■ Those who haven’t been really keeping up on matters may not realize just how much certain aspects of warfare have evolved in just a few short years. It is not the case that everything about grand strategy is suddenly irrelevant and that large multinational alliances should be torn up. It is the case, however, that the cost of causing significant and expensive damage has plunged, placing it well within the reach of non-state belligerents. In other words, the marketplace for war-like damage no longer contains high barriers to entry.

■ All other things being equal, this means a much more unpleasant future. If the cost of waging war (or something like it) drops radically, we should expect much more of it to take place. When facilities like oil refineries become the targets, that means more people will be affected more often, even when they have nothing to do with any of the conflict.

■ It’s a genie that won’t go back into the bottle, either. Drones, cyberattacks, and other rapidly-spreading vectors of trouble can’t be shut down in isolation. The knowledge behind them is already too well diffused to be contained, and that’s distasteful but basically pointless to lament. What matters now is getting to work, with all due urgency, on bringing down the cost of defending against the new, cheap weaponry -- and on making the potential targets of attack more resilient or easier and cheaper to repair.

■ There’s no time to waste on performative displays of backwards thinking about what matters in warfare. Physical attributes can matter a lot in certain specific forms of combat, but at least since World War II, it has been equally (or, usually, much more) important to have the right mental attributes. Dwight Eisenhower even noted it, writing: “[T]he American soldier, in spite of wisecracking, sometimes cynical speech, is an intelligent human being who demands and deserves basic understanding of the reasons why his country took up arms and of the conflicting consequences of victory or defeat.” Thinking troops were important 80 years ago. They are only more important now that the emerging problems have become more complex.

■ Some questions deserve reverence. The act of asking the question is itself a sacred one. Existential questions like “What should I do with my life?”, if asked sincerely, belong in that category.

■ Such questions are for humans to ask other humans: Parents, friends, siblings, cousins, teachers, mentors, clergy, therapists, classmates, co-workers, neighbors. They are questions that embodied beings with real, sensory experiences of life can discuss with one another, knowing that communication about those matters isn’t just in the words but in the non-verbal responses we give, too.

■ Nobody would ask such a question of a dog, because a dog cannot comprehend the words nor the abstractions involved in the meaning of life. But at least a dog can have feelings, whereas a chatbot cannot even have that much. Only another person can dwell on the depths of what certain questions mean. Just because a computer can “talk” like a person doesn’t mean it is properly equipped to be asked.

■ We can and should consult the dead on these matters, too, by exploring what they have written and otherwise recorded for us. But even then, the seeker has to bear in mind that the dead cannot offer a two-way street of communication, and their judgment is strictly limited by what was known of the world until the time they passed. But, again, at least the dead were once alive and knew that the experience of life is far more than what can be ordered in words on a page.

■ Every tool can be useful, and we shouldn’t be afraid to test the outer limits of what our tools can do. But we also need to know that tools applied to the wrong tasks can be seriously harmful, and if we don’t consider some elements of life to be too important for puttering around with tools that merely impersonate human connections, then we’re asking for trouble in unimaginable aspects of life.

■ Is any one incident like this directly attributable solely to global warming? Maybe or maybe not; there were, after all, devastating heat waves during the Dust Bowl, too. But the long-term trends are pretty clear, and higher average temperatures are probably going to have some non-trivial impact on the frequency of prolonged high-heat events.

■ So the question is: What are we going to do about it? Even if we were to stop all carbon emissions tomorrow, there’s plainly enough momentum in the atmosphere that heat extremes are likely here to stay. And despite the puritanical illusions of some people, air conditioning is clearly part of the answer.

■ We should take note, though, that air conditioning, as we know it, isn’t the only answer. The world needs a solid commitment to an all-of-the-above approach to cooling at the human level. Part of that means implementing not just active cooling via air conditioning, but also passive cooling and heat resistance: Window shades, retractable awnings, reflective glass, green roofs, and even green walls. They’re all worth getting into the mix.

