You may remember Harry S. Truman who had a sign "The Buck Stops Here!" on his desk. He wanted to show that he was responsible for the actions of his administration. Today we find a caretaker behind that desk who does not care and only takes. Soon April 1st might be the only day in the year where the people can speak truth to power without inadvertently ending up on a deportation flight to Guantanamo Bay or a hellhole prison in South America.

Dear Friends, Today I like to share my thoughts about the TOXIC Agent Orange Home Remedy Treatment that the United States has elected to shower on itself in a desperate attempt to fight a serious bout of depression and voter unhappiness. At its core, Agent Orange was a powerful tool to provide transparency! Who could object to that? For those of you who are not familiar with Agent Orange, here is an AI-Googled summary of some TRUTHS. Please commit these truths to your memory as the US is currently purging history based on DEI-associated word lists. With words like “gay” for example! You might have learned in your history class that the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a densely populated city was delivered not by a mid-wife but by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named Enola Gay after the mother of the pilot. The parents of Enola must have named her “gay” for it’s meaning to be lighthearted and carefree. What a nice name! Well, in today’s America where the poorly educated are loved by our dear leader just the appearance of the word gay on a Superfortress photo can purge it from the National Memory with “smart” AI that can find words in historic digital images. I believe most of the National Memory has already been cut with a Musk Chain Saw, or it will soon be eliminated by firing squad with a Musk-ET. Sorry I digress. Back to Agent Orange. During the Vietnam War, Agent Orange was a herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military to clear vegetation and remove foliage that provided cover for enemy troops. • Purpose: The U.S. military used Agent Orange and other herbicides like Agent Blue and Agent White to: o Defoliate trees and other vegetation to remove enemy cover. o Destroy enemy crops and disrupt their food supply. o Clear vegetation around U.S. bases. Health Effects: • Cancer: Various types of cancer have been linked to Agent Orange exposure, such as Hodgkin's Lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, according to the Public Health VA. • Birth Defects: There is evidence that Agent Orange exposure can lead to birth defects in the children of exposed veterans, according to the VA. • Other Diseases: Other diseases associated with Agent Orange exposure include diabetes, chronic B-cell leukemia, respiratory cancer, lung cancer, and soft tissue sarcomas. • Dioxin Persistence: Dioxin, the contaminant found in Agent Orange, is a persistent pollutant that can remain in the environment and accumulate in the food chain. Take a minute here to pause, and let that sink in… Elon Musk would now appear with a sink at your front door. I hope they are not yet looking for you. Any truth teller is a target. So more than 50 years ago the military-industrial complex in America the Beautiful, aided and abetted by Dow Chemical and Monsanto was willing to poison their own soldiers and their enemy in a disagreement over what is better for humanity, capitalism or communism. In my view it has been proven today that both of these systems appear to sooner or later converge to oligarchy, corruption, and unhappiness for the average man or woman, or any gay person in the carefree sense. For your ongoing education here is a quick side note on Monsanto: They make your Round-Up and the Round-Up resistant corn that you digest daily in many forms of your highly processed American diet. They were acquired in 2018 by the German firm Bayer which grew out of the I.G. Farben company (1925-1945) that supplied Cyclone B, the poison gas that the Nazi’s used in the gas chambers of their Concentration Camps. I find it “funny” in a very sick sense how so many of the toxic businesses in the world are connected by their capitalistic roots. There must be a source of evil that makes toxins flourish. Please use your computer to do some research on decades of birth defects that the mothers in Vietnam had to face thanks to American exceptionalism. What happened with the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly had? Where any of the “adults in the rooms of power” held accountable for starting a devastating war under false pretenses? Is it any surprise that the powerless countries in the world are in disbelieve when they see Russia and the US waving the magic veto wand at the UN that removes any accountability for their misdeeds? Rules are made for suckers if they are not symmetric! I like to close with a thought: A good case can be made that a lot of the people in power in Washington today are gay! Not in the carefree sense of Enola, but in the sense that they act FREE OF CARE! I hope you remember how Melania Trump was walking around in 2018 with a jacket emblazoned with the message: “I really don’t care, do you?” This is the fundamental QUESTION TO ALL of US today! Do we still care? About the climate that our children and all people in the world will have to survive because we love to drive our 15MPG SUVs. About the toxins and forever chemicals that we constantly dump into the environment. About the microplastics that are accumulating in food chains and brains. How much individual thinking is still done in the country where