One Day, A Daughter

(The following is from 2011, 15 years ago.)

Early morning in a heavy rain. Phone call; you’re suddenly alert. Nope, the new grandchild is not coming quite yet. But, after a couple of sick days, another one of your kids needs a ride to school.

Sure.

On the way to my car, I see a woman in a black coat and black tights with a girl, probably 9, in a pink coat and pink tights, hurrying through the rain, no doubt also on their way to school.

As I drive up to and around Bernal Hill, a flood of brown water is flowing south. 

Back home, later, the phone rings again. I don’t hear it; I’m deep into preparing a speech for tonight on behalf of a non-profit I care about.

When I catch up to the message, it is the third time in three days that one of my kids’ schools is calling; this is the third of the three, which means now it’s my daughter’s turn to be sick.

Back home, with her wrapped in a comforter and sipping tea, I start wondering what would happen if I actually had a real job?

A friend calls --”It’s getting better out there,” he says, “I’m seeing more jobs for people like us.”

Right.

The cellphone company sends an urgent text -- apparently my bill is overdue again, a monthly occurrence. I have a family plan, which includes me, my three youngest kids, and someone I used to know. 

It’s funny about euphemisms — they just pop up when you need them. 

The rains continue. A tree goes down nearby. I post to my weekly blog about what the tech industry is doing in San Francisco. I put on a white shirt, nice slacks, and a sports coat.

Not trusting how I look in the mirror, I ask my daughter, who’s observing me from her sick bed. “What do you think, jeans or the nice pants?”

“I like those ones (the nice ones),” she says. That’s it, a decision is made. She is not only my chief fashion consultant, at the age of twelve she is the only woman in my daily life, the one whose judgment I trust completely.

Soon enough it is time to take her back to her Mom’s house, back over Bernal Hill, where an even bigger brown river now heads south and an even bigger tree nearby has gone down, blocking Folsom Street.

As we are arriving, her brothers show up, having gotten there via buses from their high schools, with backpacks and wet sweatshirts.

She hugs me as I drop her off.

“’Good luck with the speech, Dad. You’ll be great.”

HEADLINES:

• Trump administration weighing military options in Mali, officials say (WP)

• Trump threatens to bomb a bridge or power plant for every ship attacked in Strait of Hormuz (CBS)

• Trump says U.S. will hold Iran responsible for Houthi attacks after oil tankers targeted in Red Sea (CNBC)

• Ships bound for Saudi Arabia turn around in sign of new Red Sea blockade (WP)

• Trump says Saudi nuclear deal contingent on relations with Israel, does not include enrichment (CNBC)

• Pakistan seeks a $10 billion fund from the US after mediating Iran talks. (Reuters)

• With His Latest Threats, Trump Signals to Iran That He Is Willing to Escalate (NYT)

• Republican blocks bill to halt retrofit of Qatari-gifted Air Force One (WP)

• Some food prices have fallen – but inflation expected to rise from here (BBC)

• ‘We’re getting into an ugly phase’: Trump’s new tariffs are angering voters and US allies alike (Politico)

• Canada cancels joint bridge celebration with U.S., citing Trump trade threats (NBC)

• Democrats demand probe into ouster of IRS lawyer who reportedly clashed with White House (WP)

• Trump-backed candidates, 2020 election deniers, win Arizona primaries (NPR)

• US talks with Canada and Mexico test North America's trilateral trade pact (Reuters)

• ICE officials warned of dangerous crowding. See how they kept packing people in. (WP)

• Children and monkeys share common understanding of geometry (Phys.org)

• Google Releases Three New A.I. Models (NYT)

• OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched ‘unprecedented’ cyber-attack (BBC)

• Major Publishers Are Reportedly Considering a Drastic Step to Get Their Content Out of Google’s AI Answers (Gizmodo)

• What Happened When Meta Used A.I. to Ban Accounts on Facebook and Instagram (NYT)

• As China advances in AI, Trump faces a new test in the technology race (WP)

• ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims (NYT)

• Nation Wakes Up From Strange Dream Where They Were Watching Soccer (Onion)

The Fisherman

Squirreled away in one of my boxes of old files I found a portfolio of papers left behind by my father when he died in 1999.

