Month: March 2026

Conflict and Deceit

Leave a comment

March 22, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

In our popular imagination, the Garden of Eden was a paradise but Genesis 2:15 says that God put Adam there to “dress it and to keep it.” Adam was the gardener, not some guy lounging around in paradise. A single act of disobedience, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, earned Adam and his companion Eve a one-way ticket out of the Garden and into a world of hard work and conflict. Eve was punished even more harshly because she was to  endure “sorrow” in childbirth and be subject to her husband. In Chapter 4 of Genesis, Cain, one of the children of Adam and Eve, gets jealous of his brother Abel and kills him. This week I want to explore conflict and the ways that various cultures have tried to explain the origins of conflict.

Ancient philosophers and religious traditions were especially focused on origins. An origin lent authority and authenticity. The Greek philosopher Aristotle based his philosophical study on first causes. He was convinced that knowing a first cause would enable him to understand why things are the way they are. This focus on origin would lead Greek philosophers like Zeno (circa 390 B.C.E. to 320 B.C.E.) to a number of paradoxes that made it difficult or impossible to understand movement (Source). The one I am familiar with is the race between Achilles and a tortoise who is given a head start. If distances were infinitely divisible, Zeno argued that Achilles could not catch up to the tortoise. Many of these paradoxes were resolved by the invention of calculus almost two millennium later.

Greek mythology also contains an origin story for conflict that results from a single act, the opening of Pandora’s box. In the Bible account, Eve committed that first act. She was the dupe of the serpent who also sold used cars. In the Greek account, Pandora was the first woman created by the gods as a punishment for mankind (Source). Nope, I’m not making this stuff up. Pandora’s affliction was curiosity and yes, she passed down that disease to Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Poor lads. Anyway, Pandora opened up the box, or urn, and out came all the evils that afflict the world.

In the western tradition, women are the scapegoats for male philosophers and religious leaders who cannot admit that men are not inherently docile creatures. Freudian analysis continued that tradition, explaining that schizophrenogenic mothering  caused the violent havoc of schizophrenia. In his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes that this was still the dominant explanation for schizophrenia until the 1970s.

Helen of Troy was the primary cause of the Trojan War (1194 B.C.E. – 1184 B.C.E.) between the Greeks and Trojans, the ancestors of modern day Turks. Surely, it must have been a woman who caused Israel and the U.S. to cut off negotiations with Iran and attack the country three weeks ago. The Trump administration has given more than a dozen different explanations for why they started the war (Source). Trump has always blamed women for his troubles, so he might as well continue the tradition.

In Norse myth, it is a half-giant, half-god called Loki who ushers in conflict both here in the world and in the universe. In ancient Persia, now Iran, the prophet Zoroaster led a religious movement that emphasized belief in one God, Ahura Mazda. He taught that conflict was the result of an epic battle between good and evil, between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman (Source). The Bible contained no reference to a battle between good and evil until Judaic and Christian religious leaders reinterpreted a passage in the Book of Isaiah to tell the story of a rebellion of angels. In the 5th century A.D., the patriarch Augustine wove several Biblical passages into a story of a cosmic battle between good and evil, between God and Satan (Source below).

Revelation 12:09 refers to Satan as a deceiver, similar to the Nordic myth of Loki. Deceit is the second axis I want to explore this week. According to the Biblical account, mankind’s downfall was the result of the serpent’s deceit. Pandora’s opening of the box came about through self-deceit, that she could ignore warnings from her brother about what might be inside the box. Yet we are social creatures who rely on others to satisfy our wants and needs. To accomplish that, deceit is a useful tool.

Elena Hoicka, a professor at Bristol University led a study which found that some infants at ten months engage in deceptive practices like pretending not to hear or exaggerating. By the time we reach the age of three we are frequent deceivers (Source). Growing up Catholic and having to regularly confess my sins, I could confess to lying to my parents even if I could not remember lying to my parents. No, I didn’t hit my brother. I certainly did not steal my sister’s candy. Of course my homework was done so I could go out to play basketball. I didn’t hear that dinner was ready or I would have stopped playing baseball. No, I didn’t drink the last of the milk and forget to write it down on the grocery list.