Freedom of Thought is not even mentioned in the Constitution and more and more neurons are plasticized. We know they/them only care about money and how to use pronouns and fear to divide us. It is time for us, the people who care, to think about a better national and global system than the corrupt machine that Elon Musk and his free-of-care sidekick are now obliterating. It is time to go back to the drawing board. Every vote should count! All lives on Earth matter! All humans and their future children are stakeholders on Earth. And if you feel you are so special that you don’t care about CO2 in the atmosphere, I would like to suggest a little scientific experiment. Take a large plastic bag. Place it over your head so that you are not longer exposed to the dirty air that the others emit. Close tight around the neck. Breath deep and relax. While your body is happily emitting and recirculating the waste CO2 that your metabolism creates, think about the future of a world with a lot more CO2. Please have a trusted helper close by who can end the experiment before the experiment ends you. Your life matters to me, too. And then take your Starship and fly to Mars! What should our priorities be at this Fork in the Road moment for humanity? 1. Stop stupid wars. They kill people, destroy the environment, and leave a lot of toxicity behind. For many decades. We should have learned the lessons of WWI, WWII, the Korea War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza… Escalation of violence does not lead to peace, prosperity, and happiness. The definition of insanity is to try the same failing recipe over and over. Do we really need to try the failed trickle-down tax cut experiment AGAIN? 2. Focus a lot of our ingenuity and energy on transforming the global society on a sustainable path with respect to the limited natural resources. We need to relearn to respect Earth and each other. China is showing us what is possible. Let sunshine in your life and let it power our lives! Save clean energy in sustainable batteries. Drill-baby-drill is as smart as the plastic bag experiment! It is the wrong way! The rich nations must take responsibility for the future of our Earth. We need to deploy our wealth to fight climate change and not to create a global Crypto Coin Casino. 3. Once we have plenty of sustainable, clean, and cheap energy available we can dedicate it to powering the power-hungry Artificial Intelligence systems that can help our own poor decision-making processes. Just by looking at our leaders we can see that the executive function in many heads is already severely compromised. There appear to be too many people who carry their heads only to prevent rain from falling into their open necks. Remember you have the Freedom of Thought even if Constitution 1.0 did not mention it. Your head is round so that your thoughts can turn their direction. It is time to turn this ship around. We are all on this Earth together! Think bigger than MAGA. MEGA! Make Earth Great Again! www.TheTruthWithHumor.com

Is Humanity hitting the Tower of Babel 2.0 cataclysm? Dear Friends, In these turbulent days I am thinking a lot about how stories from the ancient past connect with the amazing technological achievements and societal dysfunction that we observe today. The Tower of Babel story, found in the Bible's Book of Genesis, tells of how, after the Great Flood, people speaking a single language gathered in the land of Shinar and decided to build a massive tower reaching to the heavens, aiming to make a name for themselves; however, God, seeing their pride, confused their languages so they could no longer understand each other, causing them to disperse across the earth and leaving the tower unfinished; the name "Babel" itself is derived from the Hebrew word for "confusion.". (Source Google Search) What would a person from the days of Genesis think if they could time-travel into our world today? They would surely be amazed by the unbelievable recovery from God’s spell and the achievements that humans have been able to create as a group, collaborating over the global dispersion and language and cultural barriers that God created to limit us in our strive for the heavens. It only took a few thousand years to get to this point. A mere blip on the timescale of Earth that is measured in millions of years. The history of technological innovation is short on that scale. It has been accelerating at an unbelievable pace by the collaboration of an exponentially growing number of people with valuable educations that compete fairly to create better systems and technologies. Just looking at my lifetime we went from a transatlantic phone call that cost many $$ per minute to a nominal charge of one cent, which is essentially free. We can communicate 24x7 with our flat-rate broadband connections all over the world with all our friends. We have satellite networks like Starlink that extend connectivity all over the world. Diseases that used to be deadly for many have been almost eliminated by vaccinations. I am not even going to try to write down a comprehensive list of all the amazing technologies and innovations that we use every day without even an inkling of awareness. I think most of us are taking these technologies as God-given and don’t even appreciate any of this any longer. Until they fail. Think about what you did during your last power outage... How are we using these amazing capabilities? Soldiers from Russia are ordered by a despotic leader to attack their former fellow citizens with missiles, planes, drones and artillery. Ukrainian