Friday, March 13, 2026

Pushing Autocrats Aside

I wrote the a year ago. It still holds:

The Guardian has put into words what many of us have been fearing for some time: “(Trump) is leading the world’s oldest continuous democracy to a once unthinkable destination.

“Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. 

“Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.”

The Guardian article is very long and goes into great detail before ending on a surprising and welcome positive note.

Norm Eisen, a lawyer and founder of State Democracy Defenders Action, says “There is reason for hope but nobody knows. Will we go the way of Brazil, Poland, Czech Republic, where I was ambassador, all of which pushed out autocratic regimes in recent years? Or will we go the way of Hungary and Turkey, which failed to oust autocrats? It remains to be seen but I, at least, am hopeful.”

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Thursday, March 12, 2026

Echoes of a Past War

The Trump administration keeps emphasizing that the U.S. military is by an overwhelming margin the most powerful in the world.

And I have no doubt that by conventional ways of measurement that is a true statement.

But when it comes to whether the U.S. will “win” the war with Iran, regardless of how strong our military may be, there are some historical precedents that are relevant.

People my age remember the Vietnam War. In that case we were also assured by our government that our military was far superior to that of our enemy. Accordingly, the U.S. bombed and bombed, but the war never seemed to end.

Instead, the Vietnamese pursued unconventional means and eventually overcame the U.S. advantage to win the war.

Although Iran’s military may be far inferior to the U.S.’s, it is employing drones and other relatively inexpensive technologies to attack targets in the Strait of Hormuz and the neighboring countries that house U.S. military facilities.

It is not a random thought that Iran may prevail in the end, at least to the extent Trump ends the conflict, declares “victory” and moves his attention elsewhere, perhaps to Cuba.

Such a victory declared by Trump would be, of course, pyrrhic in nature. And only the latest reminder of what happened in Vietnam.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Wednesday Mix

HEADLINES:

  • ‘Largest ever’ oil reserve release agreed by 32 countries, as Strait of Hormuz ships attacked (BBC)

  • At Least 3 Ships Are Struck In and Around a Key Gulf Oil Passage (NYT)

  • US will end war with Iran ‘on our timeline,’ Hegseth says (CNN)

  • Oil prices are volatile amid conflicting reports about security in the Strait of Hormuz (NBC)

  • Aluminium, Helium and Sulfur: The Iran War Is Affecting More Than Oil (NYT)

  • Why emergency oil releases won’t fix this crisis (CNN)

  • What Americans think about the war in Iran, according to recent polls (AP)

  • Human Rights Watch accuses IDF of unlawful use of white phosphorus in Lebanon (TJP)

  • Is the war in Iran over or just beginning? When confronted about the mixed messages from his administration, Trump said it's "both" on Monday. But some of his own advisers are now urging him to map a way out of the conflict, amid concerns that a continued war could fuel further political backlash, according to The Wall Street Journal. [HuffPost]

  • Iran is wagering it can outlast the United States and Israel - not militarily, but by grinding the war into a brutal contest of endurance. Its strategy is stark: Unleash drones and missiles, cut vital energy routes and jolt global markets hard enough to force Washington to blink first. Read our analysis. (Reuters)

  • RFK Jr’s pick to review Covid vaccines authored misleading research, experts say (Guardian)

  • How the special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene is testing the power of Trump’s endorsement (CNN)

  • Judge limits crowd control devices at Portland ICE building, says federal officers must identify themselves (OPB)

  • Wyoming governor signs ban on abortions after about 6 weeks but cites misgivings (AP)

  • In Marjorie Taylor Greene’s District, a Trump-Backed Candidate Advances (NYT)

  • Trump reiterates threat of a ‘friendly takeover’ of Cuba as fuel crisis deepens (CNBC)

  • Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member took Social Security data to his new job (WP)

  • The Weather-Changing Conspiracy Theory That Will Never End (Atlantic)

  • The Bay Area Considers the Unthinkable: Life Without BART (NYT)

  • Meta hires duo behind Moltbook (Axios)

  • Research: How AI Is Changing the Labor Market (HBR)

  • AI Layoffs Are a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Atlantic)

  • MAGA Voter Claims She Loves High Gas Prices (Onion)

 

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Monday, March 09, 2026

Revolt of the Elders

Consider that people my age have been around for almost a third as long as the United States of America. Our lifetimes have spanned its entire post-WW2 period of global hegemony, and our fortunes have generally risen along with the nation’s.

But all of that has come with certain costs, including deep political divisions, obscene wealth disparities and severe environmental damage .

And now we fear that one of those costs will be our democracy itself.

We know that what Donald Trump is doing goes far beyond the normal yin and yang of politics, or the cyclical pendulum swings from right to left. He appears to be systematically dismantling the federal government in a naked grab for complete power.

