Saturday, December 06, 2025

Relics

 


(This is an excerpt from 2007.)

Today I was thinking that I maybe should be in the salvage business -- rescuing the castoffs of this throwaway society, restoring them, and preserving them as artifacts. 

I’ve been collecting things for at least half a century. Old bottles, coins, stamps, magazines, books, photos, postcards, baseball cards -- the list goes on — not to mention the memories they evoke.

Today’s find was this old portable typewriter -- the laptop of its time. I used to work on a machine like this, and in fact, I still had one until recently, when in a weaker moment I discarded it.

Thanks to one of my neighbors, it didn’t get far. And today, following the local custom of putting whatever you don’t want anymore out on the sidewalk for anyone passing by to claim, I now have retaken possession of this portable Remington. 

It makes that old comforting sound that a century ago came from the open windows in Rudyard Kipling’s compound in India, as he pounded out his stories on tropical nights.

Or Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, all warm-weather writers, take your pick. For many decades, this was the sound of literature and the sound of journalism. Even as recently as the Watergate scandal of 1974, the signature film made of Woodward and Bernstein’s legendary reporting that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, closes with a sequence of headlines typed on an old manual typewriter.

Relics. If I ever write a memoir, I should do it on this. On second thought, strike that, but its photo might make a good book cover.

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MUSIC VIDEO:

Kris Kristofferson - Why Me Lord

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Friday, December 05, 2025

Free Press Battlefield

As for yesterday’s post about young people and their news consumption habits. Bruce Koon reminded me that our generation, the Baby Boomers, also had our own ways to access the news when we were aged 18-29.

It was called alternative media and places like SunDance, Rolling Stone, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Mother Jones were right in the middle of it.

Just like today’s youth, we distrusted mainstream media and so sought other ways to stay informed.

Maybe the single most important event that brought us back to the conventional media was the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. But equally significant was the success of our alternative channels in broadening the range of outlets devoted to uncovering the stories that mattered.

In today’s context, I’m not aware of very much serious news reporting yet within TikTok, Instagram, etc., but such efforts are probably underway.

One way or another the news will find people. And that truth is a major problem for authoritarians who would vastly prefer to ban any news outlets they cannot co-opt. The current wave of controversies surrounding Pete Hegsmeth are a case in point.

It has been solid reporting that has brought the drug boat strikes and Signalgate to light, and in response Hegsmeth has gone to great lengths to ban honest journalists from the Pentagon.

In the fight to resist the further centralization of power by Trump, Hegsmeth and company, two great American institutions — the press and the military — are allies. Today’s top link matters, as it’s the latest salvo in the battle between a petty warlord and a determined fourth estate.

HEADLINES:

  • New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights — The lawsuit said the Defense Department’s new set of rules for journalists “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” (NYT)

  • ‘New York Times’ lawsuit creates a new headache for Pentagon chief Hegseth (NPR)

  • Lawmakers see video of second strike on boat survivors, say admiral testified there was no kill order (CBS)

  • Accused DC pipe bomber told FBI he believed the 2020 election was stolen, sources say (CNN)

  • Who is Brian Cole? FBI identifies suspect in Jan. 6 DC pipe bomb case (USA Today)

  • Anxiety grips Minneapolis’s Somali community as immigration agents zero in on the Twin Cities (CNN)

  • Most immigrants arrested in Trump’s D.C. crackdown had no criminal records (WP)

  • Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future (NYT)

  • How a Man Convicted of Running a Latin American Narco State Landed a Pardon (WSJ)

  • Trump has waged an unprecedented campaign against the International Criminal Court, seeking to end its work on the war in Gaza. Events this week have suggested his pressure campaign is falling apart. [HuffPost]

  • America’s peace initiative has stalled in Moscow (Economist)

  • America’s Magical Thinking About Ukraine (Foreign Affairs)

  • As global negotiations continue for a peace deal in Ukraine, the country is facing another battle: who will still be there to rebuild the war-torn nation? (Reuters)

  • ‘Never seen anything like this’: alarm at memo from top US vaccine official (Guardian)

  • The Man Who Was Supposed to Kill Martin Luther King Jr. (Slate)

  • Drunk raccoon found passed out on liquor store floor after breaking in (BBC)

  • OpenAI in open panic over Gemini’s sudden dominance (Boing Boing)

  • The Chatbot-Delusion Crisis (Atlantic)

  • Crying Sounds Coming From Inside Suit Of Armor (Onion)

 

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Thursday, December 04, 2025

Finding the News

The latest report on the news consumption habits of young adults reveals that only 15 percent of those aged 18-29 follow the news closely, as opposed to 62 percent of those aged 65 and above.

Young people also tend to be less likely than older adults to get news about government and politics, science and technology, and business and finance.

But they are more than twice as likely as older Americans to follow entertainment news. (Both groups are roughly the same when it comes to sports news.)

As for political news specifically, younger adults say they often just happen to run across it on social media or from influencers, while older people seek it out by deliberately tuning in trusted news channels.

So the generations have completely different habits, I get that. But maybe we’re not all that different in how we feel about the news on those occasions when our consumption habits overlap. 

Yesterday, when my 14-year-old granddaughter and I both encountered this story — “Sabrina Carpenter to White House: Don’t use my music to tout ‘inhumane’ agenda” — we were in complete agreement that Sabrina Carpenter rocks.

When we talked about the issue involved — exploitation of an artist’s work by a politician without her permission — we agreed on that too.

I’ve noticed for a while that though my 20-something children and my teenaged grandchildren don’t tune into the news the way I do, they usually seem well-informed anyway.

That’s one of the reasons journalists need to continue to do the hard work of digging out the truth and getting it published — because your youngest news consumers will find it once its out there in the universe.

To read the entire report from the Pew Research Center, follow this link: Young Adults and the Future of News.

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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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