soldiers are fighting back courageously with support of Starlink and intelligence from the heavens. Hundreds of $Billions are wasted on wars that would be better spend to accelerate Humanity on a path to sustainability to prevent the climate catastrophe. Our unbelievable communication resources are wasted on spreading lies and propaganda to sow discord that separates families and ends friendships. Amazing computer capacity is created to run a global-scale Crypto scam that is looking for ever more suckers who are made to believe that they too can all get rich quick like the creators and true investors of this Crypto casino. I fear that we are now approaching the Tower of Babel cataclysm 2.0. Elon Musk, who has been an amazingly creative technological innovation warrior, is taking the chain saw to the Federal Government in a reform attempt where a scalpel would be the appropriate tool to cut out the small nodules of cancer that should be removed. It is a truly tragic story of epic proportions that reminds me of the cautionary tale of Icarus. Godspeed Elon! You have many golden parashoots. Unfortunately, the many people who you are disrespecting in the DOGE circus joke-show, while the feverish and delusional crowd cheers you forward with your chain saw, do not have the financial freedom that would allow them to glide to safety as easily as you will when your wings finally melt. In our oligarchic society, where tax cuts for the filthy-rich weigh down the country with debt, it appears that only rescue parachutes have upward mobility. Let that sink in! It is time for all of us to ask: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” For how many of us does this line from congressional television in 1954 still ring a bell? I was not around but learned it from history. People forget their history and the important lessons that it holds at their own peril. Divided we fall. Be afraid of the people who make a wonderful living by splitting us up and who love the poorly educated who become easy marks for their organized scams. Humanity could be on an amazing, accelerating path of gaining knowledge if we follow the principles of science and truth in a world in peace that is guided by the Golden Rule. And this does not mean that the One with the Gold rules! Interestingly, the US Constitution does not explicitly guarantee us the Freedom of Thought! Was that an oversight? Do we need an afterthought here? The Founding Fathers probably thought that it is obvious that this Freedom cannot be taken from them. But it appears that many of us today, both on the left and right, have given up the Freedom of Thought, and outsourcing our own executive function to the groupthink that is manipulated by poor leaders who are filthy and rich and want to become even richer. Their greed has no limits and respects no borders. Any small country without its own nukes is a fair target for unfair shakedowns. MIGHT makes RIGHT. A veto trumps accountability for the powerful Nations with cushy permanent seats on the UN security Council. Laws and rules are for the small and weak. I believe we need the Constitution 2.0 where the Founding Mothers can include Freedom of Thought in the foundation of a reformed Republic. A healthy place free of toxicity where One Voter has One Vote! Isn’t it amazing that such a simple concept of “One Voter=One Vote” can be revolutionary? What world are we accepting to live in? Why should a modern country waste $Billions on stupid election advertisements and significant civic courage and effort to count votes, if its citizens do not even care to have each vote count? The Constitution 1.0 promised to establish domestic Tranquility in its preamble. Constitution 2.0 should preserve this desirable goal and extend it to the global village. I would love to have Freedom from Fear included. For school children there should not be a need to go through combat training of how to attack a deranged shooter with an AR15 that can shoot 20 rounds in 15 seconds who might appear at a moment’s notice in their classroom. I would love to live in an advanced society where I can exercise the Freedom to not wear arms because there is a well-trained militia that does, the Police. US small arms manufactures are making obscene profits by manufacturing unethical, dumb guns that kill 40,000 people a year in the US. That is equivalent to two 747 planes of precious human beings falling out of the sky every week. I am sure we would have more than “Thoughts and Prayers” for a technology problem where Boing sells 747s and two of them fall out of the sky every week to kill 40,000 of our loved ones every year. If we can have self-driving cars, we surely can ask for smart guns that end the American Carnage. The dumb guns are smuggled to Mexico to arm cartels with powerful rifles, even armor piercing sniper rifles, where Mexican police officers are simply outgunned in their battle to maintain tranquility for our friends in Mexico. Mexican politicians who want to work against cartels are simply executed on their streets. In return for the deadly guns the cartels smuggle deadly fentanyl and other drugs back to the US and make good money by selling bad drugs to our children. Soon they will be able to feed the illicit proceeds into Crypto ATMs in our local grocery store and then withdraw them cleanly laundered anywhere in the world. The paradise for the criminals who love Crypto is being created as we speak. How about including Freedom from Crooks in Constitution 2.0? There could be a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that