After my cataract surgery it’s hard for me to read. Using my left (operated on) eye only it’s too fuzzy with or without my glasses. Using my right eye only with my glasses I can read without difficulty but keeping my left eye closed while I read is a strain on its own.

Since my ordinary daily schedule includes an enormous amount of reading, that restricts my daily activities pretty strictly. In a typical day I would read several hundred emails (mostly uninteresting) and scores of editorials, columns, articles, and blog posts. If I don’t maintain that pace, my Inboxes (multiple email addresses) get cluttered quite quickly. I’m barely able to maintain a quarter of that now.

I continue to look for good legal analyses of Louisiana v. Callais. The best I’ve found so far is from Edward Foley at SCOTUSBlog. Suffice it to say he doesn’t think much of the majority decision. Here’s a snippet:

Alito’s opinion for the court in Callais is an altogether different matter. Unlike Shelby County or Brnovich, Callais is an abomination.

Callais purports to interpret VRA’s Section 2, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982 amendment to the section’s text creates a “results” test for determining whether there is liability under the section, replacing the “intent” test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, no “standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed … which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” Yet Callais defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intent inquiry rather than a results analysis.

In various passages in the Callais majority opinion, Alito denies substituting an intent test for the statute’s explicit “results” standard, saying that evidence of intent is only to be considered as relevant to the results determination. Specifically, he says that the court’s “interpretation does not demand a finding of intentional dis­crimination,” while acknowledging that “it imposes liability only when the circum­stances give rise to a strong inference that intentional dis­crimination occurred.” But the bulk of Alito’s opinion belies that the consideration of intent is at all limited in the way he suggests. Instead, it is manifest that intent has become the touchstone of the entire Section 2 inquiry. When discussing the specific facts of the case, Alito faults the Section 2 claimants for “fail[ing] to show an objective likelihood of intentional discrimination based on the totality of circumstances.” Moreover, when setting forth the threshold perquisites that any Section 2 plaintiff must establish before having any chance of prevailing, Alito categorically states that plaintiffs must “demon­strate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial con­siderations rather than permissible aims.” It’s undeniable that “driven by racial considerations” is an intent, not results, requirement.

It continues in that vein.

Most of the commentary I’ve read has focused on the policy aspects of the decision rather than the legal ones so I found an analysis that relies more on the law refreshing. Perhaps more will appear over time.

I was pretty woozy after my cataract operation and the following day. My left eye aches a little, with occasional more serious aches. In our post-operative consultation my ophthalmologist said that everything I was experiencing was within normal limits and I was cleared to return to my ordinary activities with a few limitations. Eyedrops four times a day. Don’t bend over. Don’t rub your eye.

The vision in my left eye is noticeably better than it was—it’s actually a little better than the eye which hasn’t been operated on. For the next three weeks (at least) I will be in a strange transition world in which my old eyeglasses don’t work for me as well as they once did but changing my prescription would be premature. I’ll probably avoid driving for the duration.

I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am without my loving, supportive wife. She faithfully puts my eyedrops in, is my driver, and reminds me to observe my limitations.

I hope to be able to post a little.

Posting may be a little less frequent over the next several weeks than I have expected of myself. Over the last 22 years I have written more than 22,000 posts. That’s more than 1,000 posts per year, nearly three posts a day for 22 years.

Tomorrow I’m getting cataract surgery on my left eye and, honestly, I’m apprehensive about it. I realize that’s irrational but I grew up with the knowledge that my dad’s grandfather had been blinded by a botched cataract surgery. That was more than a century ago and an enormous amount has changed over the last century—that’s why it’s irrational of me.

Whatever the outcome I probably won’t feel like posting tomorrow and I suspect I won’t be able to see well enough to post. The reason for that is, well, I wear glasses and the operation will in all likelihood change my prescription. The present plan is one eye tomorrow and the other in two weeks. That suggests that for the next month things will be, shall we say, in flux.

Today is Derby Day, the day on which the Kentucky Derby is run. It’s held outside Louisville, near where the Schulers originally settled in the United States. I’ve posted on this before including some family pictures here.

I want to take exception with Marc Thiessen’s recent Washington Post column. In the column Mr. Thiessen asserts that President Trump is 14 days from victory in Iran:

Here is the bottom line: The Iran war must end with a decisive victory. And that victory can only be achieved in one of two ways: either Iran capitulates or the U.S. launches a final flurry of military strikes.

