Like a cruise ship steaming toward an iceberg, America’s economy is headed for disaster.

The federal government reports an interest-bearing debt of $37 trillion. However, the actual unfunded obligations of the government, according to the Medicare and Social Security Trustees’ reports, are an unfathomable $158.6 trillion.

James Lileks is on the road so there’s no new edition of The Diner this week. Of course, his familiar place at the long turquoise boomerang-patterned Formica® counter is being held in reserve for next week. See you then.

I felt like I should say something important.  So I’ve been stalling.  My plan was to read through all my previous 999 posts and produce a carefully constructed hunk of opposition (Or is that piece of resistance?  Not sure – my French isn’t very good…).  My critics suggest that I should use more editing and less bourbon.  I intended to give it to them, good and hard, and see how they like it.  But that seemed a lot like work.  So I wrote less unedited incoherence and drank more bourbon.  And I got more and more messages, asking what was going on.  You just can’t please some people.

Some Ricochet members seem determined to persuade others to think like they do.  I’ve never felt that impulse.  I was very clear from the beginning that I was here to learn.  My fundamental problem was that I found myself in constant disagreement with a group (Democrats) that I simply didn’t understand.  Which meant, in my view, that I really didn’t understand my own perspective as well as I thought.  I explained my uneasiness with this problem on the Dave Carter Show – how can I criticize that which I don’t understand?  So I came here to read and to write.  Not to convince others of my wisdom, but rather to seek understanding.  Fathers of little girls will understand my efforts to understand, such as in the picture above.

I’ve come to view leftism as more of a religion than a political movement, just as Islam is more of a political movement than a religion.  But the religion of leftism lacks two very important things:  An underlying ideology, and a system for repentance for sins.  Sort of like the French Revolution all over again – screaming mobs who believe in whatever they’re supposed to believe in this afternoon.  If you wonder about the ethics of all this, that makes you a conservative.  Humility is a conservative impulse.

Are Surveys About the Economy Really About Political Views?

The headline writers pounced on the plunge in the University of Michigan’s (UMich) much-watched index for consumer sentiment on April 11th.

Hennepin County (the largest county in Minnesota) Attorney Mary Moriarty is at it again.  Deemed the most “woke” prosecutor in America, she is refusing to charge state government employee Dylan Bryan Adams, a Minnesota Department of Human Services analyst, with any crimes after he was caught on camera by police vandalizing six Teslas in the Minneapolis area, causing over $20,000 worth of damage.  Instead of being charged with a felony, Adams isn’t being charged with anything.  Instead, he has been placed in a non-criminal “diversion” program.  No jail, no criminal record, and won’t even lose his job.  He remains free to vandalize again.

A strong message has been sent: it’s open season on Tesla, and any other business or individual that refuses to align with the Left’s agenda.  Last year, the offices of conservative Minnesota think tank, The American Experiment, as well as two other conservative organizations, were firebombed.  Amazingly, in a congested metro area where security cameras abound, neither Gov. Tim Walz’s state authorities nor Biden’s FBI and ATF could come up with any leads.  The crimes remain unpunished.

That is actually a company name that I am aware of. I don’t endorse it, although it might well be a very fine company. When I think of lost golf balls, I think about the very best memories of my childhood. Many people romanticize their childhood such that every day of the first few years of school was the best of their life. That was not the case for me. It took several more years of maturation before I could confidently participate in the struggles of growing up and fitting in. My relationship with my parents through the tough early years was tumultuous.

It worked out OK, though. During my high school years, when many of my peers fought with their parents for freedom from their control, my relationship with my parents was the best it had been — maybe the best it was ever to be. I played a lot of golf in high school, and I was good enough to be the last person cut from the school team four years in a row. Our team won the state championship most of those years.

Yes, we celebrated Earth Day (and also my brother’s birthday), and what could be more consequential than that?

Still, moving a few notches down the “significance” scale–or perhaps not–we discover that it’s also the 409th anniversary (on April 22, 1616) of the death of Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes’ greatest creation, Don Quixote, a lower-class (dare I say deplorable?) fellow who was driven to fantasies of heroism due to his mid-life immersion in, and obsession with, works of knightly valor, remains the most celebrated of Spanish literary characters, one whose quest to restore chivalric values to a society he thinks has abandoned them first involves his going mad (always a good start), and then–eventually and after a series of unlikely adventures during most of which he mistakes what’s taking place in the real world for figments of his fevered and highly colored imagination–resuming his own identity, and, shortly before dying, writing a will in which he threatens the disinheritance of his niece if she ever has anything to do with any man who has ever read a book about chivalry. (By this time, it’s evident that Quixote–or “Alonzo Quixano” as he should more properly be called–has, while coming to terms with his impending death and preparing to meet his God, finally come back down to earth.)

The authority of the judiciary in America stems from the creation of a Supreme Court in the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s own rulings about its powers and limits, and congressional enabling statutes for the lesser courts. In the early days of the country, the role of the Supreme Court as the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution was an open question. The Court, in a case called Marbury vs Madison, anointed itself as the sole authority. But over the years the Court has limited direct conflict with Congress and the Executive by also creating the “political question” doctrine. This doctrine permits the Court to graciously yield to one or both of its “co-equal” partners by essentially saying it is a matter for voters and not the Court.

The current Court has been slow to employ this card in the recent contretemps between the lesser courts and the Trump administration. Although one would not know it from the media, the Trump administration has not (yet) defied a court order. But lawfare is pushing the president to that point — and that may be the goal of the Progressive Project.

There was a joke we used to tell when I was a teenager in the 70s.

What are the top three clues that you’re a member of a bad church?
1. The choir wears leather robes.
2. The only song the organist knows is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.
3. There are smoking and non-smoking sections in the sanctuary.