ensures that mainstream media do not describe purchasing of value-free Crypto coins as “investing” and instead refers to it properly as "gambling". Such an agency could also prevent value-free Crypto meme coins to be hawked on Crypto exchanges, or more appropriate Casinos, to make filthy rich Crooks even richer. Constitution 2.0 should ensure Freedom from Fear Of Missing Out . For that it should take away the Freedom of Crooks to create FOMO and scare people who are busy with their lives to send them their life savings. People deserve real protection in return for the taxes they pay. How about including the Freedom from Crooks in Government? Transparency in Government is more than having a King who has no clothes. I have a Dream! Dream with me! The World’s children deserve a future FULL of HOPE and FREE from FEAR. Please share this dream with your loved ones. www.TheTruthWithHumor.com

Dear Friends, after more than 25 years in the corporate world, I do have an appreciation for the value of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). It makes it unlawful to bribe foreign officials to promote a business. We want that businesses succeed based on the quality of the products and not based on the size of the bribes paid to the decision makers. Now that I am a small business owner and the Trump Administration has announced on 2/10/2025 that they have paused to enforce the FCPA for 180 days, with a potential 180-day extension by the Attorney General, I am asking myself and You if this is an opportunity to accelerate to grow my business faster. Kind of like lighting the candle on both ends. I feel that failing to enforce the FCPA is a corrupt act. It feels like they are trying to fight corruption with CORRUPTION! We know that fighting fire with fire does work, at least sometimes. The backfire can create a firebreak ahead of an approaching fire if the winds are favorable by exhausting the fuel. If the winds are a storm like in the recent Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires setting a backfire will – well, backfire. Corruption feels different from fire. I think this will lead to a corruptions’ arms race where more and more of the resources that could be used to make the products better are wasted on bribes. What do my corporate lawyer friends think about the wisdom of starting corruption while enforcement is paused? The pause is not like a corrupt Presidential Pardon which is permanent and cannot be undone even if it is corrupt. See the recent pardons of violent attackers of Congress. I am afraid that I will still be breaking the law and later may see extortion by the law enforcers. I am thinking about the NY Mayor Adams case here as well. I find it interesting that 30% of the representatives in the House have law degrees, and 51% of Senators, and nobody as far as I have seen has any concerns with the Freedom of Corruption that is created by presidential fiat. I thought Congress is the business that builds the laws, and the executive branch is executing them. Maybe the executive function in the executive branch is not functioning well any longer and understands the execution of the law like putting it on an electric chair? Words can be ambiguous. Who really knows what the meaning of “is” is? Maybe a lawyer? Unless someone can make a good case that corruption is our future I will stick with Nancy Reagan’s advice on drugs. JUST SAY NO!

Dear Friends, We live in a time where even the most outrageous statements and actions fail to raise concern with many people. Today is Presidents Day. On this occasion, I like to share an uplifting, explosive vision that I see in the future. You may have heard how President Trump said in a press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, but that they will never give it to him. I hope you remember that Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. It made him rich, and he created the Nobel Prizes as a recognition of outstanding achievements in science and culture. I used a picture from the Inventors Hall of Fame as the canvas for my picture today. For those of you who care to know we are in National Engineers Week that we celebrated from February 16 to February 22, 2025. For those who have studied the Trump Bible I like to remind you of the inspiring story of Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul the Apostle. He was a zealous Pharisee who initially persecuted Christians. He experienced a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus, becoming a key figure in spreading Christianity. Like the conversion from Saul to Paul, I see an opportunity where President Trump, the Orange Highlighter of Corruption, will travel on his road to Damascus. He will understand God’s will and that he was saved by God to show us the corrupt direction that leads to climate hell. Humanity stands at a Fork in the Road. As soon as Trump understands his manifest destiny and turns around, he can end the American Carnage, as promised in his first inaugural address in 2016 by unleashing Elon Musk to replace dumb guns with the smart Musk-ET. Trump will also be able to carefully trim the forest of international rules, laws, and corrupt veto power that prevent Justice. At the end of this amazing turnaround story from societal bankruptcy I see Trump being justly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He will share it with www.TheTruthWithHumor.com for valuable guidance that was provided for the turnaround. “ It does not matter if you turn right or left, as long as you turn 180 degrees you will end the American Carnage ”.

