When a judge sentences a violent criminal to twenty years in prison, citizens believe that society will be protected from that individual for the next two decades. In reality, however, it is far more likely that the perpetrator will only be detained for about eight years. That routine discrepancy can be called the sentencing illusion.

Politicians and prosecutors frequently stand before cameras to announce lengthy prison terms in order to encourage citizens to conclude that justice has been served and dangerous criminals have been removed from society for the duration of their declared sentence.

The reason for this delusion is self-serving for all involved. The pronouncement caters to political perceptions. The reality is a product of incentives.

Prosecutors seek to be portrayed as relentless advocates for justice, and judges want to appear as impartial guardians of public policy. Yet each operates under a set of incentives that point in a different direction. As a result, crime victims, police officers, and ordinary citizens are often shocked and frustrated to find that reoffenders are back to their predatory ways after only serving a fraction of their stated sentence.

To understand why this deception has become normal operating procedure for our justice system, we must understand

Some politically charged words become part of our common vocabulary almost overnight.  "Globalism" is a timely example.  Ten or fifteen years ago, calling someone a "globalist" didn't have much effect.  Today, it is well understood as a pejorative that highlights someone's allegiance to international institutions over those created within a nation state.

Although the term has been used in various academic circles for more than a century, it didn't become part of our common political parlance until anti-Establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful taxonomic description of their ideological opponents.  In hindsight, it is surprising how long the word "globalism" remained dormant and hidden away in the context of political speech and debate.  

During the Cold War, however, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets.  To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, academics and political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between East and West to gobble up as many nation states as possible.  Both sides embraced a "domino theory" of geopolitics in which partisans fought for global domination, one nation at a time.

There was, however, an

The grocery store may be the least forgiving classroom in which to teach political economy. The shelves do not care about ideology. The checkout scanner does not respond to applause lines. A gallon of milk does not know whether it was purchased in a capitalist marketplace or a municipal experiment in economic justice. It only knows what it cost to produce, transport, refrigerate, stock, and sell.

That is the inconvenient thing about economics. The numbers have no political affiliation. They simply arrive at the register.

That reality is the great problem for economic promises. They sound wonderful from a podium. They become considerably more complicated somewhere between the warehouse and the shopping cart.

More than a century ago, Americans laughed at a song built around an apparently contradictory declaration: "Yes, we have no bananas." The joke worked because the contradiction was obvious. In modern politics, the same joke has returned wearing a suit and carrying a spreadsheet.

Which brings us to one of the more fascinating promises emerging from the modern urban left: the government grocery store. The concept has obvious emotional appeal. Groceries are more expensive than they were in 2019. Families are frustrated. Everyone would like to see lower prices at

Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both concentrate the authority to define correct doctrine, law, and policy in a closed directing elite. Ordinary members, let alone outsiders, lack standing to challenge the core claims. The result is an interpretive monopoly converting a comprehensive worldview into enforceable political control. This is not a secondary feature; it is a practical mechanism that secures ideological unity and suppresses competing claims to legitimacy.

In 833, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun ordered his judges and scholars to affirm that the Quran was created rather than eternal. The position came from the Mu'tazila, a rationalist theological school the caliph favored, which held that an eternal, uncreated Quran would stand as a second eternal being alongside God, violating His absolute oneness; traditionalists held instead that the Quran was God's own uncreated, inseparable speech. Those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or the lash; al-Ma'mun's successor, the caliph al-Mu'tasim, had the traditionalist jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal flogged for holding out.

The inquisition (the Mihna) ran for fifteen years before al-Mu'tasim's own son, the caliph al-Mutawakkil, ended it in 848 and restored the doctrine ibn Hanbal had defended. The lesson: a caliph could jail a scholar; he could not manufacture consensus. That

Abbie Hoffman was a colorful radical who led a group called the Yippies (derived from the name Youth International Party, founded in 1967) along with Jerry Rubin, who eventually left the radical movement of Yippie-dom to become a stockbroker. Abbie wrote a best-selling book titled Revolution for the Hell of It and was known for combining mockery and humor with his revolutionary fervor. On one occasion, he went to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw dollar bills from the visitors' balcony towards the floor of the Exchange. It was Abbie's way of mocking the money-focus of the NYSE and of American society.

Hoffman was a graduate of Brandeis University, where as an undergraduate, he took courses taught by a professorial savant by the name of Prof. Herbert Marcuse. Prof. Marcuse was one of a group of academics known as the Frankfurt School, who had migrated to the USA from Germany to escape the threat of Nazi persecution for their Marxist views. The Nazis also wanted strict government control of the economy, but private ownership of property was still allowed (however, ownership without having the final say over the use or disposal of that property or its

The political left has developed a remarkably simple response to almost every proposed election safeguard: Call it voter suppression.

Require identification at the polls? Voter suppression. Verify citizenship during registration? Voter suppression. Correct inaccurate registration records? A voter "purge." Adjust early-voting schedules? An assault on minority voters.

Different policies addressing different aspects of election administration are bundled together as parts of a national conspiracy to prevent minorities and Democrats from voting. Motive is assumed, discriminatory effect is declared, and accusation substitutes for evidence.

Citizenship is the foundation of our electoral system. Only American citizens may vote in federal elections. Investigators have identified serious anomalies in registration records nationwide. When government refuses reasonable verification or correction of demonstrably ineligible records, it leaves the basic qualification for voting inadequately enforced.

That principle is at the center of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, commonly called the SAVE America Act. The House-passed legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections and photo identification when voting.

Opponents often portray the bill as requiring every prospective voter to possess a passport. That is not what it says.

Acceptable documentation includes identification indicating citizenship; a valid U.S. passport; certain military records; photo identification showing a U.S.

