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Every once in awhile we take in a scene that speaks volumes. For example, at the height of the pandemic, passers by could write long dissertations on depraved heart indifference, as inspired by the folks filing out of church services without a mask among them. As the institutional church continues to accelerate its free-fall, people from all walks of life are asking the adherents: Just what is your attitude towards the most vulnerable, the least of these? If you really cared about anyone other than yourself, would reasonable precautions really be all that inconvenient? Is this congregation Jesusonian or Luciferian?

Right now Co-Vid variants are rising as vigilance is falling. You don’t need to be an epidemiologist to understand that increased mutations of the virus are wholly dependent upon increased replication. Those refusing to mitigate the spread are in no way helping. While this simple fact may be rejected by the most self-absorbed, it is fortunate that the surgical team performing life- saving procedures on such shrinking hearts, cares enough about others to wear masks when a chest gets cracked open.

Epidemiologists use an investigative methodology that includes certain essential questions called the 5 W’s: diagnosis or health event (what), person (who), place (where), time (when), plus the causes, risk factors, and modes of transmission that inform them as to the (why/how). Although many of the so-called “superspreader” events occurred before very much was known about SARS- CoV-2, one otherwise blessed event, a wedding in Maine, was linked to at least 170 cases and seven deaths.

At a soccer game in Madrid, a crowd of 45,792 people arrived at the stadium in cars, trains, and buses. They waved, whooped, and cheered and then headed to local bars; later on getting back into those cars, trains, and buses. As many as 7,000 Covid-19 infections were traced back to the event that experts now call “Game Zero” as it occurred two days before nearby Italy had its first confirmed case of the virus.

At a conference in Boston, Biogen held a meeting of 175 corporate executives. They gathered for buffets, cocktails, and networking at Boston’s Marriott Long Wharf hotel. The attendees then returned home, taking the virus to six states, the District of Columbia, and three other countries. 219 people were hospitalized and there were 25 deaths traced to the event.

A five-day prayer meeting at a church in Mulhouse, France was attended by 2,500 people. In Corsica, 263 cases and 21 deaths were traced to attendees who had flown home after the prayer event. Traceable cases were seen throughout, Europe and Africa.

A Connecticut socialite celebrated her 40th birthday with more than 50 guests from around the world. As guests returned home and their daily lives, one attended an event with 420 other people. Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey became Covid-19 hotspots shortly thereafter.

While those events occurring early in the pandemic may be excused as clear patterns were few and far between, there was fully disseminated, actionable intelligence, prior to what happened during the late summer in Harrisonburg Virginia. In September of 2020, a class called Problem Solving Approaches in Science and Technology was held in a ballroom at James Madison University. It was standing room only. JMU had started in-person classes without requiring testing for any of its 20,000 undergraduates. 772 students and faculty were infected.

It may seem strange that such a spread would occur during a class titled Problem Solving Approaches in Science and Technology it’s even more ironic when one considers the most popular majors at JMU are within the category of health sciences. While the University Website states: ”Our students think critically,” it is unfortunately clear that certain administrators do not.

In early April of 2021 the People’s Church in Salem Oregon conducted four indoor, shoulder to shoulder church services on Easter Sunday. A few days later Oregon’s health authority was investigating a potential CoVid outbreak at the Salem church. It is now regarded as one of the state’s largest workplace outbreaks with 74 cases attributed to the Easter Sunday events.

Scott Erickson, holds the title of Senior Pastor for the affected church. It was one of ten litigant churches in Oregon that together filed a lawsuit in May of 2020 asking a Circuit Court to issue a temporary restraining order blocking Oregon Governor Kate Brown from enforcing stay-at-home executive regulations that limited church gatherings to 25 persons or less.

Erickson said his decision to keep the church open was based upon the words of Jesus when he said: ‘I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’ Of course Jesus also said the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and his definition of pastoral care: to lead, guide, feed, comfort and protect the people, by teaching and and example, was very different from that of those that display such a thin veneer of religiosity. The idea of “pastoral care” suggests that pastors are to care.

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As they were breaking Jim out of jail, Tom Sawyer tells Huck Finn that “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

The number of videos gone viral, depicting police violence upon non-white citizens within the United States, has raised awareness of persistent failures to reform a cop-culture tracing its roots to deep within that of the slave patrols. As police unions continue to make excuses for oft repeated instances of brutality within their ranks, corrupt politicians game the system to insure that a black man or woman never amounts to more than three-fifths of a person in a vote tally.

The number of departments that have successfully policed themselves appears to be exceedingly rare. While this may be exacerbated by the fact that news organizations have, for so long, operated in accordance with the doctrine “if it bleeds it leads,” It is also due to the fact that getting to the real numbers has been obstructed by those who have resisted any efforts to bring greater transparency through the creation of a national database. That proposed database would profile officers who have been the subject of abuse complaints.