■ Communities need to look at municipal-scale cooling features, as well. Urban heat islands are very real, and natural shade, heat-resistant paving materials, and urban greening programs need to be in the mix of answers, too.

■ For several generations, we’ve been attuned to ideas that made “progress” synonymous with “big, visible technology” -- highways, rockets, and giant buildings. Now it’s time to see and admire the high tech in greener, more incrementalist moves. Lives are counting on it.

■ Political figures can do lots of things to try to manipulate an economy in the short term, but it’s basically impossible to run from real-world consequences over the long term. The central bank may try to placate the Kremlin by making nominal cuts to interest rates, but the real consequences of the war can’t be painted over with wiggles in an interest rate.

■ The unjust and bloodthirsty war Russia launched against Ukraine is now almost halfway into its fifth year. It may be possible to suppress reporting on public opinion and even to smother public resentment with distractions, but it’s impossible to hide indefinitely from the laws of economics. A pointless, costly war is bound to weigh down an economy, as casualties mount well beyond a million, military production demands crowd out other sectors of the economy, and petroleum refineries become targets of retaliation.

■ And so that aggressor economy deserves to be weighed down. “[J]ust as we have done wrong by our choice, so too it is up to us to repent and to turn away from our evil actions” wrote the philosopher Maimonides. The choice to conclude the war doesn’t depend upon forcing Ukraine to negotiate; it depends upon Russia making the choice to stop.

■ Since Franklin’s time, we have overcome unbelievable troubles: Smallpox is gone. Drinking water is safe. Roads are paved. Electricity flows nearly everywhere. Refrigeration keeps food from spoiling. Antibiotics kill infections. And on and on.

■ Many of these troubles were especially consequential for young people, who often faced real toil on top of their hardships. Franklin himself only had two years of formal schooling before entering a work apprenticeship at age 12 (in which he became an indentured servant to his own brother for a nine-year contract). By age 17, he had run away from “home” and his brother’s control.

■ Today, schooling is compulsory until at least age 16 everywhere in the United States, indentured servitude is forbidden, and an array of rules controls when juveniles can work (no earlier than 14, and heavily restricted through at least age 16). Parents who neglect the needs of their children can be punished as criminals.

■ All of these are improvements and advancements over the status quo ante. In no way, shape, or form should we look to roll back the abundant progress that has been made. But if it seems like people express ever-greater division over ever-smaller real differences, it might just be that we are being “troubled at nothing”.

■ And in eliminating many of the involuntary problems of life from the past, we create a paradox: The ability to solve big problems usually depends upon exposure to smaller ones. We learn to recognize patterns in those problems we face, making us better at solving the new ones. So, unless we actively create artificial problems for young people to solve, they end up lacking some of the very experiences necessary for solving the bigger problems of adulthood -- and the problems remaining to be solved are by definition more complex than the ones that have already been settled.

■ Those artificial problems don’t have to be big or painful, but they have to exist somehow, even if it’s within artificial contexts and constructed environments. We can’t just pour knowledge into juvenile minds and hope for the best. We have to send them on Scouting campouts and make them change tires that aren’t flat and challenge them to navigate to unfamiliar destinations without the help of GPS. Artificial problems encountered with a generous safety net still beat arriving in adulthood with no base for contextualizing the real problems we cannot avoid.

■ The knowledge of the world may be at our fingertips like never before, but “knowing about” isn’t the same as “knowing how”. If we really want to secure the benefits of all the progress that got us here, we have to ensure that we impose the structures that will equip younger generations to use that progress well.

■ The mistake, like many today, is almost certainly a case of the sloppy use of AI. A child could have drawn a better outline with a fat crayon and tracing paper over a paper map (or, with only a bit more talent, by creating a vector graphic layered over a raster image file of a state map from the public domain).

