In mid-April, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a legislative resolution designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”

The purpose, naturally, was to grandstand on supposedly counter-acting the annual “Pride Month” celebrations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and … well, I’m sure a few more adjectives have come along since I sat down to write this column, but I don’t know what they are … people that have become a fixture of US life over the last few decades.

Historically, though, the idea is just as “progressive” as “Pride Month,” and somewhat less historically grounded.

Here’s how the resolution begins:

“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the resolution purports to be grounded in the Bible. Which, apparently, the legislators and the governor forgot to read before framing up that resolution.

The primary biblical Jewish family unit — the mishpachah or clan — was an “extended,” not “nuclear,” family. Everyone from grandparents to grandchildren to nieces, nephews, cousins, and servants lived in close proximity to each other under the supervision of  clan “patriarchs,” the alpha males of the family lines.

Globally, even outside of the biblical milieu, “extended family” units were the historial norm for millennia, for precisely the same reason that they’re less prevalent now: Economics.

The major forces that created the celebrated modern “nuclear family” were industrialization, urbanization, and prosperity.

As workers moved off of large, multi-generational feudal or family farms and into towns to work in factories and stores, their diversity of employment location, and therefore choice of where to reside, fragmented.

As they became more prosperous, they were able to acquire separate shelter for smaller groups — instead of ten people in a one-room apartment, it became three or four in a two BEDroom apartment, or perhaps a small house.

Then came the automobile, the freeway, and the suburb, at which point a young couple could, in relative (to, say, the Oregon Trail) ease, move across the country from their mothers and fathers while still expecting a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in their new environs.

The nostalgia for a 1950s “mom, dad, two kids, Chevy four-door, well-manicured lawn around a tidy cottage”  way of life is not nostalgia for “the old days,” let alone for the days shortly after “the creation of the world.” It’s nostalgia for post-World-War-2 Pasadena, California.

I see no particular reason anyone should begrudge Tennessee its own transformation — also centered around World War 2 — from a largely rural, agricultural economy to a more urban, industrial economy, with its neat suburbs and “nuclear family” arrangements.

But trying to put a moral spin on those arrangements, backdating and falsifying the history of humankind — and, to the extent we might think we know them, the decrees of God — to “own the libs” is at least as silly as the silliest “Pride Month” celebrations.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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From national politics down to local neighborhood discussion, America seems to be in full-blown moral panic about data centers.

The two main concerns voiced by both politicians and my neighbors boil down to arguments that the increasing number and size (due to the push toward resource-intensive artificial intelligence in pretty much everything) of data centers requires “too much” electricity and “too much” water.

That may be true … right now.  But will it be true a few years from now? Not likely. Why? Well, let’s look at some history.

When Henry Ford introduced his “Quadricycle” — a gasoline powered automobile mounted on bicycle wheels — in 1896, most American roads were just dirt paths. By the early 1900s, Ford and others were pumping out thousands of the new-fangled “horseless carriages.”

With the cars came the complaints: Dirt roads turned into perpetual dust clouds as “rolling firetraps” careened dangerously down them, loudly and with frequent exhaust backfires, scaring the horses which drew the “traditional” wagons and carriages. A hue and cry arose against the dangers and inconveniences of the “devil wagons.”

But then cars got quieter (as inventors introduced mufflers), their brakes got improved, and the roads got paved. Over time, people ended up with cheaper, safer, faster, and more reliable transportation. And the streets and roads stopped being large-scale dumping grounds for animal feces, arguably improving health conditions.

That process of improvement hasn’t ended yet. My wife’s 2006 SUV gets about three times as many miles per gallon (in town) as the Oldsmobile coupe I drove in my youth, and is probably a lot safer, even correcting for her “mature woman” driving skills versus my “crazy male teen” habits.

Getting a little more modern, consider computers: My Linux Mini PC, like the Commodore VIC-20 I got for Christmas in 1983, runs on 20-25 watts of electricity. But the mini PC — which cost about 1/3 as much as the Commodore after accounting for inflation — boasts three million times as much RAM and runs about 3,000 times as fast.