Trump has given the regime every opportunity to sue for peace, and it has rejected his overtures. It is admirable that Trump is taking his time. He understands that what he is doing is important and cannot be rushed. But it is also true that he cannot declare victory until either Iran cries uncle — or he finishes the job.

He contends that the “job will be finished” in two weeks.

It was about a century ago that the philosopher George Santayana wrote that only the dead have seen an end to war. I suspect that is particularly true of the war against Iran. I think Mr. Thiessen is making two errors.

First, who in Iran would surrender to us? How would that surrender be made to hold? At this point there does not appear to be any unitary leadership in the country. One faction might surrender but that would leave the others.

Second, I think he’s expressing a grave misunderstanding of religion. Some Iranian actors operate within a framework where martyrdom and resistance have intrinsic value. That does not make them irrational but it does mean that the cost-benefit calculus Thiessen assumes may not apply in the way he suggests.

About twenty years ago a unit of time, roughly six months, called “the Friedman unit” was proposed in jocular reaction to columnist Tom Frieman’s repeated assertions, over a multi-year period, whether a decent outcome would be forthcoming in the war in Iraq. If Mr. Thiessen continues his assertions we may need a “Thiessen unit”. There would be 12 Thiessen units in a Friedman unit.

At the Wall Street Journal Avi Shafran responds to Pope Leo XIV’s condemnation of the U. S.-Israeli war against Iran. Here’s a snippet from his op-ed:

Celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday amid the Iran war, Pope Leo XIV declared that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He also recalled the prophet Isaiah’s words: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, came a few weeks later, on April 20. Warren Goldstein, chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues of South Africa, used the occasion to deliver a stern reply to Pope Leo.

On Yom HaZikaron, he said, we note how “our soldiers who fell in battle” are “holy and pure.” He declared that “the wars that Israel has fought since its inception are just wars,” something that must be said in this “world of moral confusion.”

But the pope, Rabbi Goldstein said, “had the audacity and the brazenness and the cruelty to say that all of those who wage war will be turned away by God.”

concluding:

Pope Leo’s sermon and Rabbi Goldstein’s response may be simply a blip in the relations of Catholics and Jews that have improved so much over the past 60 years. I hope they do not mark a more lasting and more dangerous turn toward enmity.

I think a number of things are being bundled up in the column which deserve to be separated including:

• Interest
• casus belli
• Morality

I am an American and I am a Catholic. The remarks are at least as applicable to the United States as to Israel, and may plausibly be read as aimed at U.S. interventionism. I will refrain from commenting on Israel’s interests, whether Iran’s actions were an imminent threat to Israel, and the morality of Israel’s actions, restricting my comments to America’s interests, its casus belli for war with Iran, the legality of the U. S.’s going to war with Iran, and the morality of our going to war with Iran.

Robert Prevost (Pope Leo) is an American and a Catholic, too. He must be at least as aware as I am that Catholics are not pacifists. Furthermore, even if the pope would like to be a pacifist, his advisors have surely warned him that taking such a position would destroy the Church by undermining its teaching authority, a major distinction between Catholicism and other Christian denominations. The pope is constrained by a millennium-old teachings that allow just wars. Consequently, I believe that interpreting the pope’s remarks as directed towards Israel is mistaken: he was talking about the United States.

I see the war as yet another instance of what I call the “Batman theory” of America’s role in the world—i.e. that America has not just a right but a responsibility to right global wrongs as we see fit without reference to law or authority.

Among the many problems is that the United States is a signatory to the UN Charter and going to war other than in immediate self-defense, i.e. imminent threat, without Security Council authorization or Congressional authority is illegal. A reasonable retort to that is that the U. S. has done so many times over the last 40 years including in Yugoslavia, in Libya, in Iraq, and elsewhere. One might point out that in the instance of Libya there as a Security Council resolution. However, both Russia and China complained that U. S. action in Libya greatly exceeded the UNSC resolution which was limited to protecting civilians, not attacking or overthrowing the Qaddafi government.

In addition engaging in war other than as a last resort is immoral. Had diplomatic channels been exhausted? Was our response proportional? is there a reasonable chance of success? I believe the answer to all of those questions is “no”.

U. S. interests are not synonymous with Israeli interests and we should not pursue Israeli interests as our own. The United States is not Israel, and its obligations whether legal, strategic, and moral are its own. Treating Israeli interests as interchangeable with American interests obscures the very questions that must be answered before any resort to force: what threat we face, under what authority we act, and whether war is truly the last resort.

