"Separating the Wheat from th Chaff"

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday. It is also the 40^th anniversary of the first Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday signed into law by President Reagan on January 20, 1986.

Sunday was wintry in Essex, Connecticut, a good day to get one’s mind off politics and curl up with a good book. Thus, the photo. The stump in the lower left of the photo is from the first log I chopped, a memento saved by my parents almost eighty years ago.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Separating the Wheat from the Chaff”

January 19, 2026

 

“The wise will strive to manifest a brave new world, while

the foolish and unkind will suffer for their lack of common sense.”

                                                                                                Anthon St. Maarten

                                                                                                Divine Living: The Essential Guide to Your True Destiny

                                                                                                2012

 

The title of this essay comes from the Bible, Matthew 3:12: separating the wheat (useful grains) from the chaff (useless husks). It means we should distinguish between the good and the bad, what is important and beneficial from what is superficial and harmful. To the media, it should mean to report the truth of events and restrain biases. To politicians, it should mean to focus on the agendas that are important to the people and to avoid the mean-spiritedness of personal attacks. 

 

The world always faces threats. History does not end. There will always be people and nations attempting to accrue power, to unseat the United States of America. That is the wheat that we should target. While Russia is a nuclear power with a recidivistic leader, China is the biggest threat. Russia has an aging and declining population, engaged in an unending war, and with an economy that faces hurdles. Keep in mind, the EU plus Britain have a population 3.5X bigger than Russia, with a GDP almost ten times that of Russia.

 

The bigger threat comes from China. They have a population of 1.4 billion, and a GDP almost equal to the EU and Britain. Over 150 countries and international organizations, spanning five continents and Oceania, have signed cooperation agreements with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Norh America’s Canada has not signed up as a full partner, but last week’s trip to Beijing by Prime Minister Mark Carney – and given President Trump’s disrespect for the man – suggest that Canada is looking to forge a new strategic partnership. No one should underestimate the goals of Communist China. It is why President Trump wants to halt their expansion in South and East Asia, limit their incursions into Central and South America, and stop their progress in the arctic. Past Presidents have underestimated the will and the aims of the Chinese. As well, at home we face unsustainable debt and the lure of Socialism with its promises of false hopes. 

 

But President Trump has failed to cull the chaff. The prosecution of his political enemies consumes too much of his time. I understand that he was unfairly treated in his first term, but he should move on. Closing the border and deporting criminal migrants are to be praised. But jailing and deporting law-abiding people who have jobs and families undermines the good he is doing. Fighting with the Federal Reserve in senseless and, in fact, dangerous to our economy. His spat with Jeremy Powell is part of what I call chaff. I recognize that the Fed has become politicized. In the fourth quarter of 2008, in response to the credit crisis, Fed Funds were reduced to .25 basis points from 2% in the third quarter (and 4.25% in the first quarter.) Despite the fact that the economy recovered in the 2^nd half of 2009, and remained positive for the next ten years, Fed Funds were not raised again until late 2015. When President Obama left office in January 2017, the rate was still only 1.50%. Does anyone believe that Mr. Obama did not pressure the Fed? Low rates for so long have been a boon to asset prices, including speculative ones like crypto currencies, and they helped give rise to our unsustainable debt.

 

There are other issues that either distract or harm us, more chaff. That the Supreme Court should be forced to define a woman is the peak of silliness. We are not assigned – as was the question on a medical form I recently filled out – a sex when we are born. We are either male or female. Perhaps doctors and nurses no longer study anatomy? Allowing men, who claim to be women, to compete as women in sporting events, or to use their bathrooms, is unfair and an expression of deviant behavior. There are public schools where equity is deemed more important than Shakespeare or calculus. Sitting where it sits, and atop rare earths, Greenland is strategically important militarily, a fact that did not seem to concern the Obama and Biden Administrations. But Denmark is an ally. There is no need to bulldoze our way in. Moving on. Jeffrey Epstein was a pervert. Too many leaders of both parties were his friends. They all should be ashamed of themselves, but the story titillates; it does not inform. Tariffs, no matter how defined, are a form of taxation. For consumers, they raise the price of imported goods. To classify them as an asset, as Mr. Trump has done, is the height of ludicrousness. Should the $4.9 trillion raised in federal taxes in 2024 be considered an asset? It is on the federal government’s balance sheet, but for citizens taxes are a liability.  

 

Back to the wheat. Fraud in Minnesota confirms government corruption permeates our society. It shows how much we need a department devoted to uprooting governmental dishonesty, graft and inefficiencies. Violent protests in Minneapolis and other cities against ICE contrast with Martin Luther King’s call for peaceful protests. The shooting of Renee Good was unfortunate. There should be an investigation into her death, and it should include both federal and local officials. Let the legal system prevail. We are, after all, a nation of laws. However, the responses of Minneapolis Mayor Democrat Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz remind me of Southern governors like George Wallace of Mississippi and Arkansas’s Orval Faubus when they refused to adhere to the nation’s anti-segregation laws.