State and local governments have also been unable to curtail the power of those police unions that champion the cause of repeat offenders while blocking any meaningful reform. Clearly, the chants of “defund the police” are stupid, although the idea of subordinating police departments to public health and safety agencies may eventually prove viable. Hiring only the best of the former police officers into a new 21st Century agency could address all of the persistent problems. Simply sunsetting the old outmoded departments, after the new agency is up and running, could make such a transition seamless.

Defunding those police unions that have retarded evolution makes more sense than haphazardly defunding an organization chartered to protect and serve. As the new public safety officers join generic public employee unions, the stranglehold police unions have exerted to retard any effort towards real reform would be diminished. The clean break would also serve to dispel the notion, that some officers hold, concerning their arbitrarily assumed license to punish.

Nowhere, within the federal and state constitutions, or within the charters and oaths of such sworn services, is a police officer granted a license to be punitive. And yet, many in the force have demonstrated an abysmal ignorance with respect to their limited role within the criminal justice system. Any public servant that does not understand this most basic principle is unfit to hold such a position of honor and trust. This is true for law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges.

While the Census Bureau reports that only 13.4% of the total US population is black, the Bureau of Prisons reports that 38.5% of the prison population is black. While no government agency is reporting the extent to which the law is selectively enforced, it is most certainly a part of that public benefits package now commonly known as white privilege.

In 1911, Nels Dickmann Anderson wrote a poem titled “The Thin Blue Line”. In the poem, the phrase is used to refer to the United States Army and the fact that US Army soldiers wore blue uniforms from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. It also alluded to the Thin Red Line of the British Army in which the Scottish Highlanders stood their ground against a Russian cavalry charge in 1854.

New York police commissioner Richard Enright adopted the phrase in 1922. Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker used it in speeches throughout the 1950s. He referred to the “thin blue line” in efforts to bolster the image of the department saying the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order or social and civil anarchy.

By the early 1970s, the term had been embraced by police departments across the United States. According to a 2018 law review article, by 1978 “thin blue line” and more specifically the “blue wall of silence” also referred to an unwritten code of silence used to cover up instances of police misconduct. On April 20th in 2021, that wall of silence was breached as a jury delivered its verdict in the murder of George Floyd. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on one manslaughter and two murder counts.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division listed a total of eighteen prior abuse complaints against Chauvin. Sixteen of those were listed simply as “Closed with No Discipline while two were Closed with Discipline including a Letter of Reprimand. It should always be remembered that the original police report, released after George Floyd’s murder, read: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) had a complicated relationship with religion. And yet, he managed to cut through all the crap with the words of Huck Finn as the character said: “You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.”

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From an early age we are admonished to “Never judge a book by its cover.” As we begin to pay attention to our participatory democracy, we quickly learn that any initiative named by a politician cannot be accepted at face value. Throughout history, we’ve been subjected to a wide variety of catch phrases that were used to deceive the general population. Most recently these range from trickle down economics to election integrity. We also suffer from the politics of destruction as childish coercive labeling is used to derail any sincere attempt to elevate the political discourse: Terms like repugs and libtards are now in common use.

One of the biggest ongoing deceptions involves simple misnomers. The term packing is generally understood to mean to fill a container of a given size. One might pack a suitcase or cram a large number of things into a given space, such as when a makeshift shelter is packed with beds jammed side by side. Of course, once a politician exerts their distorting influence upon the language of the realm, the meanings become contorted and decidedly self-serving.

When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, in order to obtain favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation, his detractors described the initiative as court-packing. The sown confusion between packing and expanding persists even today and it will likely continue to distort the debate surrounding the prospect of expanding the Supreme Court to achieve an ideological balance.

It has become clear that, when one executive, over the course of one term, can replace one third of the the justices on the United States Supreme Court, the country has become highly vulnerable to tumultuous ideological swings. An administration that is able to fill three vacancies within a nine seat court is quite literally packing the Court. If ever, oh ever there was a time to consider expanding SCOTUS, it is now.

The U.S. Constitution does not define the size of the Supreme Court. In the Judiciary Act of 1869, Congress had established that the Supreme Court would consist of the chief justice and eight associate justices. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 was the actual name of the legislative initiative proposed by Roosevelt. The central provision of the bill would have granted the president power to appoint an additional justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of 70 years and 6 months that refused to retire.

During Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court had struck down several New Deal measures as being unconstitutional. However, included among the cardinal precepts of the United States Constitution is the phrase “promote the general welfare.” Roosevelt sought to bring the court into better alignment with constitutional imperatives through the appointment of new justices that he hoped would rule his legislative initiatives did not exceed the constitutional authority of the government.