There’s a small notebook that he took with him when he joined the Army Air Corps in October 1942. He reported to Fort Custer in Michigan, the shipped out to Keesler Field in Mississippi, on to the Tech School Squadron in Chicago, and ultimately to the Aviation Cadet Center in San Antonio before going overseas.

Although he didn’t see combat during the war, he served as a stenographer at the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg.

In the inside cover of his journal, he documented his promotions from PVT to PFC to CPL to SGT, etc. On the very first page is a faded B&W photo of his Mom, then one of my big sister Nancy (10 years older than me), then the first of many shots of our mother — mainly of her taking golf swings — plus his own three sisters, a 1930s car, one of his his brothers, two of his brothers-in-law, and some Army buddies and their wives and a few of him fishing.

He must have thumbed through this many, many times while away from home.

Although he told me stories about his life, I never was fully able in imagine what it had been like for him, born in 1916, growing up on a small farm in Canada, the youngest of six kids, losing his father at the age of ten, then leaving the farm with his mother to live in town (London, Ontario) for a short while, then on to Detroit as “nickel immigrants.”

Five cents was the cost of crossing the river on the ferry in the 1920s, and therefore pretty much the cost of citizenship in the USA — for those of the right European descent.

Because he was the youngest, it turned out that my father outlived all of hIs siblings, surviving just longer than his sister Norma, who passed away a year before him. Accordingly, he ended up with many of his siblings’ official documents — birth certificates, an application for citizenship in the U.S., a social security card, wedding certificates, photos, and finally, their death certificates.

Two of his sisters died with no other surviving relatives, so he became the sole custodian of their life chronicles.

Now it’s all with me.

As far as I can tell, none of my Dad’s siblings left any writings behind to document their lives — no journals or letters, just a few faded photographs and those yellowed documents.

My Dad was another matter, however. Inside a manilla folder marked “Manuscript” he left a combination of handwritten and typed pages, apparently a short story or novel that he started to write. There are notes, an outline, and a certain amount of narrative.

Early in his manuscript, there is this: “The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who must fish and those who can’t understand.” 

HEADLINES:

• Trump imposes 50% tariffs on Canadian goods (NPR)

• Americans Pay Trump’s Tariffs (Money Trail)

• Trump administration says it’s deferring $1B in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota (AP)

• Trump approves landmark U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal (NBC)

• A Red Sea blockade threatens a new front in U.S.-Iran war (WP)

• Who is driving diplomacy in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, and why? (Al Jazeera)

• Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division (AP)

• Mamdani Says Netanyahu Is a ‘War Criminal’ but New York Can’t Arrest Him (NYT)

• Senate panel advances Jay Clayton's nomination to lead US intelligence agencies (AP)

• The Pentagon, sinking billions into Iran war, is quickly running short on cash (WP)

• The Pentagon is desperate for funds — but key Republicans are skeptical (CNN)

• US civil rights agency moves to end demographic data collection after 60 years (AP)

• Zelensky Dismisses Ukraine’s Top General After Protests (NYT)

• Russia thought its supply roads 100 miles from the front were safe. Ukrainian operators can ‘free hunt’ with new drones. (BI)

• Nicaraguan Leader Says He Plans to Abolish Elections (NYT)

• Trump’s suggestion that he will retrofit the new Air Force One he solicited from Qatar with missile defense systems in just one month has left aviation experts scratching their heads. “The idea of installing it in a month is comical,” one expert told HuffPost’s S.V. Date. [HuffPost]

• Lost at Sea, the Pan Am Clipper Endeavor Is Found After Over 70 Years (NYT)

• ‘It’s total devastation’: inside the Amazonian war against illegal gold mining (Guardian)

• Senior Living Facility in Distress as Immigrant Caregivers Are Forced Out (NYT)

• Trump’s removal of LGBTQ+ history signals threat to UC Berkeley students’ ability to access uncensored sources (Daily Cal)

• Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed (NYT)

• China Wants More Babies—So It’s Cracking Down on Chatbot Love Affairs (WSJ)

• Powerful AI models are being given away for free. It was inevitable. (WP)

• Man Angry He Got Hit By Sprinkler Acting Like He’s Never Going To Be Dry Again (Onion)

 

Dreaming the Future?