 

The number one issue for voters, as is almost always true, is the economy. Polls reflect nervousness. We are in the midst of a technology revolution. Jobs are threatened by Artificial Intelligence. While down from its highs, inflation remains above the Fed’s target. Raising minimum wages discourage small businesses from offering “starter” jobs. Birth rates below replacement will have negative economic consequences a decade or so out. Gallup finds that 68% of Americans say the economy is worsening. According to Morningstar, the U.S. has fallen from 11^th place to 24^th in global happiness rankings. 

 

I am unsure what this means for the future or for midterm elections, though it does not look good for Republicans. According to Gallup, President Trump’s approval ratings have dropped from 47% last February to 36% today. Things can change; that I know. But my advice to Mr. Trump: ignore conservative pundits. Instead, take heed from the Book of Matthew, and start separating the wheat from the chaff.

"Living in a Time of 'Institutional' Hatred"

 It may seem odd to leave the serenity of south-eastern Connecticut for the bedlam of the north-Jersey coast, but we have been doing this every August for our sixty-one years of marriage. Growing up in New York City, it is where Caroline spent summers. She describes these couple of weeks as “returning to her playpen.” The photograph depicts us on a cool day last summer at the Seabright Beach Club.

 While I will have my laptop and a portable printer, I am bringing light reading, so don’t expect much in terms of essays. However, in the back of my mind I have been thinking of one on the beauty and grandeur of silence, but we shall see. Also, I have just completed Lynne Olson’s newest book, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, which deserves an essay. Perhaps it will be too noisy down there!

 

But cloistering with friends, children and grandchildren and reading mysteries, I hope (and expect) to avoid the ugly ramifications of hatred That has become too common.

 

We expect to return to Essex on Saturday, August 23.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Living in a Time of ‘Institutional’ Hatred”

August 4, 2025

 

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

                                                                                                                Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

                                                                                                                Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958

“I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.

 

Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.

 

But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.

 

Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism. Hatred has returned today, in much of the West, in the anti-Semitism that has infiltrated college campuses, in political speech, and in the language of Podcasters. “Open Jew hatred,” wrote Alvin Rosenfeld in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “is also politically mainstream, with ‘free Palestine’ and ‘globalize the intifada’ now a key part of the left’s political agenda.” The call by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime minister Keir Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to have their countries recognize a Palestine state before there is one reflects hatred toward Israel. The meaning of ‘globalize the intifada’ is clear: Kill the Jews. While Israel has been winning militarily, Hamas is winning the public relations war.

 

Here in the U.S., hatred’s most common target today is President Trump, an easy person to demagogue, as his language and actions are often goofy and/or intemperate. This hatred is manifested in opposition to anything he supports or does. In the August 2, 2025 issue of American Greatness, Stephen Soukup wrote: “The left’s hatred [of President Trump] is more powerful than any instinct it might have to do the right thing.” That hatred is displayed by those rallying against the deportation of criminal illegal migrants, and by those opposed to Israel’s war against Hamas. It motivates those who blame man for all climate change and stirs up those who support gender-affirming surgeries. Will Weissert of the Associated Press recently quoted a fifteen-year-old girl from Scotland who was protesting President Trump’s visit to Scotland: “We don’t negotiate with fascists...So many people here loathe him...We’re not divided...We’re just here because we hate him.” One hopes she is instructed on the history of fascism, what its aims, goals and means were. Nevertheless, hatred for Mr. Trump is not new. It began ten years ago when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce his run for President. It was revealed in the fake accusations by the Clinton campaign about Russian “collusion.” It led to the refusal of the media to acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s lap-top was real. I have friends who, to this today, cannot speak the name Trump without a grimace. He is not my favorite politician, but I do not hate him, and I believe he loves his Country. I experienced hatred nine years ago when I refused to join the cortège of those who wished to bury his nascent political career. But hatred is not the exclusive domain of the Left.  MAGA extremists are equally vituperative. We hear it in the voices of many conservative commentators, and in the expressions of those who rail against all immigrants.  But it is most powerful on the left.

 

Mainstream media, threatened with irrelevance, exploits and encourages this scourge of hatred, falsely seeing it as a means to stay relevant. They know their business models are in trouble. Fifty years ago the daily news viewership of the three main networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – was approximately 70 million people, or roughly 30% of the population. Today combined network and cable news programs capture about 30 million viewers, or less than 10% of the population. Newspapers have suffered similarly. In 1975, approximately 62 million newspapers were printed daily. Today that number is less than 25 million. Now, most get their news from social media accounts, like X, Facebook, Instagram and from Podcasts. People listen to what augments their prejudices and not to what challenges their predilections, so these platforms become breeding grounds for polarization and hatred. It is why Alex Jones on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left remain popular, but only with those who share their views. Ironically, greater choice in news has increased our division.

 

In her novel White Oleander, `Janet Fitch wrote: “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use...It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.” I think she is wrong, but her words reflect today’s culture. C.S. Lewis warned in Mere Christianity that there is a tendency among people to cling to bad stories of people they detest, to “wish that black was a little blacker, [then] we shall see grey as black...Finally we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad.” I suspect he is right; it is something to guard against.