The bill came to be known as Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan,” a phrase coined by Edward Rumely. In 1915, Rumely bought, and became editor-in-chief and publisher of, the New York Evening Mail. He permitted his good friend Theodore Roosevelt to use the newspaper as his mouthpiece. In July 1918 Rumely was arrested and convicted of violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act. To get financing for the purchase of the newspaper. Rumely was accused of receiving financing from the German government, which Rumely denied, claiming, instead, he had received money to buy the paper from an American citizen in Germany. Either way, he was known to be sympathetic to Germany and had failed to report this when he received the money. President Coolidge granted him a presidential pardon in 1925.

Rumely was one of two founders of the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG) who were newspaper men. The other, Frank Ernest Gannett, was an American publisher who founded the media corporation Gannett Company which now owns USA Today. The Committee opposed most, if not all, of the New Deal legislation. The organization was successful in opposing the Bills because of a large mailing list campaign targeting legal professionals. Rumely, as executive secretary, successfully dumbed down the political discourse by employing the simplistic and misleading label that characterizes court expansion as packing.

The number of cases heard annually, by the Supreme Court, has declined steadily over the past few decades. While a Court composed of Justices who share the same world view is likely to hear forty-two more cases per term than an ideologically fractured Court, a smaller docket also increases the risk that important cases will be left undecided. This, together with all the dark money that supports judicial nominations, confirmations, and accommodations puts the Court in a position to be “captured” by certain interests or actors leading to a loss of legitimacy for the institution whose strongest reservoir of power is its legitimacy.

If the Supreme Court is the unifier of law, then the Court should actively resolve as many circuit splits as possible and thus unify the law. The best way to achieve this is to expand the Court to twenty-one Justices. In that way more cases could be resolved and a minimum of seven justices could be assigned to hear and decide upon each one. This could be achieved without adversely impacting the time allotment the individual justices set-aside for their book tours.

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“My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics.” So said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on April 5th 2021. His aids were quick to point out that he was, in no way, referring to corporate contributions. As he warns of ‘consequences’ for exercising the same corporate free speech rights McConnell championed in the Citizens United case, Mitch is finally being seen as the unprincipled individual he has always been.

While the Kentucky Baptist alleges the CEOs are being bullied, we should definitely take note of how the Business Roundtable “redefined” the Purpose of a Corporation through a statement they published in August of 2019. In the statement, that moves, at least it’s public image, away from shareholder primacy, the organization claimed to adopt a commitment to all stakeholders. While many employees, suppliers and consumers doubted the sincerity of the Roundtable members and the PR piece, it now appears the “other stakeholders” just may be calling their bluff.

To be sure, the Business Roundtable is not really “redefining” anything. Companies have always been composed of people working in company with one another. Authentic Corporations were originally composed of people associating for a common purpose and acting corporately. The more recent shell-game style corporations are decidedly inauthentic. They are the ones where outside investors have been, not only in control, but also masquerading as if they somehow represent what they see as low level functionaries, the people actually doing the work.

The Supreme Court’s series of decisions, advancing a fictitious corporate personhood, served McConnell’s interest as long as certain buffoons on the bench were willing to soil themselves as they also held “money is speech.” So which is it Mitch? Is the only acceptable speech expressed as money? Is it pleasing only when others are parroting you? Or, is it that you’ve been operating as a ventriloquist’s dummy for so long, with a mouth controlled remotely, that you now lack the ability to recognize the obvious inconsistencies within your own statements?

It is now clear that you embrace hypocrisy as a point of pride. it is also clear that your are a serious embarrassment to the faith. It was John Wycliffe who, in the preface to his Middle English translation of the bible, wrote: “The bible is about government of, by, and for the people.” It was Abraham Lincoln, the same guy you refer to when you say “the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln,” that amplified Wycliffe’s statement so eloquently at Gettysburg. And now Mitch, you have betrayed just about every principle once held the Grand Old Party.

Your real problem is that the electorate is capable of pattern recognition. And, one hundred years after that era of mass consumerism known as the Roaring Twenties, we have the ability to reprise that phenomena based upon a more Intentional Consumerism. We can be intentional about which airlines we use, which beverages we consume, which entertainment events we attend, and which representatives we choose to elect. We can vote each and every day with each dollar we spend.

If our so-called representatives are not representing us, we can insure that any inauthentic corporation contributing to their campaign, becomes the target of the most technology advanced boycott since the days of Charles Boycott. We can do the forensics on all the dark money, beginning with those businesses that conceal such expenditures. We can compensate for the attacks on net-neutrality and other assaults on the First Amendment.