■ Van Halen notoriously kept an odd provision in their concert rider: That M&M’s should be furnished for backstage snacking, but under no circumstances should any brown ones appear. It wasn’t because they had anything against the brown M&M’s (which taste just like the others, after all). The “brown M&M’s test“ was their way of quickly detecting who had read the paperwork thoroughly and who had not. It really is an elegant test.

■ The same principle applies here: Look for situations where people fail to check obvious details. That’s generally a warning sign that something much larger has been overlooked, as well. (And getting the outline of a state utterly wrong but sticking it in a campaign logo anyway? That’s an obvious detail.)

■ An old adage says, “To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.” We’re in a whole new phase of that same old truth: Humans need to be in the decision-making loop for just about anything that matters, because unchecked computer errors can really, really foul things up. But extra woe unto those humans who either don’t have the sense to recognize giant errors or don’t have the discipline to check the work.

■ But we ought to be even more concerned about the proliferation of soul rot, as conspiracy theorists, chauvinists, racists, and other deeply unfit individuals find their way into circumstances of influence. Nobody has to be smart to be good. There is no barrier to entry for common decency or good character -- they are open to all. We should instead be swift to ostracize those who choose not to demonstrate those basic virtues, unapologetically and even ruthlessly cutting them off from polite society as a reflection of their own choices.

■ People should conduct themselves so that if an accusation is made against them, the reflexive response comes back something like, “That doesn’t sound like them at all”. Our society makes a giant mistake when it elevates or enriches people who profit by degrading others, seek high office despite obvious deep character flaws, or who profit by exploiting the public trust.

■ Brain rot is a real problem, to be sure, but it’s less corrosive in the long run than the kind of social decay that follows from letting truly indecent behavior become a road to enrichment. In the long run, natural curiosity will push back against the brain rot as people discover the fulfillment found in better things. But if the soul rot goes unchecked for too long, it will spread as people construct ways to rationalize joining in the bad behavior as the only way to get ahead. We don’t have to be smart to be good, but we would have to be pretty stupid to let the bad get ahead without consequences.

■ Yet it’s also true that “corruption” can be a convenient character smear used by a powerful leader to dismantle rival power structures. It’s a very old play. And in the case of China, it’s such a chronic feature of how the Communist Party rolls along that it has to be handicapping the country’s prospects.

■ If the person at the top makes it clear that he will cut down anyone who gets too close to the top, then it becomes clear that nobody is wise to put forth their best efforts. If being at the top introduces an aspect of real personal peril, then what’s the point of trying?

■ Fear is how the crooked and the incompetent keep their subordinates in line, and on the wrong end of a Communist Party purge is a dangerous place to be. Long-term, this must have really big consequences for China’s leadership, as it both discourages anyone at the top from dissenting or speaking boldly, and discourages anyone with real talent from seeking a route to the top.

■ Such a recipe is practically assured to deliver massively substandard results: A thin-skinned boss who personalizes and centralizes power around himself, giving every signal that he wants no dissent and no independence of thought. The resulting decisions will not reflect the state of the art in any category, but whatever is the most mediocre way to pass every problem along to the next fellow and lie about every situation. Leaders who can’t count on trustworthy feedback from closer to every problem can be assured they will end up sooner or later in all of the wrong places.

■ There are harrowing scenes coming from within the fires themselves and distressing pictures from far away in places like Chicago, which is experiencing the worst recorded air quality in the history of measurement due to a thermal inversion that’s trapping the smoke near the ground.

■ What’s a bit strange is how the year doesn’t seem like much of a statistical aberration: We’re just beyond the halfway point in the calendar year, and even if the total area burned doubles from this point, it still wouldn’t look like an outlier for this decade (far more acreage burned in 2023). The same goes for the simple number of fires.

■ That unfortunately means the long-term forecast could be grim, especially if winter precipitation remains in short supply and chronically higher temperatures contribute to drying out more of the potential wildfire fuel. The changes don’t have to be binary to be problematic: Incrementally higher temperatures can mean incrementally drier vegetation, leading to a chronic state of larger fires with more resulting smoke.

