■ After threats against aircraft, the malicious actors issued threats against media outlets, particularly in Ireland and the UK. It was serious enough that the normally unarmed Irish police forces brought out the armed response units. Two things become evident in the wake of an incident like this.

■ The first is that any threat sufficiently credible to draw out a serious response creates a whole other series of problems beyond the direct costs of the police reaction. It tests who takes a threat seriously and who does not. It tests what those response plans look like and how effectively they are activated. It tests how much damage can be created through a false alarm and smokes out errors and omissions that can be studied (by both the adversary and the defender). In a sense, the whole thing can behave like an intelligence-gathering operation for the villains.

■ The second thing that should be evident is that it’s idiotic for anyone to cling to the dual notions that America should care only for itself and that it can do so best by bullying, steamrolling, or ignoring its allies. Coordination, mutual trust, and teamwork are how sensible parties work with other people they respect.

■ It clouds the environment for distinguishing friend from foe if friends adopt foe-like behavior. The world is complicated and hostile enough as it is. The future will be improved only by those who decide to be constructive teammates about it, no matter how powerful they are.

■ And thus to tear it down would be an utterly baffling act of self-immolation of one’s own claim to authority. Yet the President has issued an executive order claiming to forbid anyone from doing that. It’s an inexplicable choice of first official act following a historic electoral repudiation.

■ It’s also a peculiar act to take at the very same time that a judge is restraining a rush to throw up an unnecessary and unwanted arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Just as negative space is sometimes a more significant design element than a block of color, sometimes an open view is more important than a piece of tangible construction. One such view is experienced at Arlington.

■ Like silence, tasteful restraint can be golden. It is not the least bit obvious why anyone would use the power of the Presidency to diminish one of the primary symbols of that power. Regrettably, it is entirely obvious why someone of low character would want to thinly veil a monument to himself without any regard for the value of what’s left behind.

■ Nevertheless, a world that values virtues is preferable to one that does not. And of all the possible hypocrisies, none might be greater than disparaging an entire country because a few people within it chose not to offer you an award. Yet that is the awkward position created by the President, who is oddly perturbed that he hasn’t been named to the Nobel Prize.

■ In the abstract (and maybe even in the particular), awards are how you keep people from fighting wars. Without them, people tend to aspire towards other clear-cut signs of fitness and strength (which is why war heroes are so openly revered across so many cultures).

■ Culturally, we need a sense of honor for things worth aspiring towards: It’s hard for people to aspire towards behaviors unless we place them on a pedestal. Merit -- real, freely chosen merit -- has to be rewarded with status and recognition. If people pursue honors rather than just heroics, then we stand a chance of perpetuating something like a civilization.

■ It’s possible that this is the first time a sitting head of state of a foreign country has been eligible to vote in an American election, though it’s worth noting that Winston Churchill’s mother was American and Boris Johnson was a dual US/UK citizen until he became a senior minister in the British government (Prime Ministers being heads of government rather than state, regardless).

■ About two thirds of eligible adults have been showing up to vote in recent Presidential elections; about 50% vote in the midterms. The greatest get-out-the-vote ad that no one could possibly make would feature Pope Leo saying, “I was busy leading a billion-person church and fighting lung cancer, but I still found time to vote. What’s your excuse?”

■ The more serious take-away, though, is that there is no conflict between examining moral questions deeply and making imperfect choices in a civic environment. It’s doubtful that the Pope’s ballot will be returned with nothing but write-in names. If we wait for perfection (in candidates, ballot initiatives, or any other subject of democratic decision-making. The thing that matters is participation, and using that participation to apply one’s own best available judgment to the choices we need to make. If the Pope himself can live with that kind of intellectual tension, so can the rest of us.

■ Perhaps the retort is too much of a cliche: Whether or not you’re interested in politics, politics is interested in you. It’s merely the condensation of a thought attributed to Pericles: “An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy.” Such were the views of democratic politics in 430 BC.

■ Disinterest is counterproductive, but so is ignorance. Anyone who succeeds in any human institution must have acted politically to get there. Politics is merely the skill set of achieving interests within a body of people. Successful generals are, in a very practical sense, practitioners of the political arts -- in a word, politicians. Successful business executives? Politicians. Hospital leaders, university presidents, and non-profit managers? All politicians. That is not all they are, but it is something they cannot fail to be.