Sooo, as you warn businesses about what you call “serious consequences,” you are picking a fight you can’t ultimately win. You haven’t been able to win on the merits for a very long time. That’s why you and your cohorts have to cheat. You support purging voter rolls without supporting documentation of relocation or death. You support attacks on mail-in voting and vandalizing the United States Post Office. You favor moving polling places away from marginalized neighborhoods, thus creating long lines, and making the serving of water illegal.

You have a history of supporting any form of bigoted gamesmanship that insures a black citizen never amounts to more than 3/5ths of a person in a vote tally. You have no plausible deniability with respect to your racist agenda. You said that “Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government.” While you may have written off the sentient beings, within your own constituency, businesses cannot afford to write off their customer base.

You are in the habit of packaging every value proposition for simpleton consumption, but the electorate is not composed of simpletons. The emotionally charged and most intellectually stunted part of your base may be deceived by the “Stop Socialism” bumper sticker as ninety one of the Fortune 500 companies use the roads the bridges, the airports, and the air-traffic control system; and then make no meaningful contribution to the public treasury. You, Senator McConnell, are very fond of saying Kentucky punches above its weight and indeed, your state is united under the Stop Socialism banner while it citizens receive $2.41 for each and every dollar they pay in federal income taxes.

Prometheus is the Titan god of ancient Greece characterized by forethought. He was credited with stealing fire from the most hoity-toity of the gods and then gifting it to humanity as a cornerstone for civilization. The United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision was published on April Fool’s Day. It rejected the chief cornerstone for our constitutionally grounded democratic republic in the Prometheus case, a case challenging a recent Federal Communications Commission decision ditching the ownership rules originally intended to elevate the public discourse.

By unanimously discounting the refiner’s fire of viewpoint diversity, the Court has once again brought attention to its lack of intellectual rigor; for it ignores the declaration of intent, the value proposition, the mission statement, and the cardinal precepts of The United States Constitution as they were so carefully delineated in the Preamble. That front matter is, arguably, the spirit of the law. The Court’s perception problem is really one of clear discernment by an increasingly honked-off public.

While Kavanaugh referred to Section 706(2)(A) of the Administrative Procedure Act, the APA, he was highly selective in the actual treatment of the way the court had arrived at its conclusion. The APA instructs courts reviewing regulation to invalidate any agency action found to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” The arbitrary-or- capricious test is used by judges when reviewing the factual basis for agency rule-making. Courts can overturn agency rules if they find the underlying rationale or factual assertions to be unreasonable.

In the Prometheus case, the hop-skippety-jump logic of the FCC, that was focused exclusively on gender and race diversity while ignoring the more general diversity of viewpoint factors, is clearly problematic. We are blessed with two eyes and two ears precisely because of the value of such diversity and the way it favors depth of perception. And, once we move beyond the excessively prominent head cases, there is value to considering the viewpoint of our fellow citizens as we move to form a more perfect union.

Kavanaugh wrote: “A court simply ensures that the agency has acted within a zone of reasonableness and, in particular, has reasonably considered the relevant issues and reasonably explained the decision.” The Supreme Court, throughout its history, has steadily contracted this “zone of reasonableness” in ways that run well afoul of constitutional imperatives with respect to our nation’s movement towards a more perfect union. As the framers worked meticulously to dovetail the “consent of the governed” phrasing contained within the Declaration of Independence, to that of a “We the People” initiative as reflected in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, the Justices have again “strained at gnats while swallowing camels.”

In other areas of law, consent must be properly informed. The incoherent reasoning of the Supreme Court in this case has shown its contempt for democracy and favored the prevarications of autocratic wannabes. We have seen the rise of a fictitious corporate personhood in tandem with the demise of the fairness doctrine. Our so-called independent judiciary has exhibited a high tolerance for dark money in its own nominations, confirmations, and accommodations. Is there any linkage between such covert bribery and the First Amendment hits our country has sustained through the more recent attacks attacks on net-neutrality and the ownership rules?

As we labor to make our democracy more authentic, to what extent will we tolerate deceptive practices by those occupying positions of honor and trust? When judges, masquerading as originalists and textualists, segment the constitution in such a way as to render it devoid of context, is that a deceptive practice? When legislators stand before cameras to convince the public that a bill contains something other than what it really spelled out, is that a deceptive practice? When executives selectively amplify, filter, and contextualize facts, is that a deceptive practice?

Judges operate in an arena where facts are facts and alternative facts are perjury. And yet, they seem to be entirely ok with political candidates that secure prestigious positions through perpetrating a fraud on the public. They appear to be equally sanguine when elected representatives actively deceive the electorate while holding office.

The Prometheus case is about preventing a concentration of media power within individual markets. The SCOTUS decision advances the kind of monopoly power that autocracies favor and democracies do not. As the justices work deliberately to distract us from noticing just how very far they have strayed from constitutional imperatives, their own systematized delusions, with respect to corporate personhood, proceed unabated.

