Wednesday, December 03, 2025

War Crimes and Cowards

A piece of advice for young writers: Do not use words carelessly. Try to be precise. English provides plenty of options to achieve specificity.

This is especially important for journalists covering the Pentagon. Consider, for example, these two words: war crimes.

A war crime is a violation of the laws of war. It’s a war crime to not grant quarter to survivors of an attack. 

To connect this with the news, under the laws of war, after you’ve bombed a boat and discover that two survivors are clinging to the wreckage, you must grant them quarter, i.e., you can’t just kill them.

Yet this happened in the Sept. 1 attacks by the U.S. military on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela. The two survivors were killed in a second strike, and the question now is who gave the order.

Trump’s Secretary of “War,” Pete Hegsmeth had been loudly boasting about his role in the attacks until the little matter of a possible war crime came up. Then he beat a hasty retreat, saying that the ranking officer involved — Admiral Frank Bradley — was the responsible party.

At this point, it’s worth noting that the only reason this controversy has surfaced at all is that we still have a free press, and the reporters covering the story have paid attention to the details of the case and chipped away at Hegsmeth’s ever-changing set of explanations.

Hegsmeth seems pretty nervous about where all this may be heading. They have a word in the Navy for a guy like him.

Coward. 

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Tuesday, December 02, 2025

The Defeated

Cutting through the lies and distortions coming from this White House has become such an arduous task that the truth routinely gets lost in the process. 

So a young man, trained by the CIA in Afghanistan to fight against his own people, was among those few able to escape as the Americans withdrew in 2021, thereby avoiding the revenge exacted by the victorious Taliban had he been left behind.

Instead, he made it to America. He resettled with his family in Washington state, but eventually showed signs of a profound sense of dislocation, as well as economic hardship and PTSD and the other effects of the endless war in his home country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. President, citing non-existent data, claims that violent crime is out of control in our major cities, including Washington, D.C. He orders the National Guard to occupy the nation’s capital.

They troops languish there, having little to do, because the crime that actually exists is beyond their ability to suppress.

For reasons that are perhaps unknowable, the troubled Afghan man makes his way across the country to Washington and commits an awful crime by shooting two National Guardsmen, one of whom dies from her wounds.

Trump immediately brands this “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror” and seizes on the tragedy to end all migration from Afghanistan and other poor countries. 

There are so many things wrong with this story, I hesitate to even try to tell it. There is no crime wave. There is no need for troops in our cities. There has been no act of terrorism. But there is a profound need for mental health services for those suffering from PTSD and for those migrating here from war-torn areas.

Those are the very types of social services that Trump has been cutting as he dismantles as much of the social welfare state as he can, putting those like the young Afghan at increased risk.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem says the man was "radicalized" in the U.S.

But as reported by NPR, a volunteer who worked with the man’s family and other Afghan refugees in Washington state “saw no sign of radicalization. Instead they described an individual who seemed to be experiencing a deepening personal crisis, complicated by (his) poor English-language skills and deepening cultural isolation. The volunteer said there were no organized resources for refugees beyond their initial welcome.”

According to ABC, “As investigators continue to delve into what may have motivated the suspect, a portrait of a life of increasing financial stress and a potential mental health crisis has emerged…

“(M)ultiple sources said that investigators are looking into the impact of the recent death of an Afghan commander, who allegedly worked with the suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

“The death of the commander -- whom Lakanwal is said to have revered -- had deeply saddened the suspect, sources said.

“This may have compounded on Lakanwal’s financial burdens, including not being employed, having an expired work permit and allegedly struggling to pay rent and feed his children, sources said.

“Officials said the suspect has a wife and five children. He drove from his residence in Washington state to the nation’s capital prior to the shooting and targeted the Guardsmen, officials said.”

NPR reported that “Lakanwal held jobs for brief periods and hosted gatherings at his home, the volunteer said, but by 2023 he began isolating himself and appeared “defeated” by the challenges of finding steady work and adapting to life in the United States.”

It's a sad story but it's not terrorism. And the victims never should have been on duty in the first place. Lakanwal may still have committed a crime, given his state of mind, but not this one.

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Monday, December 01, 2025

Isn't It a Pity?


Many years ago, I gathered seaglass from beaches around the Bay Area and educated myself about the best tides for finding it.

One section of Ocean Beach just south of San Francisco yielded a steady harvest of the blue, green, brown and white pieces, and there was another nice spot on one edge of Angel Island.

What I liked about seaglass was how it had been smoothed and polished by the waves, sand, sun and transformed into something nice from what had once been considered trash.

When you think about it, that is the way of all garbage, in fact of all life. From a biological perspective, the sum total of all of our ancestors and all other organic life forms is a few inches of compacted topsoil clinging to the surface of the planet. 

That planet is hurtling its way through space, and we’re all going with it on the same flight.

As much as we try to see ourselves as distinct individuals, we know we also are part of a much larger unit. And with time, most of our own sharp edges will get smoothed over by just like pieces of glass.

But for now, bad political winds have shattered us into jagged shards of glass, all too good at cutting each other rather than coming together. We’ve broken into tribes of one; even families have shattered. We are like a thousand rough pieces more than any kind of perceivable whole.

Acts of random cruelty outnumber the ever-present acts of kindness. Masked men in unmarked cars pull out their guns and terrorize our fellow Americans, declaring them “illegal.” Extremes dominate. Hate is on the loose. Isolation rules. Collectivity is disparaged. 

As a result, there can be no “us” at this moment in America.

Isn’t that a pity?

(An earlier version of this one appeared a year ago.)

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Sunday, November 30, 2025

The Pepino File


Earlier this year, I wrote about how I solved a small mystery in my garden by turning to my various communities — family, friends, and online. It was the last one — online — that delivered in that case.