(This is a compilation of essays I’ve written over the years on the subject of dreams.)

A while back, a friend of mine told me she had been having vivid dreams that she was in a passionate relationship with one of her work colleagues, though they hardly knew each other at the time. When I asked if she had ever told him about her dreams, she said no. She wasn’t sure it would be appropriate to do so.

But she insisted that she had never had such vivid dreams before, so they simply could not be false visions. “I’m already with him in my dreams. It’s so real! How could that be if it’s not going to come true?” 

It must be a vision of her future, she insisted.

That conversation got me thinking. Most of my dreams seem to be set in the past, often the distant past. I’m often starting college all over again or showing up at a new job. Those dreams are usually anxious ones because I can’t find my classes or where the office is — things like that.

Carl Jung wrote that we process our subconscious in our dreams, so that’s perhaps how any underlying anxieties surface when we sleep.

One of my granddaughter’s dreams are a case in point. She says she often relives her most embarrassing moments in dreams. “If I did or said something embarrassing in front of somebody, it happens again in my dreams. I see them and suddenly I can’t help but do it again.”

That makes all kinds of sense to me. But I keep wondering about that other kind of dream, the one where we maybe, just maybe, we actually do see the future. 

So I checked into the topic and according to the Sleep Foundation, some of us (roughly 18-38 percent) can and do see the future in what are known as precognitive dreams. Also, Healthline reports that Carl Jung himself had some precognitive dreams, though they were of a negative variety — foreseeing his mother’s death and world war in Europe.

But back to my friend who dreamt of a relationship with her colleague. Some months after our conversation, the two of them did become a couple. It turned out he had been having the same kinds of dreams about her.

***

One of my grandmothers claimed she was psychic. She claimed she could see other people’s thoughts. She was very convincing in this regard, so much so that some of my cousins and I thought we might be psychic too. We tried to read each other’s minds, with mixed results. 

My grandmother was asleep the night my grandfather died in the living room. He was surrounded by his children when he peacefully passed away. At the very moment that happened my grandmother let out a scream in her bedroom. When they rushed in to see what was wrong, she was sitting up in bed.

“It was Alec,” she said. “He came to me in a dream.”

***

One of the better pieces I’ve read about the phenomenon of precognitive visions, or dreams about future events, was in Psychology Today a few years back.

The article cites research that roughly twice as many women as men report prophetic dreams, which is interesting in itself.

To Carl Jung, such dreams may be “an anticipation in the unconscious of future achievements, something like a preliminary exercise or sketch, or a plan roughed out in advance.”

This makes sense to me from conversations I’ve had with friends about their dreams and mine. Such anticipatory dreams often occur when we are just starting a new job, or preparing to give a major presentation, or on the verge of some other significant event.

Our minds seem to be working out a strategy for us to survive that future event, which is clearly causing us some anxiety, and maybe even help us thrive. In the dream, we become hyper-aware of our vulnerabilities — of the possibilities of failure in unanticipated ways.

This type of anxiety about the future is productive on several levels, I suspect, for creative work.

Many writers wake up from dreams with ideas for solving writing dilemmas. If they can shake themselves alert enough to do so, they turn on the light and write the idea down for later use.

Later in the light of day, that idea may seem stupid or foolish or naive, but at other times it indeed turns out to be a flash of useful insight. Either way, it helps inform our future work.