What our country’s founders called “foreign potentates,” are often the ones in control of the so-called corporate persons. The addled Supremes have clearly demonstrated they lack the forethought long ago attributed to Prometheus. The court has, in effect and actual fact, converted what Marshall McLuhan once described as a “whirlpool of information” into a cesspool of disinformation.

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Net-neutrality is the most important First Amendment issue of our time. It is the principle that all information, moving throughout the internet, should be unfiltered, unimpeded, and equally accessible to consumers. Broadband providers are specifically prohibited from blocking or degrading content. This includes sites and services that compete against their own services.

California enacted a law in 2017, that reinforced this principle after Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Ajit Pai, a former in-house Verizon attorney, rolled back federal net-neutrality regulations. The Trump Justice Department immediately sued California to overturn its law. Broadband providers, through their trade groups, followed with a request for a preliminary injunction to stop the California law while the lawsuit wound its way through the courts.

On Feb. 23rd in 2021, Judge John Mendez of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California denied the motion for a preliminary injunction. The group of internet service providers had also brought suit in 2018 to stop the state law from going into effect. The judge’s ruling cleared the way for California to enforce its net neutrality law, thereby ensuring equal access to internet content.

The trade groups suing the state said in a joint statement that they were reviewing the court decision and deliberating next steps. But they argued against state laws that create a patchwork of regulations for broadband providers.” They said “a state-by-state approach to internet regulation will confuse consumers and deter innovation, just as the importance of broadband for all has never been more apparent.”

The enactment of the California law is a move that is sure to be followed by other states in the absence of unambiguous federal regulations that will insure the free flow of information without a dollar skew. Washington, Vermont and Oregon are among a handful of states that enacted similar laws after the federal rollback of the rules.

California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, said in a statement: “We applaud the court for affirming that California has the power to protect access to the internet.” He went on to say: “The ability of an internet service provider to block, slow down or speed up content based on a user’s ability to pay for service degrades the very idea of a competitive marketplace and the open transfer of information at the core of our increasingly digital and connected world.”

The Biden administration has made statements supporting the reinstatement of federal net neutrality rules. One month into the new administration, the Justice Department dropped its lawsuit against California’s law. The telecommunications industry’s request for a preliminary injunction was the last hurdle before that law could go into effect.

The California state senator who wrote the legislation, called the decision a victory. “The internet is at the heart of modern life. We all should be able to decide for ourselves where we go on the internet and how we access information. We cannot allow big corporations to make those decisions for us,” said Senator Scott Wiener.

Acting F.C.C. chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, had fiercely opposed the agency’s decision in 2017 to scrap net neutrality regulations. Although she has not announced plans to reinstate federal rules, she is focused upon a mandate by Congress to bridge the digital divide for broadband access to low-income Americans. Shortly after the February 23rd court decision, the Acting Chairwoman tweeted: “Tonight a court in California decided that the state law can go into effect. This is big news for #openinternet policy.”

It bears repeating that states and municipalities have additional options to combat the industry’s assault on the First Amendment. The incumbent telecommunications companies have long lines that the upstarts do not. That mature infrastructure gives AT&T, together with the baby Bells, an unfair advantage if the long lines, stretched along railroad rights-of-way, are not regulated in accordance with common carrier statutes, as they were when what became the Bell System first gained access.

The extent to which municipalities also make public utility easements available to Internet Service Providers is clearly relevant in the context of Net-Neutrality. The Internet was created and funded to serve the public interest. First for defense, then for research, and eventually opening it up for commerce along with personal use. The Internet is a critical part of our nation’s communications infrastructure. The short-sighted gamesmanship of self-serving ISPs and politicians can have an adverse consequence related to the three flows of commerce and our country’s overall competitiveness.

One would hope that the courts will ultimately recognize the critical importance of net-neutrality but, if they don’t, any filtering, blocking, or impeding of content should be swiftly met with the state and local governments giving a more service motivated class of competitors superior access to the public utility easements and rights-of way.

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As federal, state, and local governments take a new look at what companies should have access to public easements and utility rights of way, they really should consider all the angles. Especially since common carrier, public utility, or natural monopoly status may actually be in flux. One factor to consider might be the array of cases where a part of our essential communications infrastructure, specifically Internet Service Providers (ISPs), have sued municipalities that wanted to deliver their own Internet services. Two of the biggest ISPs, the ones that orchestrated an attack on net-neutrality, and thereby the First Amendment, should re-commit to serving the public interest as common carriers.

