■ That isn’t a wrong instinct, but it could use a little bit of temperance -- a sensibility, borrowed from Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for all things. Springtime offers the compelling reminder that nature has always had a form of automation, unlikely as that may seem, in the form of perennial plants.

■ While lots of things (including most food crops) need to be planted each year, many plants fall dormant as fall turns to winter, then reawaken -- automatically -- with the return of sunlight, rain, and other resources in the spring. Once planted, perennials “know” when it’s time to come back, even without any cognition.

■ Perennials don’t belong everywhere; they foreclose on practices like crop rotation and letting fields go fallow. Nor do perennials offer all of the same benefits in the same measures as their annual counterparts; if you see a really spectacular flower, there’s a pretty good chance it’s an annual. And many perennials need boundaries, since their ability to keep coming back means they can encroach on other plants if left unchecked for long.

■ The same kinds of lessons, long proven by the trial and error of billions of years of evolution, should be applied to the creations of our own modern making. Automation doesn’t belong everywhere; it may fall short of what rival approaches can do. It may have appealing outputs, but they’re not always going to be better than the work of a focused human. It shouldn’t be rushed into every nook and cranny, since it won’t always be the best fit.

■ It’s easy to be drawn into assuming that every new situation we encounter is really novel, but there are often patterns to recognize in the presence of whatever is new.

■ First, they’re often more filler than substance. She ran quickly? Of course it was “quickly”, she ran. He screamed loudly? It would have been news if the scream was quiet, not loud. Economical writing skips what doesn’t add value.

■ Second, adverbs are unaccountable. Who is to say what is done gracefully, thoughtfully, or mercilessly? The adverb is most often a judgment call. The fewer the subjective statements, the more objective the report.

■ There is one adverb in particular that needs to be struck -- unrelentingly -- from modern news reporting: “Strongly”. Some journalists can’t get enough of it: In just one report, CNN said that the President “strongly criticized Pope Leo XIV”, the Pope “strongly pushed back”, and the Italian minister “strongly denounced the US president’s comments”. Strange that so much strength can result in such weak writing.

■ When an incident can be more truthfully depicted with an adverb, the writer should go right ahead and use it. But an adverb like “strongly” could mean anything from “loudly” to “emphatically” to “thoroughly” to “exhaustively”, all of which might be better adverbs (being more specific than “strongly”), but none of which are necessary...probably. “Strongly” has become a filler word for the clickbait era, and it ought to be retired. Quickly.

■ Putting aside the lamentations for a moment, there’s a really interesting question lurking just beneath the surface: What kinds of books are not being published right now that would entice more people to read them? What would it take to motivate the 52% who read three books or fewer to read just one more this year than last?

■ If an entertainment product has extremely low penetration with 52% of the market, then you have to spend at least a little bit of time asking how much of that is a supply problem.

■ How much of this is a content problem? People will practically crawl over broken glass to get to really great content.

■ How much of this is a modality problem? Are people missing out because they aren’t exposed to audiobooks, e-readers, or phone/tablet-friendly formats?

■ How much of this is an authorship problem? One might think that in the era of “parasocial” relationships with “influencers”, time spent with the right authors would be attractive.

■ How much of this is a style problem? Too many books are too long -- do we need a better booklet/pamphlet economy?

■ There are probably nearly as many reasons why some people don’t read books as there are reasons why others do. We should steer clear of fetishizing any activity, but of all possible leisure activities, reading surely must rank towards the top of the list. Figuring out why it’s passing so many Americans by would be a tremendous service.

■ It’s not uncommon to hear about declining attendance at conventional religious institutions in America (like Catholic and mainline Protestant churches). Some of the change may reflect changing theological commitment, to be sure. But that doesn’t account for the entire decline.

■ Church leaders who are serious about the viability of their ministries need to ask themselves a pointed question: What about the experience has improved meaningfully since the turn of the century? Not on a superficial level, but on a real and human one -- what’s gotten better?

■ Except for cloistered or monastic communities, most churches exist within an extensive surrounding world. In that world, people have experienced some overwhelming changes, from handheld supercomputers to self-driving cars. Many of the changes start with technologies, but they go on to affect behavior -- consider the near-ubiquity of fitness trackers, and how a phrase like “Closing my rings” is full of behavioral meaning.

■ What has gotten better inside the churches? Has the preaching improved? The outreach? The anticipation of needs? The individualized pastoral care? The skillful delivery of charitable community services? The attention to new and difficult ontological questions uncovered by developments like artificial intelligence?