Politicians elevate deception to an art. In the 2016 Republican debates, candidates with years of  experience in public life were astounded at the baldfaced lies that Trump told. Trump had made hundreds and thousands of deals and was worth many billions and blah, blah, blah. He was a frequent liar but an inartful liar. He lied about things that were easily checked. In politics, lying is an art, damn it! The Apprentice was a game show. Some voters thought it was Trump’s real resume. Lincoln didn’t get it. Politicians only need to fool some of the people a lot of the time.

Our most frequent act of deception is self-deception. On little evidence, President Bush and his staff convinced themselves that Iraq did have weapons of destruction. They then smothered any evidence contradicting that belief in presenting their case to the American public and the world. Such a commitment of force and resources requires more evidence than mere suggestions of a threat.

At the end of the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025,  President Trump announced that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been obliterated (Source). In a June 25th press release, the White House maintained that the word “obliterate” was the proper term (Source). Deception or self-deception  or both? Yet, eight months later, Iran was supposedly two to four weeks away from deploying a nuclear weapon (Source video). Is there some other interpretation of the word obliterate?

Israeli and U.S. intelligence have two separate criteria for what constitutes a nuclear weapon. Israel’s Mossad classifies any crude nuclear device that Iran might produce as a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence has a stricter definition. It must be a deliverable nuclear device (Source). President Trump will not state that Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu is deciding U.S. military strategy in the Middle East because that makes him look weak. Netanyahu is a skillful politician who  wanted U.S. involvement to maintain military dominance in the Middle East. Trump is both inexperienced and very much influenced by the billionaire donors of the Israeli lobby like Miriam Adelson, who donated more than a $100 million to his 2024 campaign (Source).

We engage in deceit as a tool to resolve or avoid conflict. I wanted to play basketball while it was still daylight, so I lied about the homework. I could always sneak upstairs and do my homework after it got dark. No harm, no foul. Even as the stakes are raised, we use those same justifications as adults. Why not? That kind of thinking has worked for us in the past and we are practiced masters of self-deception.

Pandora’s brother had warned Pandora that the box, a gift from Zeus, was dangerous because Zeus was not to be trusted. She was different, of course. Zeus wouldn’t do that to her. When Helen fell in love with Paris and followed him to Troy, she didn’t think her husband, King Menelaus, would actually start a war to get her back.

President Trump has fired any advisors who didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The war on Iran would be over in a few days, just like the downfall of Venezuela’s Maduro. Sometimes, our deceit invites an escalation of conflict. How to deceive the American public leading up to a midterm election? If only politicians put as much care into governing as they do in covering up their deceit. I hope to see you next week and I am not lying about that.

////////////////

Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash

Coogan, M. D. (Ed.). (2018). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (5th ed.). Oxford University Press. (See commentary on Isaiah 14:4–21.) The reference to the King of Babylon as the “light-bearer” was reinterpreted to mean Satan. The serpent in the Garden of Eden became Satan after a reference in Revelation 12.

The War President

Leave a comment

March 15, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

This week I watched the blinking numbers on the fuel pump as I filled up with gas. $1 per gallon more than it was on February 26. Last year we had to get used to paying higher prices because of the Trump import tax. Now there is the Trump gas tax. I look over at the diesel pump. Almost $5 a gallon, up from $3.80 a few weeks ago. A semi holds about 150 gallons, far more than my Subaru. That gas tax will factor into price increases for groceries each week. The higher price for oil has been a boon for Russia, whose oil revenues had been declining in 2025. Russia produces 10% of the world’s daily consumption and exports 80% of that (Source). For those of us filling up at that gas station, it was like we were putting money in Putin’s pocket, ammo for him to kill more Ukrainians.