Yes, data centers use a lot of water.

Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity.

But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly.

Unless there’s some really bizarre change to the historical arc of invention and innovation, we are at the peak, not the low point, of data center resource usage.

In fact, shortly before I began writing this column, Wired ran an article on a recent innovation by Amazon that “delivers 33 percent higher data throughput, cuts network power consumption by 40 percent, and lowers operating costs by 27 percent.”

Future CPUS and their associated equipment will run faster (meaning fewer are needed for the same jobs), cooler (meaning less water is needed to cool them), and on less electricity.

Those innovations won’t just benefit the operators of data centers. Regular consumers will also see cheaper, faster, better products at the retail level — and lower utility bills to boot.

The future is always scary … until it actually gets here.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On May 25, US president Donald Trump went back to war with Iran, launching strikes in the southern part of that country on a laughable claim of “self-defense.”

The previous phase of the war was stupid, evil, and illegal, as is this phase.

It was and is stupid because even given Trump’s constantly shifting (and mostly themselves stupid) objectives, there was no way to “win” it other than nuking all of Iran’s major cities and sending in a massive occupation force for the foreseeable future.

It was and is evil because war is always evil. Noncombatants are killed, injured, and impoverished, purposely or accidentally. There are seldom any “good guys” on the “leadership” level of any side — it’s merely a street gang turf rumble writ large, with regular people caught in the violent middle.

It was and is illegal because here was no declaration of war, and the attack didn’t even meet the minimal  requirements of the War Powers Resolution. Additionally, even if that resolution was constitutional (it wasn’t), Trump had 60 days to get congressional approval for continuing the operations (he didn’t — and no, the clock did not magically “reset” just because he took a brief break).

Wars usually aren’t really “won” in any meaningful sense of the word, but in this war the US regime — and the American people — have clearly lost, no matter the military outcome. It’s already impoverishing us considerably, and we’re only seeing the early impact of a situation which will drag on for a long time regardless of what happens next.

The most obvious indicator, of course, is the price of gasoline at the pump, but the shortages of petroleum products and fertilizer components that usually pass through the Strait of Hormuz will soon become very real in the prices we pay for consumer goods and groceries.

So, here we are: Instead of taking his lumps, letting the war end, and hoping for an economic upturn before the midterm elections mangle his party’s present projects and future prospects, Trump is doubling down.

There are three, and only three, plausible explanations:

Explanation One is that he’s evil, hates America, and is doing his damnedest to destroy the US economy. If that’s the  case the US House of Representatives should impeach him and the US Senate should convict and remove him. His illegal war clearly meets the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Explanation Two is that he’s stupid — whether by nature or due to his obvious cognitive decline — and just doesn’t know what he’s doing or understand its moral, political, or economic implications. If that’s the case, the vice-president and a majority of the cabinet should, per the 25th Amendment, “transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” after which the vice-president can become “acting president” and put a stop to this nonsense.

Explanation Three is that Trump — again, possibly due to the obvious cognitive decline he’s publicly and frequently displayed since before his second inauguration — isn’t in charge; the presidency is effectively controlled by other people who happen to be evildoers. If that’s the case, and if the 25th Amendment isn’t invoked because those evildoers also control — or consist of — the vice-president and cabinet, then it’s the public’s job to shut the war machine, and the regime controlling it, down.

That might look like a general strike, or even a revolution. It wouldn’t be pretty. But Trump clearly must be removed from power, and a popular uprising would likely be less ugly than the alternative, which is that US military commanders cease obeying Trump’s unlawful orders and depose him themselves. A junta is a lateral move on the evil and stupidity metrics, not an improvement on either.

There’s no question of “winning” the war. The war is lost, and lost it shall remain. The questions are about how much longer it lasts, how many more people are killed, maimed, displaced, and impoverished, what the terms of the US surrender look like, and what comes after. The sooner Trump loses the power to babble non-answers and act on them, the better.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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