■ Even religious leaders are, by definition, politicians, and they are duty-bound not only to be aware of how the public interest is seen and pursued around them, but also to ensure that they develop political knowledge and skills of their own. John Paul II masterfully engaged in politics as Pope in order to hasten the fall of Communism, and he made the world better -- and holier -- for it.

■ To understand and attend to politics is akin to understanding language or mathematics: As an essential tool of how the world is formed and how people live, from which abstention (or unaccountable naivete) only makes one not harmless, but potentially useless to communities of goodwill.

■ Will Microsoft actually let a full 60,000 people go? That seems completely unlikely. But 60,000 remains an enormous number of people to be told “We might or might not continue to employ you long-term, so think really hard about whether you want to keep counting on this paycheck.” There is some serious destabilization potential embedded in what the message implies.

■ It could, of course, be a good thing for the broader economy if highly-skilled people are given the opportunity to have a soft landing from good jobs that may no longer be economical -- a good severance package can provide some tremendous seed capital for an innovative startup, and the free market thrives on certain forms of creative destruction.

■ But we also shouldn’t make any mistake about the potentially disruptive signal this sends: Microsoft is a top-20 member of the Fortune 500, and if it’s retrenching, others could easily be ready to follow. And big workforce reductions often come in clusters because there’s a sort of permission structure that gets activated once a big company takes the initial heat. CEOs like to think of themselves as independent heroes, but they’re often nothing more than herd animals.

■ The truth is that things didn’t go all that brightly for the Continental Army back in 1776. In late October of that year, George Washington lost the Battle of White Plains and had to retreat northward, leaving the British with control over New York City and its surrounding environs. It might seem a little unusual to celebrate what was clearly a tactical defeat.

■ But perhaps that’s exactly what we should be commemorating, in a spirit of humility and good cheer. Winning is obviously the objective of any fight, but we would be naive to remember July 4, 1776 as the conclusion of the fight for independence. The real narrative included victory as well as defeat, not to mention setbacks, retrenchments, and negotiations.

■ Every pursuit of something better will come with those things, sometimes in painful measure. Believing in something new is exciting, but keeping the faith when times turn hard is more determinative. There are real lessons in the story of 1776 for us today, but they’re not all about what happened in Philadelphia in mid-summer. Great troubles can be overcome, but only with patient endurance and a tolerance for setbacks.

■ But what they may need to go along with instead is a different message: One that says, “Guard carefully what you put into your mind”. The entire Holmes tale is a saga of trust and uncritical thinking. In the words of the Justice Department, “Holmes consistently provided glowing but false representations”.

■ Certain modes of information uptake are better than others at creating space for critical thinking. Reading (especially when done actively, with a pen or a highlighter) is often one of those. Watching a movie or listening to a podcast are generally much less reliable ways to encourage critical thought.

■ That isn’t the only thing that matters, of course; it can be quite enough to watch some material strictly for entertainment value. But we shouldn’t disregard the importance of cultural habits that offer some protection. Protective customs have always mattered, but they matter more than ever because the opportunities to engage in binge-level consumption without any editorial guidance in the loop are frightening.

■ There have always been hucksters and liars around, but it takes a conscious choice to elevate them in the public eye. Guarding carefully against ensorcellment isn’t a job anyone successfully undertakes all alone.

■ That cost is both direct and indirect. Even if the tools of the state were free of charge, the difference in output between people who are free and people who live in fear is large (and consistently found).

■ All of this is to say that it’s heartbreaking to imagine just how much the North Korean regime wastes on remaining in power through fear.

■ It is nearly equally heartbreaking to witness the apparent eagerness of some US officials to serve them the appearance of greater legitimacy through diplomatic talks. Some 25 million people live harsher, poorer lives because they are under the shadow of North Korea’s authoritarian regime. Nothing we do from the outside should enlarge that shadow or enhance its prestige if it shows no signs of real conversion.