Ending American Carnage A powerful source has shared with me that Tesla will soon start to develop a smart gun. My source received numerous concerns from Tesla shareholders on the Private Prayer App. The shareholders worry that the stratospheric Price to Earnings ratio of Tesla, currently at around 177, will not be sustainable considering recent activities of their CEO that make the brand toxic. Emptying the rice bowls of little hungry children in Africa by destroying USAID does not create much sympathy with compassionate people and Christians who are no CINOs (Christian in name only). Sales numbers are dropping precipitously in many markets. My source understands the concerns of the shareholders and agrees to help. In normal times he prefers a hands-off management style, relying on humans’ intelligence to make good choices for themselves. But in light of recent, dark developments in the US he sees a great opportunity to create transformational change to reestablish domestic Tranquility as promised in the preamble of the US Constitution. To end the American Carnage, my source has told me that he will send a business proposal to Elon Musk on the encrypted Epiphany App. The game-, or better carnage-changing, technology will be a smart gun that Tesla can develop very quickly by combining existing video processing technologies from their cars and previous flame thrower projects. With fast image processing technologies and AI, the smart gun will not kill American school children when they scurry away from a dumb shooter that wants to use a gun to take retribution. It will also refuse to be discharged on a suicide attempt. My source will also send an Epiphany App message to President Trump who has shown himself concerned about American Carnage since his first inaugural speech and recently when a plane crashed in Washington. Since the President was saddened by the loss of 67 lives in the first major US plane crash for many years, my source believes that the loss of more than 40,000 lives every year from dumb guns, equivalent to two 747 Jumbo Jets crashing every week, will motivate Trump to declare a National Intelligence Emergency to outlaw Dumb Guns and exchange them for Tesla Smart guns. My source told me that he plans to pardon any unlawful or unconstitutional acts that President Trumps deems necessary for the rapid transformation to a US smart gun society. He is promising a get-out-of-purgatory-free Meme Coin. This quid pro quo can be justified and HIS decisions cannot be appealed to any higher authority. To tickle Elon’s itch with funny word plays, my source proposes to brand the smart gun as the Tesla Musk-ET. He knows that Musk will enjoy seeing his name combined with ET, the Extra-Terrestrial. The name will invoke memories of the musket, the guns from the 17th century when the Constitution was written. They were safer by the fact that it took 20 seconds or more to fire a single shot. That beautiful safety feature made America great. The Tesla Musk-ET will be a massive contribution to Make America Great Again! When asked what he thinks about Elon Musk, my source replied with a quote from the Book of the Highlander: "There Can Be Only One!" You will understand this on May 4th. Godspeed! www.TheTruthWithHumor.com

Dear Elon Musk, I have noticed recently that you have been dedicating your amazing engineering skills in ways that are not really making the world a substantially better place. Emptying the rice bowls of hungry kids in Africa is not saving a lot of lives. You are burying your talents. The landing of rockets was so much more impressive and thinking outside the box. Your Tesla shareholders might also be quite concerned that your recent activities have caused you to be seen as a quite toxic character. That might not be good for Tesla where the price-to-earnings ratio (PE) is high at 177. When we are looking at the money that Tesla earns per year it will take 177 years to that get the money back that an investor pays when he buys a TSLA share today. Who knows how the world will look in 177 years? And who can wait that long to get his money back? There have been even recent reports that the sales of Tesla are going down significantly in other countries that do not appreciate your political activities. With this background, I am thinking about an engineering challenge for you that is more worthy of your talents where you could leverage Tesla technology and save many lives. Every year there are more than 40,000 fatalities in the US from dumb guns. That is a death toll equivalent to more than one hundred 747 crashing every year. In a smart country somebody would be doing something about such an atrocious air safety record. And Congress is unable to do anything about it. Their universal application of thoughts and prayers has failed. I think we can agree that progress is the opposite of Congress, at least in its current low energy, low power form. Would you be able to end this American Carnage be developing a smart gun that will not discharge at innocent children in US classrooms or concert venues? As a branding idea, I like to suggest that you call this smart gun the “Tesla Musk-ET”. This is my word play combining your wonderful name with ET, the Extra Terrestrial. I think both are dear to your heart. We both love wordplays. Let that sink in! Imagine the stellar business opportunity that the replacement of hundreds of millions of dumb guns provides. There is enough profit there to align Tesla’s PE to the PE of regular businesses that do not have the X factor in their DNA. That would get Tesla on a sustainable financial path where somebody else take the helm without the stock valuation collapsing from the stratosphere back to Earth. I think it will be helpful to ask your friend President Trump to declare a National Emergency over the 40,000 US annual gun fatalities to make the exchange of dumb guns with Tesla Musk-ETs mandatory. Ignore Congress. We are tired of their Thoughts and Prayers non-solution. You are at a Fork in the road. You can continue to chase a few dollars of governmental inefficiency by emptying the rice bowls of poor children that are surviving on USAID. Or you can end the American Carnage where Donald Trump promised us that only he can fix it in 2016. We have been waiting. The carnage got worse. Now that you are on the team, I believe that even the impossible is possible. Godspeed, www.TheTruthWithHumor.com