Finally, we may anticipate new relationships in our dreams, whether romantic or otherwise. In that regard, free will is clearly in play. As Bob Dylan liked to say, “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”

HEADLINES:

• U.S. and Iran launch new strikes after 3 U.S. service members are killed (NPR)

• U.S. teeters on all-out war with Iran after more troops are killed (WP)

• Pentagon Withheld Dozens of U.S. Military Injuries in Iran War (NYT)

• Yemen’s Houthis announce ‘maritime embargo’ on Saudi Arabia (BBC)

• There’s no reason to trust Blanche on ICE killings — or anything else (The Hill)

• Trump Blasts ‘Sanctuary’ States, but Many Still Aid Deportations (NYT)

• Republicans don’t want to go there again on Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims (WP)

• Pete Hegseth, You Call That a Pull-Up? (Atlantic)

• What to know about testosterone replacement therapy as the U.S. military plans to test troops (CNBC)

• In Maine Senate Race, Democrats Go From Chaos to Coronation (NYT)

• Judge puts temporary pause on Paramount-Warner merger (NBC)

• State Department Report: Cuba Foments Far-Left Extremism, Runs Spy Rings in the US (Military.com)

• Trump slaps 50% tariffs on Canada and Carney vows to ‘intensify’ trade talks (BBC)

• Carney blasts new Trump tariffs: ‘Direct violation’ of trade deal (The Hill)

• Tropical Storm Bertha churns off Florida coast, prompting storm alerts (ABC)

• Man sets off device at federal building in New York, triggering terrorism probe (WP)

• Andy Burnham becomes UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade (CNN)

• The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors (NYT)

• The US Food and Drug Administration said that laboratory experts re-checked lettuce sample results from Taylor Farms in an ‌investigation into an outbreak of the cyclospora parasite and concluded the finding should be considered a false positive. (Reuters)

• ‘A public health emergency waiting to occur’: how US industry groups spent years fighting who gets to measure toxic air (Guardian)

• U.S. Sought Phone Records of Times Journalists and Their Relatives (NYT)

• Spain Humiliates Trump After He Refuses to Get Out of Victory Photos (TNR)

• Armed robots are on the horizon, as Silicon Valley pitches new military tech (WP)

• China's new AI model halts new subscriptions as demand swamps capacity (AP)

• A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. (NYT)

• Trump Insists Frequent Naps Necessary To Protect U.S. Interests In Dreamland (Onion)

Come November

If American democracy is going to work the way it’s supposed to work, we should be able to put up a blockade to Trump’s authoritarian drive is this year’s midterm elections.

But in order to provide a check on Trump’s power, the Democratic Party needs to win control of at least one chamber of Congress.

According to in-depth interviews with six leading pollsters, the New York Times reports they all believe that the Democrats will indeed win the House and that control of the Senate remains up for grabs.

Control of both houses in Congress would set up a Constitutional confrontation that could block Trump and save our tattered democracy.

While these results give hope, many things could change between now and November. 

You can read the complete article here.

HEADLINES:

• Another U.S. Service Member Is Killed as Two Sides Edge Toward Wider War (NYT)

• US identifies soldiers killed in Iranian attack in Jordan after ninth night of strikes (Guardian)

• Trump Owes Americans a Better Explanation About Iran (Atlantic)

• U.S. and Iran Edge Closer to Wider War After U.S. Soldiers Killed (NYT)

• U.S. launches new airstrikes to ‘punish’ Iran for troop deaths (NPR)

• Iran issues chilling ‘Blood for Blood’ message (CNN)

• Russian attacks kill 6 in Kyiv and other cities and expose gaps in Ukraine’s air defenses (AP)

• Russia’s Empire Is Starting to Fall—the “Good Russians” Know It (Newsweek)

• Who Will Win the Midterms? 6 Pollsters and Pundits Make Educated Guesses. (NYT)

• AIPAC has spent a record amount on Michigan's Senate primary, the biggest test of its influence yet (AP)

• The Silver Lining of Trump’s Reheated Election Denialism (Bulwark)

• ICE officer’s troubled past renews questions about vetting (WP)

• ‘We just want to be treated like humans’: how a Latino neighborhood is rallying after an ICE shooting (Guardian)

• Federal Agents Were Told F.B.I. Will No Longer Investigate ICE Confrontations (NYT)

