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DC today breaks my heart

Change is not my best friend. Not since the day my family moved from Wisconsin to California when I was 8. Leaving the land of my grandmother, the skating rink and snowballs in winter, Lake Mendota and the tennis courts in summer, the community garden and all that seemed unfair. The Fourth of July parade for kids was pure Americana. I dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Ice cream never tasted better than it did then and there. Los Angeles seemed like paradise lost, with a smoggy sky in a child’s eyes. Grown-ups talked about the Manson murders. Take me back, please! That ...

The rise of trust-fund commies

The Democratic Socialists of America has a class problem that its own rhetoric is designed to obscure. Its rising stars — Zohran Mamdani, son of a Columbia professor and an acclaimed filmmaker; the Ivy-credentialed activists staffing progressive nonprofits; the heirs animating the movement’s core — reveal a pattern the movement cannot honestly explain. The face of American socialism is increasingly young, college-credentialed, and conspicuously well-bred. This is not coincidence. It is structure. The pattern is older than the DSA. Engels co-authored the Communist Manifesto while ...

Orchids & onions

ORCHID: To the Warren Heritage Center for recently adding a tribute exhibit to astronaut Ron Parise at the Neil Armstrong First Flight Lunar Module replica exhibit off Parkman Road in the city. The addition, in the form of a large illustrated biographical sign, stands as a worthy and needed addition to the site that pays homage to local heroes in space travel. Its main attraction is a half-scale replica of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Module on the site where Ohioan and first man on the moon Neil Armstrong made his first airplane ride. Warren-born Parise more than earned his place at the ...

Get all the lead out responsibly but realistically

The public-health jury has been in for some time now, and its verdict on lead pipes is clear and stark. Lead pipes providing drinking water to American households are guilty of serious, toxic and sometimes life-threatening health risks to children and adults. For children, lead leached into drinking water is tied to behavior and learning problems, lower IQ, hyperactivity, slowed physical growth and hearing problems. For adults, the dangers include heightened blood pressure, hypertension, decreased kidney function and reproductive problems for both men and women. That’s why state ...

Artificial intelligence: A modern Tower of Babel?

On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” This pastoral letter has been much anticipated by the Catholic Church, and immediate news headlines expressed intrigue that the pope addressed the moral dilemma of AI and compared it to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. He also discussed Nehemiah, the cupbearer to Persian King Artaxerxes I during the 5th century B.C. In a detailed breakdown of the pope’s central points in “Magnifica Humanitas,” Our Sunday Visitor ...

Fraudsters run amok

At first, it didn’t sound right. Someone must have miscalculated. How could there be so much fraud that has robbed taxpayers of billions of dollars without anyone seeming to notice? Worse, it appears they didn’t seem to care. Vice President JD Vance convened a meeting on Tuesday of his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Fifteen Republican attorneys general showed up. Almost two dozen Democrat attorneys general didn’t come, citing short notice. Their invitations went out on Friday, so they probably had a good excuse. Vance urged all of them to help in rooting out more fraud than has so ...