They should obtain this re-classification in an above board manner. Not by means of the usual political sophistries, that only serve to make our “elected representatives” even less representative. In the meantime, they should not enjoy a presumption of unfettered access to public utility easements or rights of way without the common carrier classification.

American enterprises have historically benefitted from the commons. And those private enterprises, enjoying superior access rights to spaces secured through eminent domain, have obligations to insure they are serving the public interest. The bad actors among them would convert and monopolize the commons, intentionally ignoring the ways their gamesmanship works to the detriment of everyone else.

It may be through taking the concept of “natural monopoly” to illogical extremes. It may be through fouling the air and the water, offloading the cost of any real consequences to future generations. Or, it may be through the privatization of things originally built by the taxpayers or through their forbearance. The one thing that certain malign actors, within business, have in common is the extent to which they privatize gains while socializing expenses and losses. Consider these examples:

• The taxpayer invests tremendous amounts of money to insure vital research is conducted in the public interest. Then we watch helplessly as essential medicines, that have been in the public domain for decades, are deliberately made scarce so that certain manufacturers are unjustly enriched by gouging people who are in desperate need.

• The taxpayer funded the development of software that would allow them to file their taxes directly with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Then, companies that reverse engineer the software and want to be paid for providing those same services, covertly bribe politicians to prevent the funding public from using the web interface they already bought.

• The taxpayer funded the systems used by the National Weather Service (NWS) to develop forecasts and convey that information to the public. Then, companies that effectively duplicate the service work to prevent the NWS from disclosing it directly to the public. Consider how you might be affected if the one minute advanced tornado warning is free while the five minute one is only available to paying customers.

• A city makes a wide range of special accommodations available, including favorable tax treatment, so that a baseball franchise can build a stadium. Then, when the players go on strike, the same city is denied any role in the negotiations even though the value of their investment is diminished and the city is impacted financially by the work stoppage.

• A charitable hospital system is built, over the course of a century, while avoiding taxes on the income, the supplies, the land, and for use of the locality’s infrastructure. Then, when the institution is privatized, just how does the taxpayer get compensated for their forbearance, for the extra taxes we all paid because the hospital was built-out without paying any?

Of particular interest in the Net-Neutrality context is the extent to which municipalities make public utility easements available to Internet Service Providers. The Internet was created and funded to serve the public interest. First for defense, then for research, and eventually opening it up for commerce along with personal use. Now, as the individual ISPs become increasingly self-serving, they sue these same municipalities for any attempt to provide their Internet services directly to the public.

There is, at the time of this briefing, a legislative initiative that on its face proposes, and I quote: “to improve public access to Wi- Fi.” This is misleading, for the actual bill contains the following phrasing:“to prohibit a state or a political subdivision thereof from providing or offering for sale to the public retail or wholesale broadband Internet access service.”

While at least one major ISP has deliberately slowed the deployment of fiber infrastructure, the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee installed a fiber optic network in 2010. It is now celebrated as one of the best Wi-Fi services in the entire United States. UniNetworks.org lists 63 cities, across the country, with similar publicly owned fiber networks. Those cities have, at their disposal, a wide variety of options in the legal toolkit to defend their publicly owned network from the ravages of unbridled privatization. The principles clearly articulated, as the Internet was first created and funded by taxpayers, remain relevant today.

One would think those who feel they’ve been “taxed enough already,” would want a decent return on the taxpayer funded investments they already made.

The first railroad chartered in the United States was the Baltimore and Ohio. Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, turned the first spadeful of earth on July 4, 1828. On May 10, 1869, the last golden spike was driven into the newly completed transcontinental railroad built by the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific.

During this period, on May 24, 1844, Alfred Vail was stationed at the Mount Clare railroad depot in Baltimore, Maryland. He decoded the famous telegraph message “What hath God Wrought?” It was sent by Samuel Morse from the Supreme Court chamber of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

During the Civil War, telegraphy played a strategic role giving Commanders the ability to communicate with their troops almost instantly. After the war, telegraph wires were strung across our vast continent along the same lines used by the railroads. When congress declared railroad companies to be common carriers in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, telegraph lines were an integral part of railroad operations. As other telecommunications services evolved, their infrastructure was effectively grandfathered into the rights of way used by the railroads.

A common carrier had been previously defined as any business entity whose main commercial activity is transporting things on behalf of people. For example one requirement has been that common carriers, in the shipping industry, would charge the same price to transport one pound of gold, one pound of fertilizer, or one pound of printed material. Moving different products that weighed the same, and packaged in the same size container, would cost the same amount of money to ship.

In accordance with the General Railroad Right-of-Way Act of 1875, the federal government granted railroad companies rights of way across the United States. By connecting the coasts over thousands of miles, rights of way served to promote the country’s economic development and westward expansion. A right of way is a type of easement granted or reserved over the land for transportation purposes, such as a highway, public footpath, rail transport, canal, oil and gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, and message communications lines.