• DOGE was supposed to be dead. Its remnants are everywhere. (WP)

• Trump Says New Air Force One Will Be Taken Out of Service to Be ‘Maxed Out’ (NYT)

• The Investors With a New Way to Win in Silicon Valley (WSJ)

• I’m 56 and got tired of being ghosted after job interviews (BI)

• AI may make you ‘boring’ at work, Columbia Business School professor says: How it can hurt your career (CNBC)

• ‘Hunt For Gollum’ Director Andy Serkis Defends Film’s All–Andy Serkis Cast (Onion) 

Sunday Reads

HEADLINES:

• Two US troops killed and one missing after Iranian attack in Jordan (BBC)

• Iran hits US allies as Israel warns missiles headed for Jordan could land on its territory (AP)

• Warehouse workers among 8 dead in deadliest Ukrainian attacks inside Russia for two years (CNN)

• Russia launches major ballistic missile attack on Ukrainian cities (BBC)

• Fighter Jets Are Passé (Atlantic)

• ‘Pulte got really scared’: Inside the White House debate over Trump’s elections speech (Politico)

• Trump’s Election Claims Land With a Whimper Among Republicans (NYT)

• Senate Democrat calls for Trump impeachment after election claims (The Hill)

• Lawmakers demand answers after ‘bombshell’ report of ICE officer shooting in Maine (PBS)

• ICE Agent Defended Shooting of Immigrant in Maine, Ex-Wife Says (NYT)

• An Ohio woman took in two strangers. Then she saw their ‘wanted’ photos. (WP)

• Summer weather smokes the U.S. (Reuters)

• Wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota pushes farther into the U.S. and engulfs D.C. in haze (NBC)

• Trump wants to impose tariffs on Canada in retaliation for wildfire smoke (WP)

• Trump threatens TV networks (Reuters)

• Millennials are bailing out their retired parents (BI)

• Too Many Books? (NYT)

• The World Cup champion will be one of the greatest teams ever (Silver Bulletin)

• People of faith are finding a new moral guide in AI (WP)

• China’s Latest A.I. Breakthrough Threatens America’s Lead (NYT)

• The Race to Stop AI’s Threats to Democracy (Reveal)

• Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Biggest Advantage (Atlantic)

• Data centers have united Americans of both parties in mutual hatred (WP)

• Man Resents Home Run For Making Him Pause Eating, Clap (Onion)

Fictional Lives

Although this may be the smallest of sample sizes, I’ve noticed a trend among Generation Zero and Y that they like to make family movies. Not the kind of family movies we grew up with — these are movies with fictional plots and the family members are actors.

When the edited version reaches their satisfaction, they post it to YouTube, where the sample size is orders of magnitude times larger, so yes this is a well-known trend outside of my family.

Anyway on Friday, my teenaged grandchildren hatched a new movie plot involving French bad guys operating out of Monaco, a nuclear threat to Washington, D.C., and a trip to New York City, where the good guys might be singing a song they’ve written.

The dog has some sort of role in this movie, but I’m not sure who prevails in the end — the good guys or the plotters from Monaco.

I guess I’ll find out with the rest of the world when they post it to YouTube.

Maybe I’ll write a review.

HEADLINES:

• Dangerous wildfire smoke blankets large parts of Canada and the US (BBC)

• U.S. strikes bridges in Iran; Tehran targets U.S. bases in the Gulf (NPR)

• Why Iran is returning to war (FT)

• A new wave of US attacks on Iran has plunged Iranians back into deep uncertainty and anxiety after a period of relative calm while a shaky ceasefire held. (Reuters)

• Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China (Atlantic)

• What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – say about threats to US elections (CNN)

• Trump says ABC, NBC licenses should be revoked over refusal to air speech on election integrity (WP)

• Trump Dooms His Own Party (Atlantic)

• Andy Burnham, a mayor from England’s north, is poised to become Britain’s next prime minister (AP)

• Russian troops survive an average of 30 minutes on the Ukrainian battlefield, CIA director says (BI)