 

Can we return to a time when respect and tolerance were common? Thirty-six years after he had been freed from slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiographical story, Up from Slavery, a remarkable sentiment we should all feel – and one that anticipated by fifty years Martin Luther King’s words in the epigraph that heads this essay: “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” While the Bible advises us to abhor what is evil, it warns against harboring hatred in one’s heart. It tells us to hold fast to what is good. Two and a half years ago I wrote an essay titled, “Hatred and the Curse of Identity Politics: “Man is perhaps the only species that kills and destroys its own kind out of pure hatred.” Man is also the only creature capable of reason and love, so perhaps there is hope.

 

The goal of ‘institutional’ hatred is power, to be rid of those who stand in their way. The consequences are alienation, division, distrust and polarization. As humans, we have been endowed with emotions and with the ability to reason. In our polarized environment, we run the risk that the emotional response of ‘institutional’ hatred supersedes our willingness to listen, to debate – to reason. We must not let that happen.

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

 Two lessons come with Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia: One, Republicans should stick to issues, such as education, which are more important to voters than personalities, and two, endorsements by Donald Trump are fine, as long as he does not campaign in the candidate’s district.

 

New Jersey, as I write, is still too close to call.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf”

November 3, 2021

 

“Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you

start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible.”

                                                                                                       Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

                                                                                                       American author & filmmaker

                                                                                                       Michelin Lecture, Caltech, January 17, 2003

 

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage. 

 

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

 

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

 

Nobody really knows the costs of climate change, but it is not cheap. “Analysts,” according to an article in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “say as much as $150 trillion is likely needed over the next three decades to fund renewable energy projects, upgrade electric grids, mothball fossil fuel plants, seed new agricultural technologies, and pay for damages tied to climate change.” The questions have always been: What are the economic and social costs of doing nothing versus the economic and social costs of holding the rise in temperature below two degrees Celsius? And, is that possible? Regardless, funds will be needed. The job of convincing the world’s banks of the urgency of adjusting their loan portfolios to accommodate what politicians are calling for has fallen to Mark Carney, former head of central banks in Canada and the UK, and now the United Nation’s point man on climate-change finance.

 

It was the Industrial Revolution, which raised living standards for all fortunate to live in countries affected, that caused man-made emissions of CO2. And it has been that wealth over the years that has enabled the problem to be addressed. Assuring future economic growth is the best antidote to the problems of climate change (and of poverty). Policies that hinder growth, such as raising the cost of energy, whether in developing or developed nations, will harm living standards. We should all take responsibility for how we live our lives, which means being environmentally sensitive. But leaders must avoid fomenting a class war. We must recognize that the poor, whether individuals or nations, need affordable sources of energy to improve lives. Feel-good corporate welfare, in contrast, funds favored businesses in exchange for political support and boondoggles that are more spectacle than substance. 

 

A meeting of the G-20 in Rome last weekend preceded the United Nations’ 26^th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow. Leaders of five countries (China, Russia, Mexico, Japan and Saudi Arabia) failed to show up. Those five countries represent just over 40% of all CO2 emissions, according to worldometer. The meeting in Glasgow brought together between 20,000 and 25,000 politicians, officials and businesspeople from about 140 nations, fifty fewer than met in Paris in 2015. Nevertheless, London’s Daily Record estimated on Sunday that “more than 400 private jets will blast 13,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere…which will produce more global warming gas than 1600 Scots burn through in a year.” 

 

In Rome, President Biden brought with him seven cabinet officers, including Secretaries of State, Treasury, Interior and Transportation. He traveled in an 85-car motorcade for a one-on-one meeting with the Pope. All vehicles had been shipped to Italy, with some shipped on to Scotland before heading back to the U.S. Perhaps such grandeur was felt necessary, but it seemed excessive and insensitive when the subject was man-caused climate change. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would have united in condemning such a monarchial display by the President.

 

With the exception of a trade agreement with the EU on steel and aluminum, most news reports said the Rome meetings failed to live up to expectations. In an interview with the Associated Press, Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa said of the G20 meeting in Rome: “The world’s biggest economies comprehensively failed to put climate change on the top of the agenda ahead of COP26 in Glasgow.”

 

On the Glasgow conference’s opening day, Jeremiah’s continued with dire predictions. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who hosted the meeting, likened the challenge to a James Bond “doomsday,” saying time was running out to save the world from global warming: “this is not a movie – and the doomsday device is real.” He warned that, in the worst-case predictions, cities like Miami, Alexandria and Shanghai could be lost “beneath the waves.” Johnson was followed by Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN. He said we are “digging our own grave.” The Prince of Wales, told the world leaders that “time has quite literally run out.” At some point, doomsayers will be right. The Earth had a beginning. It will have an end. Scientists have estimated that that time is probably a billion or two billion years in the future, based on a six or seven-billion-year life.  A changing climate is a prospect for which we must be prepared. But rather than giving a false sense of hope that we can forestall the inevitable, we should focus on adaption. What happens if we hit net zero in terms of CO2 emissions and climate continues to warm…or cool? Those who issue calls of doom would be wise to re-read the story of the boy who cried wolf.