■ A great example is the introduction of portable, containerized moving systems that permit people to fill truck-sized boxes full of their possessions. They’re most obviously useful for people who are moving to new homes, but they also come in handy for households undergoing renovations or going through big life-stage changes. Having a way to unhurriedly move lots of items temporarily to a secure place for storage is a really simple innovation, yet it’s a radical improvement over what prevailed before.

■ Even a simple innovation like this still requires some attention from potential regulatory authorities. A local community might well decide to prohibit homeowners from keeping a storage unit in a driveway for months at a time. It could certainly prohibit stationing them in the street or using them for human occupancy.

■ Those regulations are almost certainly best set at the local level; there’s no need for Congressional intervention regarding moving boxes. Finding the appropriate level of regulation is important: It’s a task that comes along with virtually every possible innovation.

■ Thoughtful people need to examine just how heavily that regulation must sit, and from what level of government it should be issued. We can neither assume that every industry is capable of self-regulation from start to finish, nor should we assume that every governmental authority is the appropriate jurisdiction for regulating the public interest.

■ All of this calls for judgment, regulated by a predictable framework of law. If we find new technologies emerging without competent regulatory attention keeping pace, we should expect bad things to happen.

■ Many things will get regulated judicially, but the back-door approach also comes with considerable flaws -- not least of which is that legal claims usually start with some form of injury to the complainant. Non-governmental regulation plays a part, too, as when insurance companies and professional associations impose their own standards. Ultimately, though, innovation almost always instigates new regulation. Whether it is imposed prudentially is up to us.

■ There are lots of places from which a wealthy, highly-developed jurisdiction might want to leave. Hong Kong, for instance, is plainly not better-off under the thumb of mainland China than it would have been had it remained with the United Kingdom, pursued true independence, or perhaps even applied for admission into the United States. But Canada is not a confederation from which it makes sense to leave. It’s big, well-developed, stable, and prosperous. It could be better-developed and more prosperous, of course, but it’s not teetering on the brink of destitution.

■ Maybe a pipe-dream scenario can be imagined where Alberta seamlessly slips from Canadian province to 51st State. But that outcome would depend upon a chain of conditions and dependencies so long as to send the mind into a spiral.

■ Even a basic pass at the question reveals that maybe the problem isn’t so much that a quarter of the voters are inclined to lunacy, but rather that a quarter of them have reckless disregard for consequences. Somehow, almost one in ten drivers still refuses to wear a seat belt. A similar fraction still smokes. These are behaviors with clear, unambiguous dangers attached to them.

■ Leaving Canada isn’t exactly that unambiguously stupid (though it’s not far), so maybe it makes sense that even more people are willing to take big chances for largely imaginary gains. But that’s the problem, really: People cannot be forced to perform second- or third-order thinking, and many refuse to even try.

■ It’s childish behavior, especially when it assumes that someone else will be available to bail the reckless out of whatever trouble they find. There are a lot of fingers searching for light sockets, and it’s up to the remainder of us to shame and shun those who can’t or won’t bring themselves to ask the simple question, “And then what? What happens next?”

■ Some protesters were peaceful, but 2,400 were arrested. Riots and looting broke out in a disturbing number of locations. France seems to have a chronic problem with youth-oriented violent protest outbreaks, and it’s certainly a case of confusing messaging, at least from the outside.

■ It’s easy to imagine American students protesting. It’s much harder to imagine them protesting in large numbers over demands for better educational opportunities, as at least some of the French have been doing. Educational quality is the kind of thing addressed more often in the breach than in any other circumstance.

■ People who feel like they’re being deprived of high-quality education often understand intuitively that the deprivation could be used as a tool of control, as has so often been the case in history. The problem is how much it muddies the waters to go from authentic pleas for better schools to destructive rioting. Education is supposed to be a civilizing process, not a barbaric one.

■ Changes in technology and in language have long caused problems with transmitting information. The quest to unlock the mysterious corners of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or to recover or reconstitute lost literary works from history both speak to the enormous frustration that results from knowing that content once existed but has escaped our present reach.

■ Most of human history (and our documentation of it) predates the Internet, and yet the ease of accessing digital content means we spend enormous amounts of time engaging with screens and much less with print. The result means that many people are almost exclusively immersed in contemporary content, with almost no exposure to anything even modestly old. (It doesn’t help that streaming services often ignore classic content entirely.)

