Reducing the IRS Could Cost Taxpayers Billions & Why Swearing is Good for You
March 11, 2025
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Robert Frost wants us to examine how we judge the value of others.
Reducing the IRS Could Cost the U.S. Billions: Mump’s (Musk/Trump) slashing of the IRS protects the wealthy but places the tax burden on the middle class.
Trump prepares order dismantling the Education Department: If children are our future, why is Trump so eager to hobble their education?
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Insults Canadians in Bizarre Stunt at U.S. Border: The country’s security is in the hands of someone who does stuff like this?
Europe reacts with outrage to Vance insult: Nothing else says “entitled brat” than insulting your allies and diminishing the sacrifices they made on our behalf.
Kareem Gets Artsy for Women’s History Month: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is one of my favorite paintings and the perfect expression of defying society’s stereotyping of women.
Kareem the Science Guy: Swearing is linked with increased pain tolerance and strength: Studies find that swearing has many benefits.
Kareem’s Video Break: I rewatched this video several times to make sure I saw what I saw. Fascinating and awful.
Kareem’s Sports Moments: This is the kind of play every athlete dreams of.
Joe and Eddie Sing “There's a Meeting Here Tonight”: They sing with such enthusiasm and joy that the song stayed in my head for days after selecting this video.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.
from Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
“Two Tramps in Mud Time” is about a man who is chopping wood when two men wander by clearly hoping to be hired to cut the wood. The man struggles with the dilemma. He knows the joy he gets from the manual labor shouldn’t override their need for money. Yet, he chooses to continue chopping the wood himself because “My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation/ As my two eyes make one in sight.” He needs to chop wood for his own sake as much as they need the money. He needs to nurture his soul as much as they need to nurture their bodies.
For me, I join my avocation—reading about history, science, literature, listening to music, watching TV and movies, and seeking social justice—with my vocation: distilling my avocational activities into what I hope are thoughtful and insightful newsletters to share with a larger like-minded community. You.
There is another more sinister aspect to today’s quote. It is that the lumberjacks judge the man only by his ability to swing an ax. They had no other way of knowing if a person was a fool. That addresses a larger idea of how we judge each other daily. What criteria do we use? I fear that many Americans, like the lumberjacks, use the wrong criteria to judge a fool.
We have handed over the country to billionaires based solely on their ability to make money without ever questioning how they made that money (ethical business practices?) or what the correlation between making cars, selling oil, or leasing your name to buildings is to defending democracy, respecting other points of view, understanding a complex judicial system, etc. Many of the qualities that make a person successful in business are the opposite of what is needed in government. This is how we end up with an arsonist administration whose strategy is to set a dozen dumpster fires to distract us. While we’re busy putting each fire out, they sneakily expand their power—and wealth.
I fear our inability to judge people accurately because we use narrow criteria is why we make so many poor choices, not just in politics, but in our daily lives. Like most other animals, we rank people according to how similar they are to us in looks. We also look at background, monetary success, and professed values (not necessarily practiced values, meaning they may attend church but don’t live by their religion’s teachings). Psychologists discuss the importance of mirroring when making friends or applying for a job. That means mimicking how they sit, act, and talk so they find you more appealing. It’s a lie, but it’s an effective one.
So many evil politicians (Vance and DeSantis for example) have gone to Yale or Harvard law schools. But that was just so they could brandish criteria that would get them elected, not because they embraced a love for law or the ability to think or act logically. They mirrored what their professors wanted, got the grades, and are now mirroring what their base wants. They are mirrors without substance, composed entirely of the reflection of hollow ambition.
Trump just delivered a faux State of the Union address filled with verifiable lies because he knows his supporters prefer the mirror to the truth. We need to be more diligent in our criteria for judging others, whether they are running for office or moving in next door. We should at least be as vigilant with the criteria as we are selecting our coffee at Starbucks.