Fellow Christians, Those of us who truly follow Jesus are motivated by our deep love to him and his teachings. We passionately study and interpret the scriptures in the Bible that describe his amazing live. His actions as related in the Bible then become a powerful guide to understand Gods plan and become more like him. In the Sermon on the Mount (Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7), he shares a message of radical love, compassion, and selflessness. He encourages us to love our enemies, to forgive others, and to care for the poor and marginalized. If all of humanity followed in Jesus’ footsteps, I am sure that we would be able to enjoy a life of tranquility and general welfare as the Constitution of the United States wants to provide. Donald Trump also has led and still is leading an amazing life among, or above us. A very good argument can be made that God sent him to us so that we can become better Christians and Citizens. One of the amazing gifts that Donald Trump bestowed on us was that he connected the US Constitution and the Bible in the Trump Bible. I see a great opportunity that by carefully and lovingly studying Donald Trump’s life and the Constitution similarly to how we study the Bible we can return on a path to a more perfect Union. I believe God sent Donald Trump to encourage us to inject disinfectant into our society and shine a very powerful light inside of its corrupted body to heal it from the inside. This should remind you of Mr. Trumps suggestion on how we could fight the Corona virus. His proposal may not have been sane or practical in a scientific sense in that context. But if we transfer the thought to the rot and disease in our society and international relationships such a prescription makes sense. Positive and negative examples are both powerful teaching tools. When God sent Jesus he used a positive teaching strategy. Jesus’ example was so powerful in the personal encounter with the people he met that from a very small group it reached and converted a large proportion of humanity to profess to follow him. Looking at this amazingly successful influencer story after 2000 years, God might think that the essence of the message was good and aligned with humans’ deepest needs. But he would also have to realize that the desire of many individuals to gain power over others, and to amass worldly treasures still left a lot of corrupt behavior. How else could he explain that many church leaders would turn a blind eye to horrible abuse of the most vulnerable who were entrusted to their care? This observation might have motivated God to try a negative teaching approach when he sent us Donald Trump. Since the carrot did not get humanity all the way to its manifest destiny, maybe a stick might work to complete God’s vision. In that sense I can appreciate how God created a caricature of an unprincipled, selfish and evil-behaving person to provoke our thoughts and challenge our complacency with the status quo. It should only require a few simple rules for a small group of people to live together in peace. “Don’t do to others what you don’t want to have done to yourself” can be found in the Analects of Confucius and is often referred to as the “Golden Rule”. In the Old Testament we find the Ten Commandments which are a set of simple rules that are important to maintain peace and tranquility. In the Book of Exodus, it is established that the punishment should match the injury. Take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, … This is an old and good rule that prevents a spiral of violence in a conflict where each side wants to extract a larger punishment than the injury that it suffered. After the injury is matched the conflict can stop. We are even! Modern society has also codified rules how to wage war “just”. There must be a proportionality between the military objective and the number of innocent lives that are sacrificed to achieve it. We have all had the recent opportunity to hear how this rule is mentioned by the lawyers of the powerful nations to justify the action of dropping 2000-pound bombs on a population of millions confined to a few square miles. In the tally of injury and death the result is that tens of thousands of lives are taken for a thousand lives. The ancient people who believed in Exodus would be horrified if they time-traveled to a time where humans appear ready to work on time traveling technology. In its humanity, Humanity has been backsliding substantially in modern days to a level of cruelty even before the days when the Book of Exodus was written. Humans have been on an amazing innovation journey of killing technology while at the same time creating a legal framework to justify the unjustifiable. MIGHT MAKES RIGHT! Legal innovation and word