I hung up the gas nozzle and got in the car. On the radio, a reporter asked, “Senator, can you comment on the rising price of gas and the effect it has on the budgets of everyday working Americans?” The senator answered with a mantra “short term pain for long term gain.” Some clever marketing geek in Republican Spin Central thought up the slogan, then broadcast it to every conservative media outlet. Republican politicians downloaded the phrase into their brains so that they had a quick answer to an uncomfortable question. Democrats have a similar mechanism but are not as disciplined in their messaging.

In the 2015 and 2016 Republican debates, Trump was the outsider candidate. His every response broadcast skepticism and anger at the political system. Obama had made a bad deal when he negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA (Source). Trump had made deals all over the world and he would get a better deal. The Iraq war was a huge mistake. He attacked candidate Jeb Bush for supporting his brother’s bonehead decision to go to war and the lies he told in the lead up to the war (Source). Trump, the greatest Presidential liar of all time, calling out a former President for lying. We need a younger Trump to debate the old Trump and call him out for this stupid war.

In the book of Genesis, Chapter 22, God tells Abraham to take his son, Isaac, up to a mountaintop and sacrifice him to show his fealty. Abraham did so. Did he think “short term pain,” the death of his son, for “long term gain,” the fealty of a powerful God? Why would the thought of such a sacrifice even come into Abraham’s head? In Chapter 17, God had told Abraham that He would make a covenant with Isaac. Did Abraham remind God of that earlier promise? Hey, God we had a deal. At that point, Abraham was at least a hundred years old and Isaac could have easily refused to submit. Best not to analyze these stories because they are stories, like the many stories that Trump and his team have told about the reasons for getting into this war.

Rubio said that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the driver’s seat on this one (Source). How to make sense of this escapade? There was little consideration given to the consequences. Trump seems to be the leader of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Reminiscent of other laughable failures like Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage (Source). There’s a rumor that Netanyahu has evidence of Trump’s escapades with Jeffrey Epstein and is holding that as a threat over Trump’s head. Oh, now it all makes sense.

Several thousand years ago, people believed that what happened in the material world was the result of spiritual forces and gods. If this war were the result of a feud between the Greek gods Athena and Ares, then it would all make sense, of course. Pete Hackysack, the Defense Secretary, or as he likes to be called, The Secretary of War, certainly personifies Ares, the Greek god of war in all its fury and chaos (Source). But wait, Athena was the goddess of wisdom and strategic war (Source). This is not a strategic war by any stretch of the imagination, so how could Athena be involved? “Tonight we speak with an expert who is doubtful that wise Athena has a hand in this ill planned war. Our second guest this evening will be a Jewish scholar who claims that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is guided by the hand of Athena towards the final apocalypse and Israel’s victory.” The news media loves to cover the controversy. Political analysis would be much more entertaining if we adopted a spiritualist interpretation of current events.

Meanwhile, several thousand people have died in this war so far. They are the Isaacs, the sacrificial lambs not to some chieftain God of the Old Testament, but offerings to appease the vanity and folly of our leaders. I hope to see you next week when the price of gas goes up yet again.

////////////////

Image by ChatGPT

The Legend of Donald Trump

Leave a comment

March 8, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

In a familiar Hollywood plot, a loner comes to a sleepy western town. He harbors some dark secrets from the Civil War and prefers to be left alone (Source). He wants someone to tend to his horse plus a good meal and a room for the night. While eating in the saloon he is interrupted by a bully who challenges him. Or maybe the bully gets physical with one of the saloon girls. The bully makes some aggressive action to the loner and the loner either knocks him out or wounds him with a gunshot. The townsfolk are scared because the bully’s gang will come back and do terrible things.

“Where’s the sheriff?” the loner asks. The gang killed the old sheriff, one of the terrified town folk tell him. So the loner becomes the new sheriff. It’s a job he is reluctant to accept, but no one else can take care of the problem. Eventually, the loner is forced to defend himself and kill the gang’s boss and the rest of the gang because the loner is fast with a gun. President Trump fancies himself as the new sheriff in town. The town, in this case, is the world. For his efforts, Trump expects to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Billions of us around the world are extras in Trump’s fantasy western, the Legend of Trump.