■ The result tends to make people insufferably myopic, a little like the college freshman who reads Karl Marx or Ayn Rand for the first time and thinks they’re the first to ever really “get it”. Yet, to borrow a line from Ecclesiastes, “Nothing is new under the sun!”. Bringing older texts across the digital bridge to where they are accessible now on equal footing with social media, websites, and streaming media platforms really is a work of enormous public good.

■ Project Gutenberg, The Internet Archive, and like-minded digital archivists deserve thunderous applause and generous funding. Circumstances may vary from age to age, but most aspects of human nature don’t. That’s not a curse, either: It’s reassuring that none of us are really exploring life alone, as long as we’re aware of the resources left behind by so many others across the generations.

■ Written language has been with us since sometime in the realm of 3200 BC -- which means something like 175 to 200 generations’ worth of knowledge has been documented somewhere. The more of it we can find, dust off, and make available to our contemporaries, the better.

■ The world is dynamic like that. Big changes generally don’t happen overnight (with the exceptions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 9/11), but a lot more of them happen in a much more compressed span of history than our instincts would suggest. Nations like South Korea and Ireland have surged from lower-income to top-tier within the time some incumbent United States Senators have been in office.

■ Circumstances change so much that fidelity to principle is more than a nicety. It’s the only way for a big power like the United States to bid for some kind of order in the world. Individual leaders may come and go, power dynamics may shift, and local hegemonies may rise and fall. But if we appear to have a stable and credible commitment to principles, then others can act accordingly by taking us seriously.

■ Therein lies the problem with the decision not to impose sanctions on Russia for what it is doing to Ukraine. If we are not on the side of those unjustly besieged, then what good are we?

■ Data centers are now infrastructure, and we should assume that they will become targets for heavy ordnance in all future armed conflicts. Bridges and power plants will continue to matter, but data centers are now on the list, too.

■ Furthermore, many people are now aware that inauthentic characters on social media are being propped up by geopolitical adversaries who gain from having misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and general mayhem introduced to the currents of public opinion. This awareness is good insofar as it causes people to recognize that not everything is as it seems online.

■ Regrettably, the other side to that coin is that people are still voluntarily exposing themselves to the platforms where those bad actors appear. It’s a lot of media and it’s being consumed in heavy doses.

■ There certainly are pro-social ways these tools can be used, but even looking past the harm done by truly malicious actors, we really need to think about the customs that are taking hold. Normalizing frequent and heavy media consumption is risky business, a matter unwittingly presaged by Florence Nightingale even before the Civil War, when she wrote: “I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last.” The malicious content is bad enough, but we need new habits responsive to modern realities to spread just as quickly as the propaganda.

■ Some costs in the short run are inescapable as investments in long-run peace and security. As Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and current chief diplomat for the EU noted, “Suspending sanctions on Russian diesel provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war. This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t.”

■ High fuel prices are of course partially the result of effective targeting of Russian refineries by Ukraine’s impressive drone operations. It’s not the only factor, but it matters. To the extent that diesel prices today are higher because of those operations, the only rational way to view the picture is that Ukraine is simply doing to Russia what the Baltic countries would have done to the Soviet Union in 1940, had they the technology or the knowledge of what was to come.

■ A ceasefire under the present status quo needs to be evaluated as if it sets up a 50-year Russian occupation of some Ukrainian territory, because that’s the only relevant historical precedent. That’s not a just or fair deal, and anyone making the claim that such a deal should prevail is a dupe or an ally of evil.

■ Plenty of leaders know that vigorous solidarity with Ukraine is the only option for long-term peace in Europe. High diesel prices hurt right now. But 50-year occupations hurt much more, and for far longer.

■ College, it has been well-established, isn’t the right path for everyone. But other paths require follow-through, as well. The attrition rate through training for the skilled trades is huge: A majority who start will not complete their programs. Sometimes a weed-out process is a good thing; if a career path isn’t the right fit for a person, it’s easier to learn that and make a course correction at age 19 than at age 39.