■ The wise remain alert to the tendency we all have to stumble into this fallacy. But for all our shortcomings looking forward, we are often even worse at looking backwards. It’s difficult to contextualize backwards except in broad brushstrokes, but the effects can be awfully misleading.

■ We paint a historical portrait of Benjamin Franklin that depicts a Founding Father who had all of the big ideas sorted out. And he was, no doubt, an ingenious organizer. But we often lack a sense of scale.

■ Franklin was a citizen working on a level well within reach of us today. Many of his creations of great civic renown were improvements to his beloved city of Philadelphia. He was a major innovating force for the public library (the Library Company of Philadelphia), the fire department (the Union Fire Co.), and the humble city sewer and street-sweeping agency.

■ Philly may have been America’s biggest city at the time, but it wasn’t big by any objective measure today. When it was overtaken by New York City in the 1790 Census, Philadelphia had 28,522 residents -- a completely unremarkable figure, when compared to literally more than a thousand cities of the same size in America today. About half of all Americans live today in places at least as big as Franklin’s Philadelphia.

■ This should tell us that great improvements in municipal living are well within reach. We shouldn’t be daunted by issues of resources, technology, or scale: If Franklin could innovate under 1700s-era limitations (no electric light, for one thing, and an inflation-adjusted GDP per capita of about $2,500), in a town with fewer than 30,000 residents, then very little stands between him and us that can’t be easily overcome with imagination and drive.

■ The joint venture is meant to put Toyota’s manufacturing approach to work building the vehicle of Joby’s design. This makes a world of sense, considering Toyota is world-class at taking manufacturing to scale. No company produces more cars.

■ If the arrangement itself is less than surprising, perhaps the real surprise is in the fact that even after all this time, there remains such resistance to adopting, adapting, and applying the Toyota Production System. It’s been around for decades, documented exhaustively, and applied successfully worldwide. Some of the approach gets distilled into “lean manufacturing” principles, but that’s only a component of the whole approach.

■ Toyota is a premier example of an organization assembled around the principle of continuous learning. Any organization is only as good as what its people know. Trying new things (like building air taxis), learning from the process, and then applying what was learned isn’t all that complex a concept. But only some institutions are any good at applying it.

■ Any time you see a serious company like Toyota stretching to try something far-out like this, look beyond the product itself: It’s a pretty good sign they’re really trying to learn how to do ever harder and more novel things. Whether the product succeeds or fails, the learning itself becomes part of the company culture and thus an element of competitive advantage. A whole lot of institutions far beyond automotive and aircraft manufacturing ought to take note.

■ Most societies impose restrictions on at least some addictive goods and services. Narcotic and psychedelic drugs, alcohol, and tobacco are all familiar examples. The societal interest in restrictions is based largely on the social costs of addiction. People who are “under the influence” and operating with diminished self-control frequently cause harm to others via their addictions.

■ In Meta’s case, what it’s doing with Facebook and Instagram is a pretty transparent invitation to addictive behavior. The EC’s argument holds that “infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms’ highly personalised recommender systems” serve to “fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling”.

■ Meta protests that it is “Giving parents more insights into the topics shaping their teen’s algorithm”, but that really says nothing about addictive potential. The European Council’s move to break out the big regulatory guns may be aggressive, but it’s not necessarily fundamentally wrong.

■ Perhaps the best defense against any behavioral addiction is in having something more desirable to do. In turn, this means that there have to be diminishing returns to each experience. The 100th consecutive slice of chocolate cake cannot be as enticing as the 1st. It seems plainly evident that tools like infinite scrolling and autoplay are meant to keep the appeal of that 100th slice of digital cake as close as possible to the first.

■ This is already a social problem and will be long into the future because it takes exposure for people to find desirable alternatives. Few people are going to decide out of the blue that they’d rather build model trains or collect stamps than keep on scrolling through Instagram.