Rights-of-Way, commonly referred to as ROWs, are granted to serve the public good and the overall competitiveness of our country’s enterprises. In the case of the ROWs granted to the railroads, when the line is further developed or abandoned, two questions that loom large involve ancillary uses of any Right-of-Way held by the railroads.

The railroads, as common carriers, have routinely sold access to their ROWs and retained those proceeds rather than pass them to either the land owner or to the public treasury. This gives rise to certain controversies the courts must resolve, especially in light of the fact that a select few Internet Services Providers (ISPs) have fought long and hard to the effect that they are no longer classified as common carriers.

On March 10, 2014, the Supreme Court, in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust et al. v. United States, held in an 8-1 decision that the right of way for an abandoned rail line goes to the party that owns the land underneath. This decision, concerning just one type of change in circumstances, may have applications or implications with respect to others, such as when a Right-of-Way user is no longer classified as a common carrier. Here are two possibilities:

• First, a conversion whereby the railroad sells access to the ROW, without compensation to the land owner, may expose the railroad or the government to a takings claim under the Fifth Amendment. This would be more likely in the case of non-common carriers due to their implicitly diminished public benefit value. Should this thinking prove meritorious, any use of the ROW, not specifically related to the control of the railroad itself, should inure to the benefit of the original property owner or, in the alternative, the public treasury.

• Second, when the communications companies are no longer common carriers, they no longer merit special access to any of the ROWs and easements that are set aside for a public benefit. Placing this question before federal, state, and local governments could and should expose the ISPs to an endless array of challenges to both their natural monopoly and their public utility status. If they are not common carriers, how does this affect their eligibility for pole attachments or other access to utility Rights of Way. And, with so many ISPs in competition for that business, why should a few large incumbents enjoy superior rights over those of any startup.

In the second example, the ISPs would undoubtably argue that the public does receive a benefit from their commercial operations. Any competent advocate for the public might stipulate there is a public benefit now ancillary to the ISPs newly defined commercial operations. To be sure, there is a public benefit for most commercial operations, such as when the pocket-picking organ grinder’s monkey brings a smile to the faces of children.

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From an early age we were taught that one of the unique values for our country is “Freedom of the Press.” Of course, from the time of this country’s inception, until very recently, freedom of the press was only available for the privileged few that own a press. The traditional understanding of what constitutes “editorializing” was, in ages past, based upon what appeared on the opinion page.

Today we understand that every decision by a publisher is an editorial decision.. Whether a story runs above the fold, at the beginning of a newscast, or if it runs at all is based upon the opinion of someone. To those of us who thrive within a world of competing ideas, this is entirely ok as we can always engage in channel surfing.

In contrast, those intellectually dishonest folks, the ones that only want to hear opinions aligning with their own, have become a problem within the context of our participatory democracy. The “Consent of the Governed” as advanced through the Declaration of Independence, presupposes an informed consent. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights put forth by the United Nations in Article 21 states that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government”.

The December 2019 survey by Netcraft revealed there are about 1.3 billion active websites across over 243 million unique Internet Domain names. The number of WordPress installations on web servers is estimated, by several survey organizations, to be around 455 million. This clearly dwarfs the number of printing presses manufactured over the entire span of human history.

The advent of the Internet gave us tremendous hope for finally making freedom of the press truly real. Those hopes were dashed recently, by very real enemies of First Amendment integrity, in part, through their coordinated attacks on net-neutrality. Our nation has, as a result, reverted to a condition of severe vulnerability. Now, certain news can be advanced or retarded, at will, by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating primarily as common carriers, traditional conduits in the telecommunications space.

On October 1, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled the FCC had authority to reclassify internet service providers as “information services” under Title I of the Telecommunications Act, rather than as “common carriers” that can be more heavily regulated.

The hop-skippety-jump logic used by the Court to differentiate, between “information services” and “common carriers,” attempted to contrast the two categories by citing the function of Domain Name Services (DNS) as somehow unique to the information services. One would have to wonder if the judges ever dialed 411 or even used a phone book. While DNS may sound like mystic art to someone other than a technology worker, it is simply a list that correlates names with numerical addresses. Just how this is different, from the directory that shows your name along side your phone number, was apparently too technical a consideration for certain highly disciplined jurists sitting as a court of appeals.

Special interest groups also bring a dollar skew, into the nominations, confirmations and accommodations for judges as well as the public discourse. Issues affecting everyone are often crowded out or eclipsed as legislators are enabled and financially bolstered by overpaid, underwhelming CEOs. This occurs even as they characterize themselves as constitutional conservatives.