trickery takes essential Justice away. When God looks at the Superpower that supplies the 2000-pound bombs in the above example and claims to be guided by Christian values he must be shocked if he compares the deeds with Jesus’ teaching of de-escalation in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. ' But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:38-39 RSV). We write “In God we trust” on our currency. Thinking about the above, I doubt that God trusts US. Promoting and using Crypto currency, essentially a scam if you listened to the 45th President Trump, is an acknowledgment that the US lost God’s path a long time ago. Now the scammers are on a roll. The 47th President Trump increased his net worth by billions of Dollars when he created $Trump and $Melania meme coins on the Solana Blockchain three days before assuming power. Could a more perfect instrument of corruption be created? I doubt it. We the people would likely not even complain if he created a $Emoluments Coin or a $Trump-Pardon Coin! If God wanted to create a caricature of corruption to highlight the weaknesses in the US Constitution and in international laws and rules, he could not have created a better Orange Highlighter than Donald Trump. And Trump told us that he was saved by God. And he never lies. We should start to believe him. I do. And realize that God has pivoted from sending us a positive example to follow to an example that shows what not to do. When the carrots don’t work it is time for the Orange Stick. If we claim to be Christians’, we should go back to ask ourselves: “What would Jesus do?” Or if we have forgotten what Jesus did, we could also follow a path of “Do what Donald Trump does not do”. We now have a President who literally fights windmills and paper straws. Does anybody think about Don Quixote? Laws and the Constitution are not even speed bumps on the run-away train. There is no emergency brake for a runaway Executive Branch without executive function. To help fight fire in LA the Orange Highlighter ordered to release water from reservoirs that do not even connect to LA but threaten to inundate some agricultural areas. The execution of the orders of madness also has no executive function. Water that could be used in the future to grow valuable crops is instead wasted. The interesting question to me is how far madness must explode until people realize they are getting punked. I LOVE GOD’S SENSE OF HUMOR! Evolution has a few hundred million years left to find and develop intelligence on Earth. It may come from a different branch of evolution. Homo sapiens are rapidly sawing off theirs by creating Artificial Intelligence without even noticing the peril. Godspeed Humanity! We are all at a Fork in the road. When will we realize we are sliding down on the wrong branch? www.TheTruthWithHumor.com

The recent airplane crash in Washington and the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles motivate me to share my thoughts on the value in such accidents. In the news the focus is usually first on the fatalities and damage that such events create. That is human. Thinking about the value appears heartless. Bear with me. There is a powerful history of innovation that is propelled by taking such events as teachable moments and learning important lessons. This process is the reason flying is the safest mode of transportation per mile. From an engineering perspective each real accident is a critical test case that the designer of a system did not consider. The failure of the MCAS system on the Boeing 737 Max is a teachable moment in two important directions. There is a technical angle where a safety-related system was not designed with sufficient redundancy. And then there was a commercial interest where the addition of this complex control system was hidden from pilots to avoid the cost of retraining them. Hundreds of people died because of this corrupt motive. Learning from mistakes is a sign of intelligence. Individual pain is a powerful motivator. Once a child has touched a hot stove it will learn a lesson for life. Really smart people learn from the mistakes that others make. Compassion is important for society to progress. Compassionate people do not have to feel all the misery of life for themselves to appreciate the suffering of others and work to make life better for everybody. Thought experiments and simulations in science are powerful tools to expose the weaknesses of systems without the cost of accidents and catastrophes. A proactive mindset is very valuable. Unfortunately, if you are a successful engineer that has worked proactively for all your life you must have learned the following lesson: Upper management often sees no value in the absence of accidents. They can be so removed from the crude engineering realities that they do not even know that a project with a cost of tens of $Millions is at risk to fall into a hole because somewhere down in the margin models there is an assumption that 4x1=1. Ignorance is bliss and makes the big bucks if we are lucky to avoid falling into cracks. When I as an engineer and a member of the flying public think about the complex system that humans have created so that more than four billion of us can fly with only minor inconvenience every year with very few accidents, the amazing power of proactive engineering and learning from accidents is proven beyond any doubt. At this point my mind pivots into a loaded question. Don’t you think it is strange that we are now worried about the safety of flying where we had one large accident with sixty-seven fatalities which was the first