■ If the answer to all of those questions is nothing but a shrug, then that’s the difference between manageable contraction and terminal decline. Most people don’t expect perfection, but they do reasonably expect improvement. It can be incremental, it can be cautious, and it can be mild. But it needs to be something.

■ By their nature, professionalized think tanks tend to be good at establishing provocative claims and putting them in front of policy-makers, so any claim that gets made in a think-tank study should be viewed with appropriate skepticism. But there often is truth in them nonetheless.

■ It’s not that Ontario isn’t rich in absolute, historical, or even most relative terms -- given the choice between being born in Ontario today, Cuba today, or New York in 1926, there’s no doubt that Ontario today wins. But government policies (like taxation) have compounding effects over time: If taxation is too high or investment in public needs is too stingy, then that affects today’s economy with reverberations for many decades to come. And the gap Fraser’s report identifies is growing, which is worrisome.

■ Economic riches alone do not decide whether a place is a good one to live, nor whether it’s a just and decent one. But economic resources do make it much easier to pay for a great number of good and valuable things. Most Americans continue to respect Canadians not just as good neighbors, but as valued partners in any number of endeavors in the world. Our successes are mutual, which doesn’t give us license to boss one another around, but does give us common interest in figuring out what models work best.

■ This matters to public budgets because governments pay for health care in all kinds of ways (Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, and health insurance benefits for public-sector workers, to name some of the big ones), and because health care is extremely high-touch (literally and figuratively), many of those health-care costs are bound to grow both in absolute terms and as a share of budgets, irreversibly and indefinitely.

■ The resulting message isn’t very satisfying: “Health care will get better and more expensive as far into the future as you can imagine, taking up more and more of everyone’s budget with no end in sight, but you’ll be OK with it because lots of other things will get better and cheaper, leaving room for you to still feel much richer.” This doesn’t mean efficiency improvements don’t matter in health care -- just that they’re inherently difficult to find.

■ With National Public Health Week drawing to a close, it’s timely to observe that if Baumol was right, then the public health professions are almost certain to grow in importance and consequence -- basically in perpetuity. In statistical terms, our three biggest health victories in the last two centuries have been antibiotics, vaccinations, and safe drinking water, and the latter two are squarely in the public-health domain.

■ Prevention usually costs less than cure, and if we can discover more high-impact tools of prevention, those might be our only ways to put brakes on the growth in health-care spending. The question is: Will the public health professions have the resources, imagination, and credibility necessary to carry that burden?

■ Our worst atrocities as a species have resulted from the practice of dehumanization. A chattel slave-keeper is only enabled to see another person as “property” when they cease to see that other person as human. Empathy discourages us from inflicting pain and suffering on others.

■ Some people obviously lack the basic aspects of empathy, whether by disorders of the mind, by intoxication, or by choice. And while that doesn’t diminish their own intrinsic value as human beings, it does mean that they should be kept far away from the tools that would allow them to inflict pain on others, at least to the best of society’s ability to police such things.

■ Cruelty, sociopathy, sadism, and other pathologies that rely upon treating others as less human, or their sufferings as less real, must be addressed as real moral defects. Even dogs can sense emotions in people and regulate their own behaviors accordingly. Many dogs even show real signs of empathy for the humans around them.

■ People need to be at least as willing to have concern for others, lest they show themselves to be less morally sophisticated than a golden retriever. It is wrong to inflict suffering or to weaponize fear against other people -- no matter how far away or how different they might seem. We are all equally human, and to recognize and behave according to that simple (but too often elusive) understanding is a moral requisite.

■ But he is the heir to a dreadful family business, and consolidating power around a blood-related heir is a sly way of trying to head off any future competition for power. She’s only about the age of the iPhone 5.

■ Government by absolute hereditary monarchy is stupid. No matter what outfit it wears, whether it’s dressed up in robes like Henry VIII or wearing a Mao suit, it’s still stupid. Just because they call it “socialism” doesn’t change the fact that it’s a monarchy.

■ And it’s stupid not because it’s impossible for a multi-generational family operation to produce conscientious leaders; successful family transfers happen in the private sector, as long as the families involved are careful to steer clear of the pitfalls of going “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”.

■ The powerful hereditary monarchy is a terrible and corrupt idea because it deprives people of their own choice in their governance. None of us would want to live under so much as a parks department governed by a hereditary monarchy. Not a school board, not a city council, not a county board of supervisors. Not a statehouse, an EPA region, nor a Federal Reserve bank district.

■ But above all, absolutely not a national government.

■ Blowing up power plants and other civilian infrastructure is a sure way to smother any potential rehabilitation effort in the womb. Getting the proverbial trains to run on time is hard enough in good times. It’s vastly harder to do when the infrastructure has been torn apart. Infrastructure, generally, is expensive, slow, and difficult to install, meanwhile oversight is difficult to achieve since the invitations to dishonesty are so many.

