by Richard Moss, M.D. It is painful when defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory as occurred on Jan. 15, 2025, some five days before President Trump’s inauguration. Israel was on the verge of a strategic triumph over the Muslim Brotherhood/Iranian axis in the Middle East, brought about by its unparalleled military superiority and audacity. That victory is now in question.  The chain of events began with the unprovoked massacre of 1200 Israelis by Hamas…

Education: Partisan Is Good BIPARTISANSHIP, the comedian George Carlin famously said, usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out. That has been our experience with school board elections.  Back in the 1980s we allowed the local political machines, some of them actively corrupt and all of them black at heart, to control the election of school boards. Even so, the bosses understood that their constituencies would not take kindly to the mishandling of children’s futures. They…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. Last week the Indianapolis Star reported on “Senate Bill 235: Banning DEI.” The Star said that “this bill bans all state spending on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — from trainings to diverse hiring initiatives — at state agencies, educational institutions and health profession licensing boards.” The bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by an 8-2 vote. The committee’s vote aligns with President Donald Trump’s actions to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in…

Diversity Has its Limits LISTENING TO BLACK LEGISLATORS at the Statehouse this week protesting Gov. Mike Braun’s dismantling of DEI, it was clear they are driven by sincere conviction. They believe there are many more people like them who deserve to be, say, surgeons, judges, engineers and pilots, but are being unfairly denied. Oh, you should wish that were so easy to fix. We need more such professional expertise, as diverse as possible. But it is a…

by Mark Franke “The changing structure of the family unit has degraded cultural values and economic stability.”  This was the provocation addressed recently by my Socratic discussion group. We call our monthly topic a “provocation” because it should provoke probing questions and lively debate. This one did, so much so that near the end of our mandatory two-hour limit we wondered if the provocation should be stated in reverse: Degraded cultural values and economic stability have caused changes in…

‘Counterfeit’ Journalism THE LEGACY MEDIA, exemplified by our own Indianapolis Star, is having a problem exerting authority — it has none. Nonetheless, its editors and columnists still affect the tone of earlier days when their titles were depended upon to sort out the morning’s news. Columnists Michael Hicks, James Briggs and Abdul-Haikin Shabazz have assumed the concocted morality of fact-checkers, peppering their copy with modal verbs telling us that we “should” do this or “must” do that. We mustn’t,…

by John Gaski, Ph.D. Officials of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have recently sounded off on the prospect of eliminating Daylight-Saving Time, i.e., ditching the inconvenient semi-annual clock change observed in most of the U.S.  The highest official of all, President Trump, is a proponent.  This development resurrects the specter of Indiana’s tumultuous history with Daylight-Saving Time (DST) and time-zone policy decisions.  The most recent such conflict occurred about 19…

by Mark Franke Donald Trump’s inauguration today to a non-consecutive second term had the beneficial effect of reminding us of Grover Cleveland, the only other president to have achieved this dubious honor. Having memorized the presidents as a schoolboy, this being one of those obscure lists that my failing memory can still resurrect, I recognized the name. The other reason Cleveland has stuck in my memory is that his interim year of non-voluntary retirement sandwiched the term…

by Barry Keating, Ph.D. Private entities, both for-profit and nonprofit, behave differently than public entities. Although we often hear that “government should be run more like a private business,” we know that is nonsense. It’s as difficult to make a cat bark as it is to get a government agency to behave as effectively as a private firm. The Palisades fire in Southern California has provided us with a reminder of the differences between private…

by Mark Franke It’s high time for Donald Trump to focus. His transition team got off to a good start by readying nominees for federal offices and Trump was active in the foreign policy space. A different Donald Trump was evident late in the campaign and it seemed the new Trump was for real. Then Donald Trump 2.0 reverted to the 1.0 version. Where did this nonsense of making Canada a 51st state come from?…