While we hear lots of criticisms of social media, for good reason, when used judiciously they can be a blessing. The photo at the top of this post is both a reminder of that and an update.

Here again is that essay.

***

Well, it wasn’t exactly investigative reporting, but I discovered that I had a small mystery on my hands Monday evening.

As I checked my plants in the garden, a new item caught my eye. It was a whitish globe on a plant with leaves shaped like elongated Isosceles triangles and clusters of small purple flowers.

The fruit peeking out from behind the leaves was white, as I said, with several faint purple stripes.

I’m pretty sure we had gotten this particular plant from a neighbor a year ago;, and at the time my daughter thought it might be a pepper of some kind.

As I felt the surface of the fruit, it reminded me of an onion, but only sort of.

So I started my investigation. I snapped a photo and sent it to my daughter-in-law, an avid gardener.

“Eggplant?” She offered.

My son-in-law and granddaughters thought it might be a pear apple.

At this point I took the case online and after a bit of searching, found myself inside a very helpful Reddit group devoted to identifying unknown plants.

There, an answer came quickly, without ambiguity.

“It’s a pepino, a small melon. When it turns gold it’s ripe and tastes like a tropical fruit, when unripe it’s unremarkable and like a tasteless cucumber.”

Another member clarified: “Yes but it’s not a melon, it’s a nightshade (Solanaceae), but it’s also called pepino-melon.”

Okay, I’m going with pepino, for now. Let’s let it ripen.

P.S. It did.

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Saturday, November 29, 2025

The Opposite of a Mirage

Taking a Lyft from the East Bay into San Francisco early Friday afternoon was a ghostly experience. Looking west across the bay, there was nothing to see. It was as if one of the world’s major cities had simply disappeared.

I shuddered.

As we crossed the bridge and neared landfall, a bit of the city’s familiar topography finally started to appear from the shadows. The vacancy had been a mirage, of course, or maybe the opposite of a mirage — and one I’ve experienced literally thousands of times.

San Francisco’s fog is as famous as the Golden Gate Bridge, but it still can play tricks on my mind, even after all these years. For a moment, it felt like I’d lost it, the city I love, the city where all my kids were born and three of them live.

My destination was a Mexican restaurant and lunch with those three, my youngest kids. It’s a small, colorful place a couple blocks from where the four of us lived throughout their childhood in the Mission District. We had many meals there when they were growing up but this was our first time back in a long, long time.

As we settled into our chairs and I looked into their smiling faces, the sun started breaking through the marine layer outside. I shivered for a moment — just a moment — before joining in the reunion.

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Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Who Is Stephanie?

The other day, while perusing the latest update from Ancestry.com, one name and number caught my eye. In case you haven’t gotten your own DNA report yet, I should explain that it evolves over time as more and more people’s data comes online.

Like any information network, this DNA registry becomes more powerful as it expands, yielding new insights that never before were possible, let alone accessible. Today the Ancestry network claims it has data on 25 million people.

Among those are hundreds of people I share some percentage of DNA with, and the names at the top of the list were all familiar. It’s a simple matter of math: My children share 50 percent of my DNA, my grandchildren share ~25 percent of my DNA, my first cousins share ~12.5 percent of my DNA and so forth down the line.

The range for first cousins is actually 7.31–13.8 percent; my late cousin Dan Anderson, for example, shared 13 percent of my DNA.

Well, downlist the number that caught by eye was 8 percent, but the name attached, Stephanie Weir, represents a complete mystery to me. Was she a first cousin? I don’t see how that could be possible.

A first cousin, once removed? This does seem within the realm of the possible, as following the deaths of my parents, my sisters and I have lost track of a few cousins on my father’s side — the Weirs.

(I first published this one a year ago.)

A first cousin, once removed, would share between 2-11.5 percent DNA with the average being 6.6 percent. Since she shares 8 percent with me, Stephanie, wherever she may be, is almost definitely a first cousin, once removed.

I contacted my sisters, none of whom knew of any Stephanie in the family either. But we have all lost contact with my Dad’s brother Bill’s four sons, one of whom likely was responsible for Stephanie, one must assume.

For now, the mystery lies there, unsolved. Further digging clearly will be necessary to connect up the dots. Should I one day get around to that, there are apparently a few other potential first cousins, once removed, and second cousins out there, sharing 2-5 percent of their DNA with me.

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Tuesday, November 25, 2025

Missing the Story

(This one is from 2021. It still holds true.)

One of the things I like about the news is that most of it doesn’t stick around. It comes and goes rather quickly; then it becomes a lot like fish — best when fresh; later on no.

But even though the news itself may come and go, the people who bring it to you remain.

Nieman Reports is out with an opinion piece by HuffPost editor-in-chief Danielle Benton that points out that “The press can’t afford to fall into disarray and depression while reporting on the collapsing world around us.”

This has always been true of journalists but the present context is notable because our own profession — journalism — is stuck in a prolonged state of depression from which some may reasonably conclude it will never recover.

The problem is not just that there are very few jobs for reporters and editors; it is also that the world is flooded with disinformation, lies, conspiracy thinking and outright attempts to undermine those who do seek to tell the truth about important matters.

In public life, virtually no one has enough credibility to be respected as an authority on anything any longer. There really are no “experts” left with a few exceptions here and there. 

In addition, the very companies that employ journalists who seek to get to the root of these issues often seem to not have a clue about just how much the world around them has changed, especially the digital world. Or if they do, they don’t know what to do about it.

Thus, these “legacy” media organizations are seen by many people of all political persuasions as part of the problem rather than a solution. When I curate the news, I rely on what are considered the leading journalism organizations I can locate to pass on each day’s headlines.

But at the same time, I am constantly struck by how little any of those organizations are doing about the Big Story themselves. 


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