■ Any new regime can have staying power only if it can succeed in earning some of its credibility by doing the job right. It’s extremely hard to do the work of rebuilding without the lights on.

■ When society glosses over the shortcomings of the past, we end up amplifying and over-emphasizing glossy nostalgia, forgetting that there were bad aspects, too. This arises quite chronically when people try to compare present living standards with those of the past, particularly when the past is just far enough away to be outside of living memory for more than half of the population.

■ That means we need to be doubly cautious about anything popularly “remembered” from about thirty to eighty years ago. Anything older than that, and few people have first-hand memories. But in that half-century window resides a peculiar combination of first-hand and second-hand memories, which often resist fact-checking and even more often resist reasonable contextualization.

■ A fair number of characters quite vocally argue that basic affordability of universal needs like food, housing, and health care has plunged since the 1980s. Some people fight back against this overblown nostalgia, but it’s a tough fight when they’re arguing with people who don’t even realize how much has changed.

■ Microwaveable bags of frozen vegetables were a huge culinary improvement over their canned counterparts, to name one of the most mundane possible examples. Who even thinks about them today, when 90% of American households have microwave ovens? But only 25% of American households had them in 1986. If you were eating steamed frozen peas rather than mushy canned ones when Ronald Reagan was President, then you were among the elite.

■ Housing wasn’t especially affordable then, and a lot of places still had lead paint on the walls and ashtrays on the tables. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still press for much more improvement in the policies that affect things like food and housing affordability, but it’s profoundly unhelpful to ignore that progress has been made. Progress isn’t always steady, nor even, nor fast enough, nor widely enough shared. But hanging on to romanticized hallucinations about the past is one of the surest ways to obstruct real advancements in the present.

■ Theodore Roosevelt said, “[W]e must face the facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism.” Those words, published in 1897, were good advice long before any of us were born. They remain sound recommendations today.

■ CRM goes farther than that, to be certain, but the idea holds that everyone on board is safer if everyone up front is considered a contributing member of the decision-making system. This concept was born out of tragic experience, including crashes that probably could have been avoided if pilots in command had listened to their first officers, or if junior officers hadn’t been reluctant to speak up.

■ CRM has a place in upper leadership, too. When general and flag officers are sidelined or forced out because their professional perspectives are inconvenient to their overseers, something highly problematic is brewing. Just like a co-pilot needs to be able to say “I think we’re in danger and need to go around”, a general needs to be free to say, “I think we’re pursuing a misguided strategy”. Not only that, but statements of honest dissent need to be welcomed.

■ Ultimate authority (and responsibility) lie with civilian officials under our Constitution, and there’s no doubt that sometimes a person wearing a lot of stars needs to be let go (see: Douglas MacArthur, who was pretty clearly insubordinate). But it should be a rare thing for upper-echelon talent to be jettisoned without obvious cause.

■ Just as in the cockpit, it’s not just important for all sets of eyes to be on the action, it’s essential that professional judgment be heard without prejudice. Real national security isn’t the product of individual genius; it’s altogether too complex for that.

■ A diverse, populous, and continent-sprawling nation like the United States needs certain bold common endeavors to give the public a widespread rooting interest in times of peace and prosperity (and something aspirational to keep up hopes when times are tough). We’ve had the Interstate highway system and the Apollo missions, which to some extent channeled the same kind of energy that went into the common purpose of winning World War II. Even the 80s-defining effort to triumph in the Cold War had something of that same rallying spirit.

■ But we really haven’t repeated any of that in the years since: The abundance and technological optimism of the 1990s could be dizzying, but we missed the opportunity to channel a sliver of that momentum into a specific public purpose. And the two and a half decades since have been characterized more by strife than by esprit de corps.

■ Perhaps that can be at least partly explained by the lack of a common project. Economically and technologically, the last quarter-century has been remarkable in many ways. But sometimes it is the lack of a motivating challenge that brings out the worst of our petty differences, our cynicism and ennui, or our dissatisfaction with objectively good times. As Benjamin Franklin put it in 1742, “They who have nothing to trouble them will be troubled at nothing.”

■ A common project doesn’t have to be outrageously expensive nor overwhelmingly large to do some real good -- it just has to be ambitious enough to capture the imagination and constructive enough that public figures can talk about it and the general public can follow its progress. And while it may not satisfy the strictest libertarian instincts (the ones that don’t want to see government doing anything beyond the strictly necessary), some things we must do to pay the social-cohesion tax. It shouldn’t be hard for even middling leaders to summon the personal wonder and awe to get people stirred up about missions to the Moon.