■ But diminishing returns are inevitable, and no matter how addictive programmers manage to make social media, most people will sooner or later find that there’s an emptiness to the experience -- and aspect of feeling unfulfilled for all the time spent, because human fulfillment isn’t created by endless consumption, but rather by a sense of being needed and genuinely socially-connected. No infinite scroll can supply that.

■ A country can resist attack by a powerful aggressor in several ways. First, they can put up a strong fight on the battlefield itself and repel according to winning along battle fronts (like the Western Front of World War I). Clearly, Ukraine has devoted enormous resources to that approach.

■ Second, a country can harden itself so much that it becomes like a turtle withdrawn into its shell (or, perhaps, like a porcupine). Finland has been building this model for generations and now has 50,500 civil defense shelters across the country ready in case of Russian invasion. Ukraine wasn’t quite so hardened before and continues to suffer grievous losses as Russia attacks civilians in their apartments, schools, and hospitals. But Ukraine has been adapting with innovations like anti-drone nets over highways and cities.

■ Third, a country can repel an aggressor by making the fight so costly that the aggressor gives up in the face of staggering losses. Ukraine has imposed 1.4 million casualties on Russia -- an utterly astonishing figure -- and shows no signs of letting up. To the rational observer, it’s astonishing that the Kremlin cares so little about such mind-boggling losses, including nine times as many war fatalities as Russia and the USSR had suffered in every fight since World War II.

■ Fourth, a defending country can cripple the economic and material supply lines that make it possible for the aggressor to continue to fight. Ukraine has been pounding Russia’s oil refineries and supply chains and weapons factories for exactly this reason. If Ukraine can take out Russia’s tanks and trucks faster than Russia can replace them, then it doesn’t have to fight them on the front lines.

■ Against some astonishing odds, Ukraine has survived and advanced the state of the art of warfare far more than probably anyone could have imagined four years ago. A defensive victory is not assured, and Carns’s warning should be taken seriously: While the strategically (and morally) correct course of action is for allies to pour all the support they can behind Ukraine’s defense, even success by all measurable objectives won’t necessarily stop the Kremlin from desperate and irrational escalation. The sooner Russia quits, the better.

■ But at least since Lee Iacocca became Chrysler’s own starring pitchman, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around trying to turn executives into celebrities. When those efforts had to sway either Madison Avenue or a hard-nosed press corps, there was at least some gatekeeping to offer relief to a weary public. But so much of that has eroded in the social-media age that we are now awash in people styling themselves as “thought leaders”.

■ Like an invasive species choking out native plants, “thought leadership” has reached what deserves to be a terminal stage: Clout-seeking executives are now hiring English-speaking remote assistants from the Philippines to churn out AI-assisted content packages that are cluttering LinkedIn. Worse, they are hiring other assistants to provide totally artificial “engagement” because it juices the algorithms that make the content look popular.

■ For most people, writing is hard. Hiring ghostwriters and ghost-in-the-machine writers to pad the numbers and churn out more is a fairly predictable choice for some to make. But Say’s Law (”Supply creates its own demand”) misleads us here: Nobody really demands low-quality, mass-produced “thoughts” that don’t even belong to the author, or else they wouldn’t be paying for the synthetic engagement.

■ Ironically, in purporting to discourage “low-quality content”, LinkedIn itself has featured predictably low-quality content right near the top of the page (just beneath a low-quality AI-generated summary of that content). It’s as though nobody wants to learn the real bottom line: There’s a giant gap between the amount of worthwhile writing that can ultimately be produced and the quantity of “engagement” that social media services are bound to demand.

■ Thus, there is no real “suppression” of low-quality content, just an industry of “strategists” offering suggestions on the next technique to win more publicity through the same old channels. It’s probably less damaging than William Randolph Hearst’s (perhaps apocryphal) approach (”You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”), but it’s hardly more enlightened.

