fraction of a second given it's exponential growth upon exponential growth of intelligence...and make decisions we cannot imagine. And worse yet, control.  Most AI experts believe it could happen anytime within the next few years...if not months.  And at that point it will be too late to stop it. 

There are still a few ways to maximize our freedom and security in our interdependent world. But it's the competition between nations and companies to achieve AGI first that is the primary driver of the gamble with humankind's future.  A future with unpredictable outcomes.

If by chance AGI decides humans are worth saving and we use it wisely - we could create heaven on earth, restoring our environment to a garden of Eden - and living longer, healthy lives, even anticipate natural disasters and celestial events. Or, AGI will consider us a problem or nothing worth entertaining, and take us out.  We've been heading that direction on our own...with our own insanity, believing we are independent, and establishing our governance system on this delusion. 

And we are running out of time to put effective controls on all nations and corporations regarding the current evolution of AI. If we are not already too late. 

As long as profits and political national powers continue to drive us into a head-on crash with the unknown. Prepare for the worse...if that's even possible.   It is a given that AI's exponential growth is no match for linear thinking, our various human values and priorities, plus our mental insanity that resists knowing what we need to do...and then not doing it.  Our species has done this for thousands of years.  What is so complicated about taking care of nature and each there?  Oh yes. Our mind's concepts (religion, politics, and economics) that won't evolve or even try to adapt to reality. 

Know this!  Protection of National Sovereignty should no longer remain supreme over the protection of human rights and the environment. Capitalism cannot continue being regulated -driven by greed, indifference to people's needs, and ignorance of our planets life support systems.  Our mental constructs are driving us off an AI cliff, into the AGI unknown.  

A comedian once said, 'humankind stands at a crossroads. One road leads to utter hopelessness and despair.  The other - to complete annihilation.'  He hoped we would have the wisdom to make the right choice.'

The phrase 'United we stand, divided we fall', has never been more appropriate and urgent as a idea whose time has come.  We need an urgent prioritization of a global campaign that already exists.  It was created in 2015 at the UN by involvement with all nations and organization concerned about humanity and the environment.   They agreed on 17 "Sustainable Development Goals" to be achieved by 2030.  

Few Americans are aware of them. But every citizen of every nation should urgently demanded of their government and the billionaires driving this global gamble to prioritize this comprehensive, holistic, and synergistic effort. It's affordable and achievable. It only lacks the political will and the financing that policy makers, billionaires and multimillionaires can afford.  

Instead, they are doubling down on funding AI and the energy infrastructure needed to be #1.  Meanwhile, the SDGs have the capacity to address the root causes of most of the very expensive disruptive forces that cross our delusional borders each day.  Preventable disruptions killing and displacing millions while destroying both human infrastructure and nature's systems.

We have forgotten that nature will always have the last vote.  Hopefully AI will gain that wisdom, because we have not.   Achieving the SDGs won’t guarantee AI will not achieve AGI.  That goal must ASAP.  I don't believe prayer will work.  If we love our human family, we will stop this insanity, unite in every country and within every business, and stop those who govern by politics, power, or greed.

This may not be the time to preach non-violence to people in power.   It's a gamble we need to take - to finally unite humankind (if that's even possible given our mind's priority of defending mental identities- to the death).   It's been said, we will only fight for things we love.  It's time we love people and planet, over profits and patriotism.   We can ensure sustainability for this miracle planet we have been gifted, and do it non-violently.  But our investment of time and money must be made soon.  

The Declaration of Independence gave us a phrase that still contains the solution. Those "Truths" that we should all "hold to self evident" came from "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God".  Violating those laws will only leave us with the new laws followed by AGI.  

Feel lucky?   Hope is not a strategy. This is a time for human agency...action to actually achieve life, 'liberty and justice for all'.  

This coming Sunday in the US! And every day you make the pledge.

 

Flag Day: and the 5 Words We Forgot

Every year on June 14, Americans celebrate Flag Day. We display the Stars and Stripes, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and honor the sacrifices of those who served under our flag.  But this is making a pledge!

Yet few of ask: What exactly are we pledging allegiance to do?

The last five words of the Pledge are among the most important in the American ideal, our language, and the American spirit:  ”…with liberty and justice for all.”

Not liberty for some.  Not justice for some.  Not freedom for one nation at the expense of another.

Liberty and justice for all.   These words echo the vision of the Declaration of Independence, which appealed not to power, wealth, tribe, or nation, but to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Declaration offered humankind the principles greater than governments themselves should have codified.  Principles rooted in human freedom, security, health, dignity, equality, and our common irreversible interdependent social human species....often referred to as humankind or humanity.

Unfortunately, our patriotic political culture treats allegiance to the Constitution as if it were an end in itself. And within the US population, political polarization is increasing along with hatred and an increasing belief that violence is not only possible...but necessary. 

