Tuesday, June 16, 2026

War and peace: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Is age just a number?

Is age just a number?

We recently celebrated her 79th birthday here in Berkeley Springs with Pam, a life-long friend living in the DC area. My son Jon, whose head is seen there on the left, took this photo with his phone with me peering, there right beside him. (Look closely.) A little quirky perhaps, but you get the picture.

In Martinsburg, West Virginia, very close to where we live, is the General Adam Stephen House.

The Adam Stephen House is a historic home built between 1772 and 1789. It was the home of Adam Stephen (c. 1718 – July 16, 1791). Built of shaped limestone, it stands on a prominent stone ledge, with two outbuildings in stone and log.
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Trump's Lawyers Insist There Is 'No Evidence' of 'Collusion or Fraud' in

His 'Settlement With Myself' The final agreement stipulates no more audits of Trump for the tax period in question. We might all like to pay as little in taxes as Donald Trump now does, but then our government would simply go broke.

President Donald Trump's approval rating just hit a second-term low in a new NBC News poll, with Democrats gaining ground ahead of November's midterm elections. The poll, released on Trump's 80th birthday, June 14, shows the president's approval among U.S. adults reaching 39%, only five months out from the upcoming midterms. The survey marks Trump's lowest approval rating in an NBC News poll since his previous first term.

When Joe Biden left office, he was age 82 and 2 months. If Trump survives until the end of his present term, he will be 82 and 7 months, the oldest president ever in our nation's history, a distinction he doesn't like to emphasize.

Is Donald Trump now already declining mentally or was he always like this? Maybe he appeals to voters operating at his own simple cognitive level. He seems unable to understand nuances or complex situations, functioning like an average 13 or 14-year-old. Netanyahu has been quite successful in talking to an easily manipulated Trump by using basic present-tense American English.

As mentioned before on these pages, there are minimum ages for running for public office. Under the Constitution, someone must be age 35 or over to serve as president; age 30 or over to become a senator; and as a representative, to be age 25 or older. But there is no upper age limit. Senator Dianne Feinstein was a California Democrat who served well into her late 80s. Prior to her passing in 2023, her extended absences and visible struggles with memory and cognitive performance while serving at age 90 fueled national debate about mental fitness and a need for upper age limits.

The very oldest serving U.S. Senator in history is Chuck Grassley (R-IA), still in office at age 92. The very oldest U.S. President at inauguration is Donald Trump, who was 79 when he took office this time and is now age 80. If he surviuves until the end of his term, he will be the oldest US president ever in our nation's history.

Not so long ago, voters seemed concerned that Joe Biden was "losing it." He was age 82 when he left office. Now that same concern applies to Trump, age 80, whose current term expires on January 20, 2029, in about 2 1/2 years. That seems like much too long for our nation to continue under his questionable leadership.

Donald Trump has often touted his performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a brief, 30-question screening tool specifically designed to detect mild cognitive impairment and early signs of dementia—not to actually measure intelligence. "Acing" a basic dementia screening, as Trump has done, is not very reassuring, as it would be really hard to "fail" that screening. I too had gotten a score of 100% on the MoCA screening after completing it in just a few minutes.

So how old is too old? Is age just a number? Here now is a judge, age 98, who really never wanted to retire.

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by the nation's oldest federal judge, 98-year-old Pauline Newman, to overturn her suspension ‌from duties in 2023 during an investigation into her fitness to serve.

Bravo to Newman for living now to a ripe old age, but maybe after so many years on the bench, she should give someone else a chance to take office.

Newsom says DOJ conducting baseless investigation of him and his wife at Trump's direction

California's Governor Newsom and President Trump have traded barbs for some time now, Trump has called Newsom "Newscum" and the governor has referred to the president as "The Nodfather" and "Tiny Hands."

Newsom has now accused Trump of ordering the Department of Justice to investigate him and his wife.“They have not found a crime - they are simply trying to find one,” Newsom, a Democrat, on the social media site X. said that Trump was motivated to target the governor because of the fact that “I am considering running for President."

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Palestinian death toll in Gaza tops 73,000, officials say, as Israel strikes despite ceasefire

Thanks to his command of unaccented American English, Bibi could often do no wrong, according to Donald Trump. At least that was true until recently. That simple persuasive ability has protected the prime minister and has kept him out of prison so far, being the key to his influence over his pal President Trump, who has continued to funnel money to Israel, with no questions asked.

Yahoo News,

But now Trump has made 2 phone calls to Bibi with news that the prime minister was not happy to hear,

In the first, Trump told the Israeli leader that he was "pissed off" at Israel's earlier strike on Beirut and that Netanyahu has "no fucking judgment." In the second, Trump informed him the war they had launched together in late February is effectively over.

US vassal Israel has no other option now but to comply. Trump had fully supported Netanyahu until now, but has abruptly pulled the rug right out from under him.

BBC

Iran deal presents political nightmare for Netanyahu

Netayahu, looking toward upcoming elections in Israel, is now facing very likely defeat. Trump himself, meanwhile, has been looking toward the US midterms, knowing that he had to end the Iran war ASAP. (Trump has had less time recently for his usual daytime naps.)

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Israel/Iran is not the only war still underway. There is also Russia/Ukraine.

In Kyiv, a venerable Orthodox cathedral was just struck by a Russian missile.

What can done to stop this other deadly, destuctive war which has has now raged on for more than 4 years? Maybe we could even say, looking at how it started, that it been going on for 12 years already. So many have been killed, so much has been destroyed. Can Trump now help stop the Russia/Ukraine war? If he can do that, after having halted Israel/Iran, he does deserve a lot of credit, despite the many errors he has made.

Let's just remember what Tolstoy said in War and Peace, "We're all mortal, aren't we?"