Shortly after taking office for the second time as the sheriff, Trump had to get rid of many of the gang members, i.e. federal employees, who worked in Washington. Many of these people were engaged in helping others, a criminal activity that Sheriff Trump vowed to stamp out. Employees who helped Americans during natural emergencies (FEMA) were part of the gang. People providing services for veterans (Veterans Affairs) or helping provide medical aid to those in poor countries (USAID) were part of the gang and were cut (Source). For that task, Sheriff Trump turned to Chainsaw Muskrat who promised to carve off the fat like a Wisconsin woodcutter carves a tree trunk into a statue of an American eagle. Turns out the Muskrat was about as artistic as a beaver chewing a tree trunk. Then the Muskrat left Washington, taking his chainsaw with him.

Next the new sheriff rid the town of brown skinned varmints who took jobs away from God- fearing townsfolk. They were worse than horse thieves. They were stealing social benefits. The sheriff had ‘em rounded up and put in cattle pens in Texas. Next he sent his posse to the town of Venezuela to capture the gang leader Machete Maduro and throw him in a Brooklyn jail where other notorious criminals had waited for the firm hand of justice.

For decades no one had been able to bring peace to the Middle East. The violence and hatred was worse than the range wars between cattlemen and sheepherders in the 19th century. This time the sheriff gathered up a big posse with lots of dynamite that they could hurl down from the sky. Ka-boom. They took out the gang leader Ayatollah and some of his henchmen. The townsfolk in Iran danced with joy. “You’re welcome,” the sheriff told them as he rode off with his posse, the sunset casting an orange glow on the sheriff’s face.

This is the Legend of Donald Trump who brought law and order to the wild frontier. I hope to see you next week for another thrilling episode.

///////////////

Image by ChatGPT

An Urgent Situation

Leave a comment

March 1, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

This Friday marked the 93rd anniversary of the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, the home of Germany’s Weimar Parliament. A month earlier, Adolph Hitler had been elected Chancellor, the Chief Executive in Germany’s Parliamentary system. In the aftermath of the fire, police found a communist sympathizer who was accused of starting the fire. The following day, Hitler urged President von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree granting Hitler extraordinary powers to prevent a communist takeover of the German government. The decree suspended Constitutional liberties like freedom of speech and assembly, guarantees of private communications and protections from arrest. Within weeks, political opponents were arrested, press freedoms were crushed, and the constitutional order hollowed out (Source). The “emergency” ended twelve years later after the utter destruction of Germany and the deaths of as many as 8.8 million German soldiers and civilians (Source). This week I want to explore the many meanings of emergency.

A hospital emergency room treats conditions with many degrees of urgency. The Latin word emergere refers to anything that comes up suddenly. When they are busy, emergency room doctors perform triage, an assessment of the urgency of a condition or illness. Many years ago, I slipped on the ice and dislocated my shoulder. Urgent? The nurse glanced at my eyes, then held up two fingers. How many? Two, I said. What day is today? Friday, I answered. No concussion. Have a seat. I waited in pain for over three hours in an emergency room in the Bronx, while doctors treated knife stabbings, gun shot wounds, heart attacks, and other conditions deemed more urgent than a dislocated shoulder. I was surprised to learn that neither the degree of my pain nor the short time it would take to fix the problem was a consideration to the doctors and nurses that night. Learning lesson: do not get hurt.

In 1787, a Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to resolve a financial crisis. The country could not pay its bills, or make payments on the war debt it had sustained through the eight year war for independence from Britain. Foreign investment had slowed to a trickle. Because each state issued its own currency, foreign investors were subject to currency risk and volatile exchange rates. The federal government had no power to directly tax businesses or people and states often neglected to meet their share of payment for war debts, weakening the credit of the colonies. Congress had no power to regulate commerce so the states fought among themselves for control of interstate waterways. In 1786, several months before the convention, four thousand people rose up to protest Massachusetts’ tax laws. This uprising, known as Shay’s Rebellion, demonstrated the need for a new compact among the states (Source). The acronym SNAFU was invented during World War 2, but the term aptly describes post-independence America. Despite these crisis conditions, the Constitution does not contain any reference to emergency, crisis or exigency (Source).