larger accident since 2001? I am thinking that this is strange when contrasting this to our acceptance of tens of thousands of gun related fatalities every year (48204 in 2022). There is an opportunity here where even reactive engineering could save a lot of lives. If the gun fatalities fell from the sky in two planes every day somebody would do something. Which begs the question: Why is nobody looking into this? There are always discussions if guns kill people, or people kill people. But I think we must look at the system to better understand the root causes of this constant and growing catastrophe. I am thinking about a couple of reasons here that we should appreciate: 1. You might know that there is the “Dickey Amendment” in a federal law that prohibits the use of federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. This chills research on this topic. Personally, I do not think the law is smart when it forbids us to learn from mistakes and accidents. 2. There is also the problem of false equivalencies in the historical context that has the US stuck in a rut on this topic. On October first, 2017, Stephen Paddock, a non-DEI citizen of the United States killed 60 people and injured approximately 867 (at least 413 by gun wounds, others from the panic that ensued) by firing into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers who were exercising their right to happiness in Las Vegas. He was able to fire over one thousand rifle rounds from assault rifles that he was able to convert to operate like fully automatic machine guns by adding so called bump stocks that were available legally at the time. What did we learn from this catastrophe? Congress sent thoughts and prayers as is customary for such disasters. Our wonderful 45th president banned bump stocks after this shooting. Unfortunately, our less-wonderful Supreme Court declared the bump stock ban illegal on 6/14/2024 in light of the second amendment and the historical context of the constitution. It is interesting how the conservative justices on the Supreme Court can parse historic words that were written at a specific level of technology to create an equivalence between a front loaded gun, reloading time about 30 seconds for one shot, and a semiautomatic assault rifle that can release 15 to 20 rounds in 15 seconds in semiautomatic mode, and can now legally be converted again to work like a machine gun with a bump stock. To an engineer and hopefully any school child in America it is clear that 1/30 is much smaller than 20/15. Shouldn’t proficiency at basic math be a requirement to get on the Supreme Court? Is the Senate evaluating this in the advice and consent function? Maybe the struggle with basic math explains why some of the Justices have such a hard time accounting for the value of the perks that their benefactors provide to them. I feel that the justices who are protected by the Federal Marshall service in their cozy chambers are not really connected with the reality that our school children face when they must practice regularly how to deal with the risk of an armed school shooter. One of the suggestions to the victims of a shooting is to rush the shooter and overwhelm him. For a person with just a little imagination and compassion it is obvious that there is a HUGE difference between rushing a guy with a musket that can release one round in 30 seconds vs. the modern semiautomatic rifle that releases more than one round per second for many seconds. In the first case one person might get killed before the attacker is rushed. In the second case the bodies pile up so rapidly that any rush stops dead. Literally. I am thinking about a thought experiment here: We should offer the Justices a choice between two scenarios: 1. A court chamber that will be attacked by a shooter with a musket, vintage 1787. 2. A court chamber that will be attacked by a shooter with an assault rifle. In the spirit of entertainment that the people of today enjoy so much we could call this the Supreme Survivor Game and broadcast this on TV. However, there is no reasonable question here and we can spare the justices to suffer through this experiment. Any sane person will know there is no equivalence. This raises the question why such a simple question was answered incorrectly from the highest bench in the country without being challenged. There must be a corrupt force in the system that prevents us from learning from catastrophes. Follow the money! I see a sliver of hope. Our wonderful 47th president has decided that Congress is the opposite of progress. He has entrusted Elon Musk with extraordinary powers to fix the wrongs that the US Constitution 1.0 could not prevent. With Elon’s technological savvy in creating self-driving cars, I am confident that Tesla could create a much safer gun. Imagine what such revolutionary technology could do to TSLA stock! Value and valuation would get much closer to each other. And since the Seconds Amendment afficionados have recently become also afficionados of Musk, I see the opportunity that all the owners of non-equivalent assault weapons will upgrade them to the new, safer Muskets. The only problem that I see for Elon is that he will not be able to get a trademark on the “Musket”. Our Supreme Court word parsers might find historical equivalency here. And in this case any reasonable person should agree with them. A smart society learns from accidents and catastrophes. Will AI help us to get on a path to a more perfect Union 2.0? Or will the corrupting forces that benefit personally from other people’s misery prevail? Time will tell. Soon.