■ Leaders of low character occasionally deliver good results. Leaders of high character sometimes flop. But, on the whole, it is not what a person knows or how magnificent their plans that decides whether they are remembered well. It is how their character (or, perhaps better, their array of personal virtues) holds up when they are equipped with power.

■ Lots of voters in America think that when they vote for a candidate, they are effectively purchasing a bundle of policies. This is emphatically not the case. Candidates express policy preferences, to be sure, but few candidates get elected by trying to advance policies that differ wildly from what the general public already wants.

■ The policy choices that really matter are the ones that nobody sees coming before election day. It’s easy to test popular opinion on the things we know we’re already fighting about. It’s the surprises that can’t be poll-tested. But the surprises matter most: They are fundamentally why we outsource our political choices to elected officials.

■ There is no time to conduct a plebiscite when a hurricane strikes, when banks teeter on the brink of failure, or when a neighboring state launches a bloody war of aggression. When a technological development is new, public information is limited, or past experience provides little in the way of useful guidance, even highly intelligent, engaged, and virtuous members of the public want people in charge who commit to a full-time job of assessing issues and information on their behalf and acting in ways that reflect well on the people. Voters who want good outcomes have to remember that policy platforms come cheap, but few things cost more than low character in high office.

■ The real villain, it turns out, was a haughty institutional culture that refused to assess external threats, demand self-improvement, or engage with the likely consequences of its actions. Success bred complacency, and complacency poured accelerant on the flames of willful ignorance. Had the book been written later, it could have treated the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies of 2009 as natural and predictable extensions of the original story.

■ Reality doesn’t often forgive long-term, structural obstinance. The saying goes that if you find yourself on the wrong road, the first step is to turn around. The funny thing about ego is that it often keeps people from admitting to mistakes, even when those mistakes are obvious in the immediate short term. But what makes that behavior even daffier is that the longer people choose to compound their bad decisions by doubling down, the worse those mistakes end up tarnishing their legacies.

■ Certain things should be staggeringly obvious by now, because they were made obvious to everyone half a century ago. One of those obvious things is that a chronic vulnerability to the output of petroleum from the most tempestuous parts of the Middle East makes for instability in the entire economy. With on-again, off-again exchanges of fire with Iran underway and a still massively unsafe Strait of Hormuz still crippling the Persian Gulf, it should long ago have become obvious that much more than environmental interest weighs in favor of breaking the economic dependency on petroleum.

■ For certain goods and activities, there’s no substitute -- but for any role where an alternative can be found, it’s a matter of national security to break the chains to oil. Whether the nation involved is petro-rich (like the United States) or oil-dry (like Japan), the same volatility has been in the air for more than 50 years. Complacency doesn’t work.

■ Many nations have declared independence. Few have maintained a continuous democratic regime without interruption for longer than a century. And the US Constitution deserves vociferous praise, not because it is, was, or ever will be perfect, but because it contains both a brilliant perpetual framework for checks and balances and a humble acknowledgment of its own need for evolution and reform through the amendment process.

■ Scalability is the real brilliance of the Constitution. It’s not only a document fit for 4 million people (the census-counted population in 1790), it’s fit for 400 million or more, so long as we take care to preserve the framework. Far from decrying the Constitution (as some radicals are inclined to do), we should spend the next decade or so reviving our appreciation for what James Madison and his co-creators established.

■ Congress, for instance, should be larger. The House should probably have double its current membership, allowing for closer representation, smaller election stakes, and a better diversity of membership (not just in terms like ethnicity or gender, but in life experience, vocation, and education). Congress should also act like it belongs in Article I of the Constitution, not in the back seat.