Hitler’s seizure of power in Weimar Germany raises issues of constitutional design. How does a country respond to a genuine crisis without empowering political leaders with the power to destroy constitutional order? In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton argued for a unitary executive, a President who could swiftly marshal resources in case of an attack from a foreign power. In response to insurrections like Shay’s Rebellion, Hamilton wanted a President who could restore domestic civil order (Source).

Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985), a German conservative judge, argued in his 1922 book Political Theology that emergencies reveal the political structure underlying the ordinary norms in a country. He wrote that, in actuality, the sovereign is the person that decides when the rules can be broken (Source). Robert Bork (1927 – 2012) was a strong proponent of what is called the unitary executive, a President who has supreme power in the executive branch. According to Bork, Congress has no constitutional power to limit the President’s executive powers (Source).

The conservative justices on the Supreme Court have decided several recent cases that support this expanded power, rejecting the idea that Congress can impose limits on a President’s ability to hire and fire officers in the executive branch. This year the court will decide whether to overturn the court’s 1936 precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor and allow President Trump to fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission (Source). What is the limit of that executive power? Can a President fire the head of the Federal Reserve and install someone who supports the President’s political agenda? Can a President declare an emergency and invoke extraordinary powers? What is the limit of executive authority?

In France’s Constitution, Article 16 allows the President of France to assume exceptional powers when the normal functioning of government is interrupted. Should the U.S. amend its Constitution to give some clarity to what an emergency is? If there were such an amendment,  could the President suspend habeus corpus and other liberties when the Federal Government has a shutdown because of a budget fight in Congress? He could claim that the government is not functioning normally and take control. The U.S. relies on a political tension between the three branches of government rather than an explicit constitutional clarification of what constitutes an emergency.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, arguing that the rebellion by the southern states made such a violation of individual liberty a necessity. Shortly after his inauguration in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a national emergency and temporarily closed banks. Did Roosevelt have such a statutory power? Three days later, a Democratic Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, effectively ratifying Roosevelt’s emergency decree. In 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, President Truman responded to a steelworker’s strike by declaring an emergency in which he nationalized the steel industry. Within two months, the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority (Source).

In 1976, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act to check a President’s discretion to declare open-ended emergencies. According to the Act, the President must specify which statutory power they invoked during an emergency. Secondly, either house of Congress could unilaterally vote to end the emergency. Seven years later, in INS v. Chadha, the Supreme Court invalidated that unilateral power as unconstitutional (Source). After that decision, Congress had to pass a joint resolution subject to Presidential veto and a two-thirds majority to override that veto. With little effective oversight from Congress, any president could declare an emergency. Checks and balances be damned.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency and claimed certain statutory powers under the National Emergencies Act. In April 2025, President Trump declared an emergency, not in response to a terrorist attack, but to persistent trade imbalances. What was the emergency? The need for Trump to exercise a discretionary power over other countries as he had done with contestants on the reality show The Apprentice. This month, the Supreme Court decided that Trump had exceeded his authority.

Emergency powers rarely disappear on their own. Once activated, they tend to be normalized. The extraordinary becomes routine. Surveillance powers expand. Administrative discretion widens. Political rhetoric justifies urgency. Democratic societies must be on guard against the temptations of power and the possibility of abuse. They must question whether the policy response is proportional to the danger and how long the response should last.

Constitutional safeguards cannot rely solely on the good faith of leaders. There must be effective institutional boundaries to check the desire for power. An executive can act with decisiveness in a true emergency but decisiveness has to be balanced with restraint or a country descends into autocracy. We want to tame rather than eliminate emergency power. I hope to see you next week.

////////////////

Photo by Aconitum on Unsplash