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After spending quite a few years on my own peace missions to a total of some 40 countries, all speaking different languages and with different laws and customs, I have come to adopt a more relativist view of "right and wrong." The Ten Commandments may have been written on tablets handed down to earth by an angel, but those commandments were not actually written in stone. Laws and customs are ever evolving, always changing. Yet we often consider what we generally accept now as quite obviously the most up-to-date, most correct, and morally right. I am thinking. for example, about marriage, divorce, birth control, abortion, sexual identity, and the death penalty, although even today, there is no actual consensus on these various matters.

Likewise, we often instinctively try protect the feelings and reputations of many folks we interact with every day. A neighbor may not imagine that her husband is a well-known neighborhood philanderer, but we would certainly never tell her. Nor would we hint that her teenage son is gay, especially if she seems unaware of it. In other countries, as was done here in past generations, adoptive parents' names are often put right on a baby's first and only official birth certificate, meaning that the child may never know that he or she is not the parents' actual biological offspring. Something especially common is a husband's name being shown as the father, though donor sperm has actually been used. And far be it from me to ever tell anyone what I may actually know. But does it all really matter? Maybe not in most cases, unless a hereditary condition is involved. I've heard an adoptive mother in another country say, "I do feel like I actually gave birth to my child," meanwhile right there is her name already on the original and only birth certificate as the mother. So why even bring up the subject?

Matters can actually get rather tricky if we are talking about gestational carriers or possible embryo transplants. All that has now been breaking new ground. Maybe it's enough to acknowledge that we are all part and parcel of the same human family, going back countless generations and extending indefinitely into the future.

Saturday, June 13, 2026

Trump's current scorecard

Trump's name has been removed from the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy family was just not going to let that continue.

Wash. Post, Congress has lost its grip on funding the government

The legislature showed again this week that it’s really struggling to follow its own normal budget-making process, and programs Americans love could be at stake.

Wash. Post, Federal judge indefinitely blocks Trump’s $1.8 billion payout fund

Donald Trump as president had been essentially suing himself, hoping to collect money from his own government.

That loss had almost moved the president to tears.

Trump has often paid less in taxes than either you or me.

He likes taxing us, but certainly not himself. His presidential

salary is $400,000 per year and all possible expenses

for him and his family are fully covered.

The Joint Committee on Taxation, which reviewed the returns, flagged that Trump claimed a large number of questionable items on his tax returns, including eyebrow-raising amounts of interest he claims to have received from loans to his children that the bipartisan committee said could indicate Trump was disguising gifts.

The JCT argued that an auditor should investigate the loan agreements Trump made with his children, including the interest rates. If the interest Trump claims to have charged his children was not at market rate, for example, it could be considered a gift for tax purposes, requiring him to pay a higher tax rate on the money.

President Donald Trump agreed to voluntarily drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department regarding the 2019 and 2020 leak of his confidential tax returns. In exchange, the Justice Department established a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate individuals who claim to have been politically targeted by the government.

The Settlement Terms: Trump, his sons, and

Details of the settlement include: the Trump Organization agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice and drop other administrative claims (including those related to the Mar-a-Lago search and Russia-collusion investigation). While Trump will not receive monetary damages, the government issued a formal apology.

In 2018, the New York Times investigation into the finances of Fred and Donald Trump had revealed that despite the claims of the latter to be a self-made billionaire, he had actually received more than $400 million (in 2018 dollars) from his father, most of it in ways that avoided paying gift or inheritance tax. The 13,000-word report was one of the longest investigative articles ever published by the Times.

On September 29, 2023, federal prosecutors announced they were charging someone with leaking the data from Trump's tax returns while he was a contractor for the IRS from 2018 to 2020. In October Charles E. Littlejohn pleaded guilty to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information. On January 29, 2024, he received the maximum possible sentence of five years in federal prison and was fined $5,000. Littlejohn is still in prison.

Here are other asepcts of the agreement with Donald Trump.

Permanent Audit Immunity: An addendum signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche permanently bars the IRS from auditing, examining, or seeking recourse on any tax returns filed before May 18, 2026, by Donald Trump, his adult sons, or their affiliated trusts and companies.

Voluntary Dismissal: In exchange for this protection, President Trump filed a voluntary dismissal to drop his lawsuit, which originally sought up to $10 billion in damages for the unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns.

Anti-Weaponization Fund Controversy: The initial settlement documents included a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" from the U.S. Treasury's Judgment Fund to compensate allies claiming they were mistreated by the government.

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A 5-yar-old crossing the border without his parents has turned himself in.

Now is anyone helping to care for him? Do we even know his name?
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Let's not forget about Cuba, so if you read Spanish, here is the opening of a comprehensive report on political prisoners still being held there in record numbers, with another prison death just recorded.

INFORME MENSUAL SOBRE PRISIONEROS POLÍTICOS EN CUBA

NUEVO RÉCORD DE 1.281 PRESOS POLÍTICOS EN CUBA TRAS SUMAR 28 NUEVOS EN MAYO Y REGISTRAR OTRA MUERTE EN PRISIÓN

Prisoners Defenders publica su informe mensual de mayo de 2026 sobre presos políticos en Cuba, con un nuevo récord de 1.281 presos políticos y de conciencia. Durante el mes se incorporaron 28 nuevos casos y se registraron solo 7 bajas, entre ellas una muerte bajo custodia estatal, dos destierros forzados, una excarcelación efectiva y tres cumplimientos íntegros de condena. El informe completo muestra que el régimen cubano continúa respondiendo al deterioro social, político, económico y humanitario del país con más detenciones, encarcelamientos y castigos ejemplarizantes.

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Police dressed as World Cup mascots helped arrested drug dealers in Peru.

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Iranian envoy in Mexico signals US, Tehran could be ‘friends’ if Israel sidelined