Those questions cannot be answered by invocation or by alliance. They require argument. And when they are not answered, appeals to justice ring hollow, however sincerely made.

If Pope Leo’s words have any proper application here, it is not as a blanket condemnation of war, but as a challenge to the presumption that American power, once engaged, is thereby justified. That presumption deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

I rarely do this but I am going to quote James Taranto’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in full, not necessarily because I agree with him but because I think it is highly informative.

Perhaps the most contentious statement of Donald Trump’s career has been his assertion in August 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the agitation in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Trump was right in more ways than he realized—at least one person was on both sides. Meet F-37, a figure in the indictment a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Ala., handed up last week against the self-styled antiracist nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event . . . and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” the grand jury alleges. “F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”

F is for “field source,” the SPLC’s term for inside informants it paid to gather intelligence on white-supremacist groups. According to the indictment, “between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds to Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups.” Among these, the indictment says, were F-9, who got a cool million over a decade for activities that included stealing documents from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and F-39, whom the SPLC paid $6,000 to take the rap for F-9’s theft.

The SPLC raises money and sustains its relevance by stoking the perception that white supremacy is pervasive and influential. I have argued since 2008 that this aligns the center’s interests with those of supremacist groups. My point received insider validation from a 2019 New Yorker article by journalist Bob Moser, whom the SPLC hired as a writer in 2001. “Though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups,” Mr. Moser wrote. He and his colleagues came up with a mordant slogan: “The SPLC—making hate pay.”

If the indictment’s allegations are true, the SPLC’s fundraising efforts went beyond hyping hate groups to providing them material support. Several of the field sources were allegedly leaders of the organizations on which they were informing, including F-unknown, “the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America”; F-30, who “led the National Socialist Party of America”; and another F-unknown, a Ku Klux Klansman of unspecified sex who was “married to an Exalted Cyclops.” F-9, the million-dollar document thief, was a fundraiser for the National Alliance. There’s no way he found a more generous patron than the SPLC.

Supporting white supremacy through lawful means is constitutionally protected speech. It may be a scandal, but it isn’t a crime. The prosecutors’ theory, however, is that the SPLC criminally defrauded its donors “through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for”—that is, by promising to spend the contributors’ money to oppose racism, then supporting it instead. The center also allegedly used fictitious business entities to pay the informants and is charged with money laundering and lying to a federally insured bank in connection with those transactions.

In a video statement, the SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, neither denied nor admitted the criminal accusations but implied that they were politically motivated: “The federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach.” He acknowledged that the SPLC had used paid confidential informants and said that although the practice was necessary “to protect the safety of our staff and the public,” it has ended. (The events alleged in the indictment all occurred in 2023 or before.)

Mr. Fair added that “we frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.” The SPLC repeated that claim in a motion filed Tuesday in federal court, which seeks an order that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche retract a “false and unfairly prejudicial statement” to the contrary that he made in a TV interview.

Mr. Fair doesn’t explain what function the informants served for the SPLC. Even the center’s supporters are at a loss about that. Columnist Clarence Page writes that “a key question will be whether prosecutors can distinguish SPLC’s informant practices from those long used by law enforcement.” The distinction is obvious: The SPLC is a private organization, not a law-enforcement agency. Mr. Page’s framing sidesteps the central question.

Making sense of all this requires a look at the SPLC’s history. When the center was founded in 1971, it mainly did legal work for clients who were indigent or had civil-liberties complaints. “A decade or so later,” Mr. Moser reported, it “began to abandon poverty law . . . to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan.” The center filed lawsuits aimed at bankrupting Klan organizations, unsympathetic defendants that made easy targets.

In explaining the SPLC’s concern for its employees’ safety, Mr. Fair noted in his video that the center’s offices were firebombed in 1983. That was during the heyday of the anti-Klan litigation campaign. But those lawsuits tailed off after the 1990s as the center increasingly focused on what it calls “tracking hate.”

Around the time the SPLC began the litigation campaign, it launched a project called Klanwatch to monitor and report on KKK activities. Klanwatch ultimately grew into “the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list,” Mr. Moser wrote.

According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023 the field sources contributed information to at least three SPLC publications: Intelligence Report, “a magazine-like periodical”; Hatewatch, a blog; and Intelligence Project Dispatch, “a monthly online publication issued by the Hatewatch Staff.” This seems to have been the informants’ main function in recent decades. The SPLC’s principal activity has been gathering information and presenting it to the public in printed and online media. That is known as journalism.