■ Despite vexing every President since John F. Kennedy, Cuba still has a nominally Communist government that doesn’t look substantially more liberal than it did in the 1960s. There has been enormous suffering and hardship for the Cuban people, but little in the way of change.

■ USA Today is reporting that diplomatic talks between the US and Cuba may be close to yielding some kind of economic cooperation.

■ It still doesn’t sound like regime change is actually on the table, though, offering the prospect (perhaps) of some material relief for the people. But it should not go unnoticed by any President (or the people around him or her) that the stated goal has eluded America’s efforts. Despite the ease with which the phrase “regime change” rolls off the tongue, we have few if any case studies illustrating how it can be successfully done.

■ When historical perspective reduces King to abbreviations, highlights, and pull quotes, there is much from which to choose, but it leaves an incomplete impression. In “Where Do We Go from Here”, King furnishes a much more complete understanding of the civil rights movement as a necessary but incomplete stage in America’s development.

■ He supplies a vital explanation of the continuum from predecessors like Booker T. Washington (with a clear-eyed critique that Washington was right to appeal to high-minded ideals but “underestimated the structures of evil”) to his own choice to reject violence and separatism (”If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory”) while sustaining pressure for higher expectations.

■ King’s analysis of the situation in the late 1960s has frustratingly broad relevance today -- perhaps because we lost his presence as a leader who could have sustained pressure for worthwhile changes that would have gone beyond just the civil rights long denied. The King of this text is one who offers real policy prescriptions that we can debate even now. “I Have a Dream” may be what we remember him saying (and it is well worth remembering), but it wasn’t his final word on matters.

■ In this book, King criticizes the wide-reaching consequences of the Vietnam War, advocates for a universal basic income, and has no shortage of demands for educational reform (”Education is too important today to be left to professional fads and needs [...] there must be a greater evidence of competence”). We can engage with these and his other ideas on subjects like housing policy as reasonable adults today who have the benefit of nearly 60 years of hindsight. (We can also be chagrined by six decades of missed opportunities.)

■ We shouldn’t leave King in the history books or merely fixed in granite: He earned his place in those books and is a thoroughly fitting choice for a memorial tribute. But even though he is no longer living, the thoughts he recorded remain relevant to our choices today. Reading them and incorporating them into our understanding of the present is a way not only to honor him, but also to treat our country as one worthy of continued betterment.

■ The Chief of Naval Operations, for instance, recommends books that have obvious military applicability (like “Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars”), but he also lists books like Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, an extremely important work by a Holocaust survivor about the very essence of life.

■ Many of the entries in these kinds of reading lists are exactly what one might hope that military leaders are thinking about (Britain’s Chief of the Air Staff recommends “The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future”), but the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force is not alone in recommending much older writers like Audie Murphy and Dwight Eisenhower. Much of what’s worth knowing or considering, at least at the strategic level, has been around for decades and even centuries.

■ Considering the importance of civilian leadership and control of the military, we really ought to expect political leaders to have performed their own due diligence by completing their own reading lists. War isn’t a video game, and anyone who has thoughtfully digested even a single serious war memoir realizes that. Even some movies (like “Dunkirk” or “Bridge on the River Kwai”) belong on such a list because their screenplays force audiences to consider what might go wrong. (Nobody should be allowed anywhere near a chain of command until they’ve watched “Dr. Strangelove”.)

■ A military that continues to develop itself in the direction of better skills, wider knowledge, and stronger ethics deserves civilian control typified by the same.

■ The stakes are high, so perhaps the intemperate rhetoric is suitable. It’s nothing new for an innovative technology to make a lot of waves before inviting a backlash, even if this particular hype cycle seems to be playing out at 10x speed.

■ Philosophically, a certain limitation cannot be escaped: While it is obviously the case that some subjects and skills can be learned without any reflection on the part of the learner, the real root of the liberal arts is that humans need to study for becoming, rather than being.

■ In learning one thing, we discover deficiencies, errors, or omissions in what we know about others. It’s a process that takes place across time, and furthermore, it is one that imposes physical sensations and chemical changes within our brains. The “Aha!” moment isn’t some dull bridging of two file trees inside a digital disk drive. It’s an experience with a “before”, “during”, and “after” -- and it’s often as emotional as it is intellectual. It feels good, literally, to solve problems.

■ A thing without physiology can’t have those experiences, can’t understand them, and should never be asked to substitute for them. There will be ways artificial intelligence will enhance certain specific learning processes. But some people seem so eager to see it as central to an arms race that they miss the huge range of impossibilities that it cannot escape, and that human nature can never be successfully reduced to mere outcomes.