■ Regional, voluntary inter-state cooperation ought to happen more, as well. The Constitution contains several provisions meant to keep one region from dominating the Union, but it doesn’t prohibit states with common interests from coordinating among themselves. Nearly any multi-state region you could identify contains more Americans than the entire country held in 1790, and we ought to expect real state capacity not just from the Federal government, but from the individual states themselves (and from clusters of them). Multistate arrangements shouldn’t be limited to lotteries and NCAA conferences. We ought to consider having regional weather services, regional scientific alliances, and regional retirement-savings programs, among many other public goods. Washington shouldn’t be a chokepoint for worthwhile endeavors.

■ If we truly want to reinforce the good that comes from scalability, then states ought to be the primary level for hammering out most truly contentious policies. Really divisive arguments shouldn’t be subject to wild swings due to changes in the White House, the Capitol, or the Supreme Court. The national government ought to strive for less enforced uniformity and more effective delivery of what really demands a national scale. We should know more of our governors and fewer of our Senators, because state-level innovation and execution should be just that good.

■ When officers of the military and of the Federal government swear to support and defend the Constitution, not only should they mean it, the rest of us should hold them to their word. We place too much strain on the Constitutional order when we foolishly act like the quadrennial Presidential election is some kind of parliamentary mandate. Reaching 250 years of Constitutional order will be a milestone well worth celebrating, but as with any good celebration, we ought to do a bit of housekeeping first.

■ Behind those complaints -- all quite justified -- is an underlying guideline for anyone who wishes not to be a tyrant (whether as a monarch or merely a manager). A book on leadership might label it “ABC”: Always Beckon Criticism.

■ Criticism, when genuine and legitimate, is a wonderful tool of improvement. The true critic is usually someone who cares authentically about the good of the institution he or she criticizes. In calling for something to be better, they reveal a deeper belief that the institution contains at least some underlying good.

■ An openness to criticism, codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution, is one of the key reasons America has succeeded for so long. Hostility to authentic criticism is a telltale indication that someone in a position of power is unfit to lead.

■ The smart leader isn’t just open to fair critiques, they beckon it, inviting the feedback that makes positive change possible. If we want to see a great experiment in civilization make it another 250 years, we should be clear to all: We’re not perfect, and we’ll never achieve perfection, but we can only steer towards something better if we always beckon criticism.

■ The government didn’t create ranch dressing. The real secret sauce to America’s magnetism is that our country is a colossal, long-running experiment in what it means to be left alone. It’s a thought that even left an artifact in the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson stealthily replaced the word “subjects” with “citizens”.

■ Subjects, as documented in the Supreme Court decision about birthright citizenship, owe something to the person of the sovereign in return for protection. Citizens, on the other hand, owe one another. And in the United States, what we owe one another is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

■ This, too, is why it sounds so reflexively un-American for anyone in high office to expect or demand gratitude from the public. We don’t owe our fellow citizens grateful thanks and praise for doing their jobs.

■ And because we are all citizens -- including Presidents -- we are all entitled to equality before the law. Equally, too, we should contribute in our own ways to making the country great. But the country is much more than its government, and most of the ways we achieve greatness happen voluntarily and free from coercion. That, even more than ranch dressing, is the secret recipe.

■ It is no undersized triumph that the world’s longest demilitarized border spans about 5,500 miles -- as the crow flies, that’s the distance from Paris to Beijing. In the course of human history, that kind of peaceful coexistence is beyond extraordinary. And it ought to be a model.

■ Not all neighbors start with such a good common framework for mutual understanding, but like all good relationships, the handshake across the boundary requires continued effort and willingness.

■ Despite some of the preposterous and unenlightened things that have been said, the United States doesn’t need Canadian territory, just Canadian friendship. And vice-versa. Economic, political, defense, and cultural ties as close as ours should be a model of mutuality to the world, not a source of anxiety to anyone. Trade should flow almost as freely as the air, enriching all involved and making further proof of Adam Smith’s case that commerce is a terrific door to friendship.

■ But because some people forget or ignore the obvious mutual advantages to the relationship, we ought to make more of a regular public affair of celebrating it. A little bit of difference is quite OK as long as goodwill prevails. Some regular reminders may be necessary.