Here’s what SPLC journalism looks like: The indictment alleges that “a high-level SPLC employee” used the documents F-9 stole from the National Alliance as the basis for a Hatewatch story. A former chairman of the same group, F-42, “was featured on the SPLC’s ‘Extremist File’ webpage.” The center denounced F-42 as an extremist with one hand and paid him $140,000 with the other, according to the indictment.

To observe that the SPLC practices journalism isn’t to give it a seal of approval. To the contrary, it is to insist that the center’s work be judged by the ethical standards of journalism. In America at least, respectable journalists don’t pay sources for information—much less hire sources to obtain information illegally, as the SPLC allegedly did with F-9. We don’t deliberately deceive our readers, as the SPLC allegedly did by attributing F-9’s theft to F-39 and by publishing an exposé of F-42 that concealed the most interesting and pertinent fact about him—that he was on the SPLC payroll.

Journalists like Mr. Page don’t understand the SPLC because such clarity would reveal that this journalism scandal implicates their own organizations. Mr. Moser noted in 2019 that the SPLC’s hate-group list “remains a valuable resource for journalists.” News outlets frequently pass along other SPLC work with a gloss of expert authority. They couldn’t do that if they acknowledged the center for what it actually is—a competitor, and a particularly disreputable one.

Racism is vile. By “racism” I mean conduct such as discrimination or violence directed at people because of their race; such actions are both immoral and, in many cases, unlawful. Distinct from that is the belief that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another. That belief is equally reprehensible, but under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution it is generally protected when expressed, however offensive it may be. Similarly, expressing support for individuals or organizations that hold such views is ordinarily protected speech, unless it crosses into material support for unlawful acts.

As I understand the allegations concerning the Southern Poverty Law Center, they are not that the organization itself engaged in racist conduct or advocacy but that it may have defrauded donors, specifically, that it provided funds to individuals within racist organizations (for example, as informants) in a manner inconsistent with how its activities were represented to contributors. That is a different question entirely.

Whether fraud occurred turns on familiar elements: whether there was a material misrepresentation or omission, whether it was made knowingly, whether donors reasonably relied on it, and whether they were harmed as a result. The key issue, therefore, is not simply whether the organization paid informants, but whether it accurately disclosed the nature and extent of those activities. If donors understood that such payments were being made as part of the organization’s work, then the case for fraud is weak; if they were misled about that point in a way that would matter to a reasonable donor, the case becomes stronger.

I wanted to comment on some things I think that Yascha Mounk and his guest miss in their conversation about why Americans are disillusioned with higher education.

1. Most Americans see college degrees as instrumental.

Relatively few Americans pursue college degree through a love of learning. Most see it as a means to an end with the end being a better job and higher lifetime earnings. Even if college still pays economically, disillusionment can grow if the perceived return is overstated or increasingly uncertain.

2. The “college income premium” has always been exaggerated.

There is a small premium that results from having a college education but is not huge and it’s getting smaller. The explanations for the premium usually rely on mean incomes. When you discount the top 5% of income earners, the picture looks considerably different. A disproportionate share of the very highest earners are in professions that require postgraduate credentials. When those outcomes are included in estimates of the “college premium” they blur an important distinction: the returns to a bachelor’s degree alone versus the returns to extended, credential-dependent educational pathways.

That top 5% include physicians, lawyers working for big firms, and MBAs working for major banks whose incomes distort the results. Median, mode, and standard deviation are all revealing.

3. What matters is what you study.

Some degrees have a very high return on investment. Others may be zero or negative.

4. The benefits are backloaded.

To obtain a college education you defer earnings for several years. That means that a college education actually has negative benefits at first with the positive benefits appearing later.

How confident are you about what the economic conditions will be in 20 years?

5. Offshoring

Over the last twenty years in particular a significant number of jobs that require a college education have been offshored, many to South Asia. The positions that have proven particularly vulnerable to offshoring have been engineers, accountants, analysts, and backoffice professionals, particularly in customer support and HR. Basically, anything that is codifiable, deliverable digitally, and modular, i.e. it can be divided into pieces.

There are hundreds of millions of people in South Asia who speak English and have college educations. We don’t know how many jobs have been offshored because we don’t keep track of them.

6. AI

Very much the same positions vulnerable to offshoring are increasingly vulnerable to AI.

The bottom line is that Americans are making rational decisions based on the facts on the ground.