They masquerade as originalists and textualists as they disregard the declaration of intent, the mission statement, the value proposition, the cardinal precepts, and the constitutional imperatives as they were so carefully delineated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution. The Framers of our constitutionally grounded democratic republic did not intend for unrepresentative elected officials to treat the United States Constitution as little more than a buffet from which they can pick and choose.

Professional journalists and politicians have also facilitated the development of polarized news sources. They have, at times, belittled the contributions of individual bloggers that, while they may lack a certain journalistic discipline, bring much greater diversity to the public discourse. So-called advocacy journalism has also entered the fray. It is, of course, not true journalism any more than agenda science is true science.

To address the problems associated with a misinformed citizenry, unable to exercise “informed consent” as they consult suspect historical accounts, concerned historians are now working to leverage the consensus and immutability features of blockchain, the same technology undergirding crypto-currencies. In this way they hope to protect future generations from revisionist history.

While egomaniacal leaders actively engage in squelching diversity of opinion, we should closely examine the actual business practices of those tele-communications companies that were once, but are no longer classified as common carriers. While the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the attempted murder of Alexi Navalny are high profile cases in point, there are also sinister forces at work within the United States, to thwart the collective will of We the People.

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Sir Francis Galton introduced the term “eugenics,” meaning well-born, in 1883. His emphasis was on encouraging healthy and capable people, of above-average intelligence, to bear more children, with the idea of building an “improved” human race. The eugenics ideologies that are typically associated with the first half of the twentieth century are much older though they persist, even today. Now they are simply manifest in a different way.

While an individual may reasonably consider what their children might look like upon choosing a mate, a couple would likely be ostracized for using abortion for purposes of selecting a child based upon, say, hair color. In May of 2019, a Supreme Court opinion described abortion as a potential “tool of eugenic manipulation.” The opining Justice was referring to an Indiana abortion law that bans abortion motivated solely by the race, sex or disability of the fetus. He used the history of the eugenics movement to explain why “the use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical.”

Societies have long engaged in what is sometimes termed positive eugenics, the improvement of the human race by better breeding. Plato suggested applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400 BC. He went on to suggest selective mating to produce a guardian class. Negative eugenics also emerged long ago when, in Sparta, every child was inspected by the council of elders to determine if the child was fit to live. In Rome, Table IV within the Laws of the Twelve Tables required that: “A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed.”

North American colonists practiced race warfare through the gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox to the Ottawa tribe’s Chief Pontiac. In his 1922 book Race Decadence, William Samuel Sadler, addressing problems within a given race, argued that alcoholism, feeblemindedness, insanity, and delinquency” were hereditary traits and that those who possessed them were breeding at a much faster rate than “superior human beings.” By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined.

Early in the CoVid 19 pandemic, one Antioch planning commission member wrote on his Facebook page that “the World has been introduced to a new phrase “Herd Immunity.” He wrote “In my opinion we need to adopt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers its ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet their natural course in nature.” He went on to add, the “homeless and other people who just defile themselves by either choice or mental issues” should also be allowed to perish. This, he said, “would fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources.”

The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by that of 1930s California. National Socialist racial hygiene, the German variation on eugenics, was at the center of Nazi ideology. It’s prominence rose sharply as wealthy Nazi supporters started heavily investing in it under Adolf Hitler’s leadership.

Now, in 2020, a wealthy and largely hidden network of ideologues, advances eugenics in a highly effective ways that also support plausible deniability. This same oligarchy uses a variety of sophistries to engineer poverty, to complicate access to healthcare for people that are in many other ways marginalized due to their age, their race, their ethnicity, or their economic status.

The oligarchy is cloaked in a thin veneer of religiosity as it surrounds itself with excessively prominent, integrity challenged, mammon serving evangelicals. No matter how injudicious the judicial act, how reckless the executive behavior, how negligent the legislative inaction, it all maps back to the depraved heart indifference and unmitigated selfishness of these, the most condescending.

It has been said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We have seen them campaign in bigotry as moral depravity flows. Such groups cannot win without cheating, and therefore focus much attention on rewriting the rules of the game. Wielding disproportionate political influence to mislead, spam, purge, suppress, intimidate, gerrymander, and otherwise corrupt elections is not new to the game. The exploitation of crisis events, that was once associated with a small group of war-profiteering industrialists, now appears to be in vogue to benefit career politicians together with their donor owners personally, and on a global scale.

As the United States surpassed the grim milestone of a half million pandemic related deaths, we should all recall the former guy’s early efforts to minimize the severity of the outbreak. Vanity Fair quoted one public health expert who said a member of the Corona Virus Task Force offered the view: Because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. Beto O’ Rourke later said the Texas GOP is a ‘death cult’ that wants you to do the dying.