Our nation was founded in a rebellion against autocratic power and formed to resist it should that threat ever appear at these shores.

Well, that time has come.

As elders, we must now speak out. We can’t check out just because we’re old and tired or that we’re too busy. (We’re not that busy.) We must do our part to help save what matters most while we still can.

Trump can still be stopped, so let’s stop him. Why revolt? Because he is revolting.
(This is from last March. It remains true.)

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Sunday, March 08, 2026

Asking Questions

One of the most intriguing jobs during the chaotic second half of my career was editor of an online prediction site, where users submitted their best guesses of what stock prices, sports scores or political polls would indicate at some fixed date in the future, usually days or weeks away.

I curated the submitted questions, wrote others, and reported the results. It was a fascinating experience in coordinating the so-called “wisdom of the crowds,” backed by venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road.

Among our partners were media companies, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. They saw the service as a novel way to gauge reader interest in various topics.

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but what we were doing was part of a larger attempt by media outlets to shape their content to appeal to more people -- a kind of popularity contest for what used to be decided independently of any user feedback.

Since my earliest days as an online editor/producer, I’d used a similar technique -- opinion polls -- to survey our users on provocative questions. At The Netizen/HotWired in 1996, we staged regular polls about the presidential candidates that election cycle, for example.

But by far our most popular poll was when we asked “Do you prefer a Mac or a PC?”

The results were trending PC early on until a prominent Mac enthusiast got involved, which dramatically altered the results. This was an early opportunity for me to witness the unprecedented power of online influencers.

As part of his effort to get out the vote, the Mac enthusiast attacked me as the editor of The Netizen, assuming for some reason that I was a PC-sympathizer, without verifying whether his assumption was true.

(In fact I strongly preferred Macs -- the only computers I had ever owned.)

But I was and am a journalist, so our poll presented the question in a neutral manner, since we didn’t want to bias the results.

Meanwhile, the anonymity of the online environment made it easy to attack me or anyone else via email, or on bulletin boards and the like, without giving them a chance to respond. That of course was the opposite of the journalistic process I was accustomed to.

I didn’t take the Mac attack personally -- it was the first of many -- because it was clear to me that in the new age when everyone had an equal voice, this was how the game would be played. The real problem, of course, was how this spread of social media would affect the world of traditional journalism, which I believed was fundamentally about the search for truth.

It’s been my mission from those days until now to try and counteract the excesses of social media by working to promote and protect traditional journalism and our methodology. To me that’s a vital step if we are to preserve the democratic experiment that has been going on in this country for 250 years.

Can anyone make a discernible difference in something this enormous? IDK, but I’ll probably die trying.

(I published the first version of this essay in 2021.)

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Saturday, March 07, 2026

Grow Your Own (Resistance)

(From this time last year…)

There’s a new report out that gardening is a good way for older people to keep their brains sharp, and given all the crap Trump is shoveling our way, I’m thinking that we definitely need to be staying as sharp as possible. 

So, if you are able to grow something — anything — now’s the time to start planning for it. Maybe start with a flower in a pot on your windowsill. A garden box of herbs. If you’ve got the space and the inclination, a few rows of vegetables.

You might plant a fruit tree. Or a berry bush. Hell, even a banana tree (we’ve got a couple.)

The point is that one way to counter Trump’s poison is to help something new grow and thrive.

Trump equals death. Death of ideals, hope, dreams, decency and kindness. The polite term for him is a pile of manure.

To start fighting back, we have to be about life. So I’m suggesting to create some new life.

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Friday, March 06, 2026

Who Are Heroes?

Sometimes when I am going through a rough patch, I remember something my father said to me numerous times when I was a boy.

“I just want you to be happy.”

While that sounded simple enough at the time, even as a boy I knew that happiness wasn’t going to be all that easy to attain.

Now, as I look back over a complicated life filled with many ups and downs, I know my Dad was expressing a wish, not necessarily an expectation. And over the years, I came to see that the cost of one person’s joy could often be another person’s misery.

So even happiness can be complicated.

Another, perhaps more relevant memory from my youth is one of those teenaged conversations with three of my male cousins, where we compared notes on the following question:

“If you had to die, how would it be?” 

We discussed accidents, sickness, old age — all the reasons people around us had died, but if memory serves, the consensus was that we would prefer to die a hero in war.

Young men’s fantasy: To be a hero in war.

Old men’s actions: To send them into war.

It’s a story as old as time.

The dramatic fall from power by Kristi Noem brings a small measure of justice to the brave people of Minneapolis who peacefully protested Noem’s ICE agents rounding up immigrants and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

I will always honor the brave men and women in our armed forces for their sacrifices overseas, regardless of whether the cause is justified, but the people at home standing up to an autocrat also are real American heroes

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