Even with the unpredictability of evil actors in matters of war, a normalcy bias that developed after World War II has enveloped the minds of many policymakers involved with U.S. war-fighting strategy. American approaches to war for the last 70 years have been characterized by a normalcy bias that war conduct should be guided by the goal of reaching negotiated compromise outcomes rather than achieving victory and total defeat of the enemy.

Douglas MacArthur was relieved of duty as Commanding General of the U.S. Army Forces-Far East on April 11, 1951, almost a year into the Korean War. A week later, he gave his farewell address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, a speech that was coined as the "No Substitute for Victory in War" speech. MacArthur's full quote on the essential importance of victory in that speech was, "War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there is no substitute for victory."

The current war with Iran that started on February 28, 2026, has not been conducted by the MacArthur maxim. Rather, similar to previous conflicts, it has been carried out through cycles of intense strikes -- ceasefires and lengthy "peace" negotiations -- truce breakdown

From Wikimedia Commons: Capitol at Washington D.C. (Augustus Kollner, 1839)

The federal architecture of the United States has always carried a burden heavier than mere utility. From the earliest days of the republic, the design of public buildings served as a deliberate assertion of national identity, a visible claim to civilized continuity with the deepest sources of Western political wisdom. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson understood this with clarity rare among statesmen.

Washington and Jefferson conceived the capital on the Potomac as a New Rome, a city whose forms would declare that the American experiment rested upon the enduring achievements of antiquity rather than upon the transient enthusiasms of the moment. The classical vocabulary that they employed—porticoes, colonnades, pediments, and domes of measured proportion—was no ornamental affectation. It constituted a public language of civic virtue, republican restraint, and institutional permanence.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant's plan for Washington embodied the ambition of his employers in urban form. A regular grid was overlaid with broad diagonal avenues that recalled the processional ways of Rome and the axial compositions of the European baroque. Public buildings were placed upon

Reading excerpts from Anthony Fauci's ill-advised diary, saved on government servers, it's clear to me above all that he's a money-grubbing, narcissistic liar.

Fauci helped fund the Wuhan Level 4 Virology Lab, knowing full well that the lab was tinkering with bat viruses. And when the Chinese Communist lab loosed COVID-19 upon the world, wee Tony felt two overwhelming urges: the immediate urge to cover his butt, and a burning and probably lifelong desire for the little rat to finally become a big cheese.

So Fauci lied about the virus's origins, and pressured other spineless scientists to agree that the "novel," i.e., never before seen, virus came from some Wuhan local enjoying bat soup or a pangolin hero, and not the obvious source, a nearby Fauci-funded virology lab. To believe that, you'd have to be a Democrat, one of their media handmaidens, or a complete moron, but I repeat myself.

After all, those folks are all fond of fairy tales, telling us it's fine for men to beat up female athletes, Muslims were instrumental in founding America, ObamaCare lets you keep your doctor and your plan, and Joe Biden's Stage 4 prostate cancer was only recently discovered.

Having dodged all accountability for helping

The reality of the Social Security system and laws is that the system design is fundamentally and fatally flawed. Unless we fix the design flaws, any other changes to the system are purely cosmetic and doomed to perpetual tinkering, temporary fixes, and eventual failure.

We will have failed our younger citizens by failing to address the flaws. The options are painfully simple. Do nothing, which our federal government has done well since the program's inception, or truly fix the system.

The crux of the problem is that the Social Security system was never structured to keep the beneficiary front and center of every investment decision. Most pension-fund fiduciaries are held to a prudent expert standard. The Social Security trustees are not in the same position because Congress has largely removed their investment discretion.

That lack of investment discretion creates an insurmountable obstacle to the system -- the sacred trust of Social Security stewardship. It is the fatal flaw.

We have done a great job of masking the reality of the failure. As a result, they are clamoring for more of the very system that failed them because our citizens have been lied to about Social Security -- the sacred trust is anything but.

To

"Politically correct." I was introduced to that fatuous phrase about 35 years ago while watching an episode of the television series Thirtysomething. The following day, I mentioned it in a casual conversation with a colleague. Confessing that I had never before heard the expression, I told her I found an astounding clumsiness in its construction. "(The character) said it without a hint of irony," I complained. "Isn't 'politically (long pause) correct,' a contradiction in terms?"

"Not at all," she educated me. "We used it all the time at Occidental," explaining everything I needed to know. "Some things simply cannot be said," she continued, "or even thought."

We were both in our early 30s, and it had been years since either of us had sat in a college classroom. It dawned on me that my colleague had carried the burden of that knowledge for both of us for over a decade. I was impressed. As her lesson continued, I learned that speech that is hurtful or "denies what we know to be true" must be suppressed. I don't recall whether she tried to enlighten me about what type of things constitute "what we know to be true." If she did, it didn't take.

Over

Envy is the second of the seven deadly sins, after Pride.  In Catholic theology, deadly sins are serious failings that result in further spiritual harm if not repented.  Envy is especially common and pernicious because once it enters the soul, it is especially difficult to discharge.  In Dante's Purgatorio, the envious are shown huddled together in poverty, their eyes sewn shut with wire so they cannot see the wealth of others.  As always, Dante has chosen an appropriate symbolic punishment for the particular sin.

Where does this leave Zohran Mamdani?  He appears to be not only envious himself — standing outside the apartment building of billionaire Ken Griffin's penthouse apartment, pointing to where Griffin lives and asserting he will impose a pied-à-terre tax on the property, the most expensive in Manhattan — but inciting others to envy.  In response, Griffin's company issued a statement hinting at the possibility of canceling an $8-billion project there.

Actually, inciting envy is the modus operandi of all socialists.  It is their means of fomenting division and attracting voters, but it is a particularly ugly way of doing so because it demeans the very people they would lead and creates the potential for violence.  One reason envy is so destructive is that it