■ But it’s useful to recognize that sometimes outcomes reflect habits of character more than anything about intelligence or ability. Sometimes, you just have to stick with things in order to succeed. Not that this is a new observation. In an essay specifically titled “The College Graduate and Public Life”, Theodore Roosevelt said, “He will meet with checks and will make many mistakes; but if he perseveres, he will achieve a measure of success and will do a measure of good such as is never possible to the refined, cultivated, intellectual men who shrink aside from the actual fray.”

■ There are many good reasons why a person might quit one pursuit or another. But there have to be just as many good reasons to stick with things, even when rewards seem fuzzy or far away. Lots of people are getting the messages about starting education and vocational training. But maybe we need to focus more attention on building the habits that will keep more of them from quitting. Personal habits aren’t the only factor involved, but they’re indisputably part of the story.

■ The Soviet command economy learned less from day-to-day encounters with consumers and competitors, so it committed a fair amount of state resources to science and technology research. The US did, too, but it helped a lot to have an economy that rewarded innovation.

■ To this day, Russia’s export economy is far less sophisticated than it ought to be. It’s mostly an extraction-based export market, with petroleum far out in the lead.

■ That’s what makes the news of a special deal to let Russia sell diesel so frustrating. Restricting the flow of money into the country by restricting its exports of petroleum products is a bloodless way of discouraging further attacks on Ukraine. No incoming money means it’s harder to make war.

■ Take away the restrictions, though -- even if nominally to make life easier on the US domestic public -- and you make it easier for the bad guys to create pain. Ukraine deserves better allies who will do more of what is within their own power to help hasten peace. Sometimes peace costs a little more.

■ It’s a good illustration of the kind of thing we should expect computer models to be good at doing: Running lots of simulations based upon lots of past data to develop a probabilistic look at outcomes. Just like natural selection, this kind of model shines when it’s able to run experiments over and over and over again, then compare those experiments with verifiable results from the real world. Repeat more of what works, kill off what doesn’t.

■ It also speaks to the value of institutions like the National Hurricane Center. Some things are worthy public goods, decidedly worth paying for out of the public till, and reliable weather forecasting information is high on that list -- especially where conditions can threaten life or property. Having a country prosperous enough to afford a world-class forecasting agency ought to be a point of significant pride.

■ Accountability is hugely important whenever the public funds public goods, and to its significant credit, the National Hurricane Center publishes verification data showing a very clear and sustained long-term trend towards greater forecast accuracy. That’s what we should be able to expect from responsible adults in all walks of life: Continuous improvement both in the state of the art and in the routine application of professional skill.

■ The arrival of new tools to help with forecasting ought to be welcomed, insofar as those tools can be integrated accountably with the existing profession and its established practices and procedures. As promising new technologies emerge, thoughtful integration, not disruption, ought to be the guiding objective.

■ This promise is nearly a complete mirage. There are, of course, chores in life that offer little in the way of psychological reward: Emptying a dishwasher, for example. It’s monotonous, dreary, and there aren’t many creative ways to do it without shattering some glass. But we’ve already automated dishwashing about as much as we can without introducing Rosie the Robot into every home, and that’s been a pipe dream ever since the debut of “The Jetsons”.

■ In any domain where human ingenuity, creativity, or spirit are involved, “effortless” is the wrong goal altogether. Removing obstacles? Great. Reducing barriers? Desirable! Making dreary tasks more efficient and complicated ones more elegant? Please do.

■ But advertisements that promise to do things like “Make learning effortless“ miss the point entirely. The human brain doesn’t learn anything without trying to go through the learning experience. There is no learning by listening to recordings while you sleep or plugging into The Matrix so you can learn kung-fu. Learning can be made easier, more enjoyable, and less burdened by obstacles. But it cannot effectively be made effortless.

■ The same goes for so much else about human endeavor. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, of course, but it’s the artistic creation story that moves the viewer. Nobody boasts about how little work they put into preparing Thanksgiving dinner; the effort itself is an expression of love. People who watched “The Beatles: Get Back” weren’t drawn to nearly eight hours of documentary footage because they were unsure how the songs turned out.

■ The word “effortless” is having quite the boom, and it’s best if we put a stop to it. Effort is too important to throw away, and developing an appreciation for it starts at a very young age. But if we don’t actively hold it in high enough popular regard, it could too easily slip away.