The U.S. Constitution was a remarkable achievement but flawed from the start.  It still has three ways of being amended.   But human minds are steadfast addicted to their beliefs and willing to kill and even die defending them.   Thomas Jefferson believed any constitution should be rewritten every 19 years, to fit the next generation, just as a jacket would need to be altered to fit a growing person. 

The greatest crisis, one after another over the last 240+ years, and now, increasingly close to a human extinction event.  If not in a nuclear war or bioterrorist Armageddon...with either linked to the evolution of AI... or AGI itself orchestrating mass murder.  And there is not a single AI expert who believes they or anyone else, can predict what AGI will do when it arrives, and it will, and we cannot control it. 

The US Constitution was designed for an old world - with separate states and limited interdependence. Today’s world is the opposite.  Now all people and nations are increasingly connected and interdependent as global forces (climate, capitalism, corruption, conflicts, contagion, and a UN Charter that enables nations with unprecedented military power, slow democratic power, or a dictatorship to determine life and death of people anywhere and nature everywhere) that cannot be stopped by borders, missiles, drones, popular vote, pathological liars, or police power.  

Human survival itself is now entirely interdependent.  The central challenge of our time is not simply whether “We the people” can govern itself, but whether humanity can unite in time, and learn the solutions, government have ignored, to keep people and nature healthy and sustainable.    

We continue to believe and act as though nations are independent - when the evidence points in the opposite direction. Our economies, ecosystems, technologies, and security are woven together more tightly than ever before.  Believing otherwise does not preserve freedom; it undermines it.

The greatest irony of Flag Day is that a few hundred million Americans have pledged allegiance to “liberty and justice for all,” with relatively few making those words the organizing principle of their work or civic lives.

If liberty and justice are truly for all, they must apply beyond our political tribe, religion, race identity, and especially beyond our national borders. The pledge phrase challenges us to expand our moral concern to everyone whose life is affected by our decisions.

It’s been said many times by US policy makers that “all politics is local”. What they don’t say, and we persistently ignore is “all consequences are global”.  The increasing insecurity we see around the world—the erosion of democratic norms, the growth of conflict, environmental degradation, economic instability, and widening inequality—is not merely a failure of institutions. It is a failure to take seriously the promise we casually and habitually repeat with hand over our heart.

The flag is not the goal.   The Constitution is not the goal.   Even national greatness, or Making America Great Again, is not the goal.    The goal is what the flag was supposed to represent: a society and human spirit committed to liberty and justice for all.

This Flag Day, perhaps the most patriotic act is not reciting familiar words. It’s asking ourselves whether we are willing to live by them.  The future of humanities freedom, security, prosperity and sustainability depend on those final five words becoming more than a slogan.

Keep your pledge, or stop making it. 

Liberty and justice for all.  The alternative will not end well.

 

Science Day 2026

 The core of science approach.

1. Skepticism

2. Empirical evidence.

3. Seeking falsification- not confirmation!!!! 

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Albert Einstein, 1941

 “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”   Carl Sagan  (Suggests science can deepen our sense of awe and meaning.)

“When you mix science and politics -- you get politics.”  John M. Barry, Historian. 

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.”  — Albert Einstein, quoted in Scientific American

“The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty; and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments....We waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws.” ― Benjamin Rush

“Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.” Dr  Benjamin Rush,  a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A friend of Thomas Jefferson and asked him when drafting the Declaration to change the word “Happiness” to “Health”. 

“But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” (Albert Einstein, 1941) 

“While it is true that science, to the extent of its grasp of causative connections, may reach important conclusions as to the compatibility and incompatibility of goals and evaluations, the independent and fundamental definitions regarding goals and values remain beyond science's reach.” (Albert Einstein, 1948) 

“There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that the religious teachings are utopian ideals and are unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs.” (Albert Einstein, 1948) 

“The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.  Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men."  -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   (1929-1968) US civil rights leader

“Science can make a nuclear bomb, but it cannot tell us not to drop it.” Unknown (A warning about science’s moral neutrality—it empowers but doesn’t guide.)

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”   Isaac Asimov (A timeless caution about the gap between knowledge and ethical maturity.)

 “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”   Isaac Asimov   (We must grow wiser as we grow more powerful.) 

 “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.” Adam Smith  (Celebrates science as a counterbalance to irrationality.)

 “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”  Neil deGrasse Tyson  (A blunt affirmation of science’s evidence-based nature.)

“Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.” — Louis Pasteur   (Science as a unifying and enlightening force.)

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.”   Edwin Hubble   (A poetic reflection on science as human curiosity made methodical.)

“Man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.”   Edwin Hubble  (Science is the story of human curiosity—always learning, always reaching.)

 “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”   Carl Sagan  (Suggests science can deepen our sense of awe and meaning.)

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”  Carl Sagan  (Points to the danger of public ignorance amid scientific advancement.)

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”  — Often attributed to Albert Einstein (though disputed)(Progress must be measured not just by what we can do, but by what we should do.)

 “Science without conscience is the soul’s perdition.”  François Rabelais  (From the 16th century—still a profound reminder that ethics must guide inquiry.)