■ Without passing judgment on the merits of the case, the situation does put a spotlight on a problem deserving of some big-picture consideration. It is basically self-evident that many online services are optimized (if not expressly designed from their very first line of code) to reward addictive behavior. Television and radio programming have long sought to maximize time spent viewing or listening; what’s available on a computer or smartphone screen is different only in intensity and measurability, really.

■ Adults should have self-control. But self-control isn’t natural; it is learned, trained, and practiced. Children don’t naturally have it (not usually and not in large measure, at least), so to develop it, they need to receive that training before adulthood.

■ Meanwhile, adults who do not have it need to develop the desire to have it before they can learn it. Human nature likes to gorge on sweet foods and binge on entertainment and generally just laze about. Most of the good things truly worth having come from accessing self-control and putting it to focused use.

■ But if adults aren’t doing enough to form that self-control in young people -- especially while some people are reaping big financial rewards for trying to circumvent it and start long-term addictions -- then society is headed for a whole lot of trouble. Whatever the truth and the merits of a particular court decision, the bigger story is not just one about a few apps. It’s much more about what feedback loops and habits of the mind are being chosen and rewarded, and how dangerous it is to wait passively until it is too late to start forming the right ones.

■ The problem for many households is that choices made about major purchases, like vehicles, often last for years to come. The average passenger car or truck on the road today is 12.8 years old. If that trend continues, then the average vehicle sold today will probably still be on the road in 2039.

■ Many of the major automakers have pressed hard on fully electric vehicles -- the race to catch up with Tesla has been evident, and it has produced some very impressive new models. But it’s also led to a lot of split lineups, with many manufacturers offering EVs, gas guzzlers, and little in between.

■ GM touts its status as the #2 EV seller in the US, but it doesn’t offer much between pure EV and combustion, while Stellantis nixed its plug-in hybrid family for 2026. The market seems to have been responding heavily to the availability, then the repeal, of EV tax credits.

■ Toyota, meanwhile, has long taken heat from environmental groups for offering less in the pure-EV market. But it claims that just shy of half its US sales are now “electrified” in some form. That’s resulted in a fleet-wide average fuel efficiency of 29 miles per gallon, partly the result of the largest five-year efficiency gain of any major manufacturer, according to the EPA.

■ It’s a compelling case study in the value of steady, widely-distributed improvement. It might have been flashier to roll out lots of all-electric vehicles, but when the highest-volume automaker makes a fleetwide improvement of a solid 12% in half a decade, that results in significant market-wide efficiency gains. Those would pay off in normal times, but they really pay off in the face of an oil price shock.

■ We ought to appreciate persistent, unglamorous improvements (especially when they are widely distributed) just as much as we applaud splashy breakthroughs that often don’t penetrate quite as far. Modest but wide-reaching innovations can end up delivering big results.

■ What “current federal conditions” really means: TSA agents aren’t receiving paychecks, and at least a third of the agents at Atlanta have called in sick. A last-minute, ad-hoc plan to send ICE agents to the airports to supplement the TSA is supposedly to take effect with the start of the work week.

■ As a matter of principle, citizen encounters with government should be safe, respectful, and as unobtrusive as possible. Delays of five or six hours fail miserably on the yardstick of “unobtrusive”. Moreover, they’re hardly respectful of citizens’ time, and they’re really not safe, either, since they create enormous crowds of people gathered prior to security screening.

■ More than 20 years ago, then-President Bill Clinton made a big display of “Government that Works Better for Less”. It was a popular promise that even predated the assembly of the Department of Homeland Security, the funding of which is the ultimate source of the airport security delays today. Yet we seem farther away right now from that promise of efficient, effective government services than we did in the Clinton era. Surely the buck must stop on someone’s desk somewhere.

■ But not every harm can be mitigated by prosperity. Fear, alas, is with us in more forms than ever. This is in part because fear can be weaponized. Terrorism is a weapon preferred by some movements and ideologies, precisely because it works even against the wealthy.

■ Robert Mueller, who has just died at age 81, was a committed opponent of fear. He assumed leadership of the FBI just a week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reframed the bureau’s entire mission to deprive terrorism of its power to spread fear.

■ The world needs people of Mueller’s cast: Methodical, unassuming, and extremely proficient. People willing to do the thankless tasks that give others lives with less fear. People willing to take skills that have significant market value and apply them instead to the public interest. We don’t often know how fortunate we are to have strong, civic-minded leaders like Robert Mueller among us until they are gone.