It’s Been a Year

President Trump gives speech at Davos January 21, 2026, screenshot from here

Tuesday of this week, January 20^th, marked the first anniversary of President Trump’s second presidency. And the next day was his speech at Davos, in which he recounted some of his accomplishments and plans. As the introduction to his speech informed us, a US president has only spoken at Davos two times: both were Donald Trump. And it certainly isn’t because he agrees with the World Economic Forum agenda; it’s to use the stage for his own purposes.

The first thing that was brought to my attention in the speech, before I’d had a chance to hear it myself, was this declaration, about a half hour in (emphasis mine):

The war with Ukraine is an example. We are thousands of miles away, separated by a giant ocean. It's a war that should have never started and it wouldn't have started if the 2020 US presidential election weren't rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that; they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.

Was it headline news? Nope. Crickets.

He has said it before; I think we’re all aware. But the declaration that “people will soon be prosecuted” for stealing that election might be news—if it happens. We’re all getting a bit impatient to see those prosecutions, along with some other ones that identified the previous regime as corrupt and tyrannical.

The most highlighted topic of the speech was something of an aside, as far as accomplishments for the year go. It’s related, but not obviously so. About Greenland:

·       Trump wants Greenland for the US.

·       Trump will not use force.

·       But there will be consequences, if opposition continues: “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.”

He doesn’t say what consequences will be for the opposition, but we could speculate it could mean higher tariffs on those countries, or even withdrawal from NATO, which would demonstrate that NATO has been mainly the US and freeloaders all along.

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Making Nice Isn’t Good for Society

I visited Minneapolis once, many decades ago, the summer I graduated from college. It was hot and humid, new to me, having grown up in the desert. The “land of 10,000 lakes.” It was green and lovely. And the neighborhoods I observed were neat and tidy, the houses not large, but with basements, which you might as well have, since you had to dig that deep to keep plumbing from freezing. Quite similar to the neighborhood I grew up in.

The people were nice. It was my first encounter with the accent, which, as accents go, is a lot clearer to understand than many. The city was organized into “alphabets”; a set of streets would be named things going from A on through the alphabet, like, “Apple Tree Lane,” “Birch Tree Lane,” Cherry Tree Lane,” etc. Elsewhere the alphabet would be related to something else. It was a way of organizing neighborhoods.

example of Minneapolis alphabetical street names, found here

I didn’t observe any of the chaos we’ve seen there in recent years. You’d think just facing their extreme winter would be challenging enough that no one would want any more trouble than that. But here we are.

It may be that the niceness was a contributing factor to the decline. Nice means pleasing and agreeable. It can also mean kind, but it’s not an exact synonym. There are multiple more meanings for both nice and kind in the Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, probably not helpful here today. 

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 perceive the difference, in others or even from the inside.

Celebrating the Semiquincentennial, Part I: The Declaration

 That’s a big word in the title: semiquincentennial. Let’s break it down.

Semi = half

Quin = five

Cent = hundred

Ennial= year (same root as annual)

So we’re in the year of half of five hundred years. That equals 250. We’re talking of course about the 250^th birthday of the United States of America. The specific birthday will be on July 4^th. That is the day we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, declaring us a separate nation from Great Britain, the colonizing mother country. There was a war underway at the time of the signing, originally to regain rights that had been violated, but by this time it was to win independence. And we won. Otherwise the signers would have been hanged for treason.

Most nations are born out of a people: an ethnicity or language or culture. Sometimes they break off from other existing nations. Sometimes—easier in previous times—they found an uninhabited frontier and settled there, thus creating a new nation.

The United States of America was born out of an idea. As Abraham Lincoln recounted it nearly a century later, America was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This was different from all men are born into their strata of society, with higher-born people getting power and other advantages not afforded to the lower-born layers of people.

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