• Ukraine Was on a Roll. Then a Clash Over War Strategy Exploded Into View. (NYT)

• How to Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter (ProPublica)

• The death of the stick shift is almost here (WP)

• What ICE Didn’t Say About Its Latest Killing (Mother Jones)

• The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press. [AP]

• Map: 7.3-Magnitude Earthquake Hits Off Mexico’s Coast (NYT)

• If you’re not a billionaire in San Francisco, you’re poor (BI)

• Good AI standards don’t need a new government bureaucracy behind them (WP)

• Google Ordered to Give A.I. Rivals More Access on Android Smartphones (NYT)

• Mitch McConnell Clarifies Absence Due To Brief Planned Trip To Afterlife (Onion)

 

Fake News

Trump’s big speech Thursday night was a flop.

Once again, he is trying to claim that he lost the 2020 election because it was “rigged.” Although he claimed last night there was evidence to support his claim, he provided none.

But this entire drive by Trump has nothing to do with 2020. It’s about this coming November when his party is on course to lose control of Congress to the Democrats.

Trump may be scheming to use allegations of past election meddling by the “deep state,” China and other adversaries to cast doubt on the integrity of the midterm elections. Then, he could use this doubt as predication to try and invalidate the results, which would lead to massive protests, which would allow him to declare a national emergency, call out the National Guard, and declare martial law.

That may sound like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, but it’s beginning to look like one that is plausible given his obsession with “rigged elections.”

Meanwhile, here’s a quick summary of the news around Trump’s speech from the Washington Post:

• Trump stopped short of offering evidence of vote tampering in the 2020 election. Instead, he described weaknessesin voting infrastructure. Read our four takeaways.

• ABC and NBC didn’t air the speech: Trump threatened to revoke their broadcast licenses.

• Trump wants a new voting bill: Here’s what to know about the Save America Act.

HEADLINES:

• Trump Exaggerates Claims About Election Vulnerabilities in Speech (NYT)

• Trump rehashes wide-ranging US election claims and releases heavily redacted documents in primetime address (Guardian)

• Air quality plummets in 20 states as smoke from Canadian wildfires spreads across the US (Guardian)

• Thom Tillis tells Todd Blanche to meet with Epstein victims — or don’t expect his support (Politico)

• The use of force has become a ‘default tool’ for ICE officers, a new report finds (NPR)

• ICE misused crowd control weapons against protesters 412 times within 1 year: Analysis (The Hill)

• Reflecting Pool peeling likely caused by application flaws, experts say (WP)

• Can the establishment stop Abdul El-Sayed? (Silver Bulletin)

• Pete Hegseth Wants YOU to Test Your Testosterone (Atlantic)

• Hegseth touts a high-testosterone military, as doctors question his claims (WP)

• House Democrat: Hegseth testosterone screenings indicative of ‘homoeroticism’ (The Hill)

• The New York Times Files Motion to Quash Trump Administration Subpoenas (WSJ)

• US or Iran — Who needs a new truce deal more? (Al Jazeera)

• Iran targets military bases as US launches wave of strikes (BBC)

• Iran said that the Strait of Hormuz was an inviolable "red line", warning that if US President Donald Trump carried out his threat to attack Iran's infrastructure, it would strike all infrastructure across the Gulf region. (Reuters)

• Trump’s Iran Bluster This Week Revealed the Only Thing That Really Matters to Him (Slate)

• Trump’s foreign policy is to try to get America paid (CNN)

• Zelensky’s removal of popular defence minister sparks protests in Ukraine (BBC)

• Paralysed man regains hand function through novel brain technology (FT)

• White House Teleprompter Operator Bet on Trump Speeches, Kalshi Says (NYT)

• The Race to Commercialize the World’s Most Powerful Psychedelic (WSJ)

• Californians back Becerra and reject AI data centers by big margins, poll finds (LAT)

• Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster (Atlantic)

• Thinking Machines Lab Drops Its First Model (Wired)

• Public Begs Mitch McConnell To Stop Releasing Photos Of Himself (Onion)