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.)

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

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.)

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

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.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

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

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Thursday, March 05, 2026

Trump's War at Home

While most of our attention is currently focused on the war in the Middle East, it is worth remembering that our would-be-autocrat, Donald Trump, continues to attack his perceived enemies at home, including the press.

Aggression abroad, repression at home — that is the authoritarian playbook. Trump’s war in Iran is illegal as it hasn’t been authorized by Congress. But he pursues it shamelessly, expanding the war zone to the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, a simple, legitimate question by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins set Trump’s press secretary Carolyn Leavitt off on an unprovoked, extended rant Wednesday against CNN’s coverage of the war, which in fact has been fair and balanced. 

Leavitt’s verbal assault was pathetic but dangerous. Trump labels unfriendly press as the “enemy,” and he tries to destroy all his enemies.

CNN’s future is already in doubt due to a pending corporate takeover by a Trump ally, and this is one battle that we must hope one bastion of our free press wins. We need CNN to remain free.

Otherwise our democracy may share the same fate as the Iranians.

These are dangerous times. We have an autocratically minded leader who is attempting to impose his will on the whole world. And that includes you and me.

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

Why?

‘Why this war’ and ‘why now’ are two of the basic questions Donald Trump cannot answer. Or to be more precise, he will continue to provide a shifting set of answers, none of which or all of which may be partly true.

He can’t tell the difference.

The bottom line is Trump doesn’t know in a deep strategic sense what he is doing or why but he didn’t need answers to those basic questions to go to war on Iran. 

Maybe he just did it on a whim.

By contrast, while Trump provides the firepower and the fighting words, his self-described “junior partner,” Israel, knows exactly what it is doing as it systematically takes out layer after layer of Iran’s political and military leadership.

Israel’s goal is destroy Iran’s ability to threaten Israel’s existence for at least a generation.

So this is really Israel’s war. Trump is merely the “useful idiot.”

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

The Oil Wars

If you are looking for one word to explain Trump’s decision for starting these wars, it would be “oil.”

“Energy dominance is a blueprint for rewiring the American economy for the age of AI before China can do the same,” explains Business Insider.

Other points made in this analysis include:

“(T)he plan boils down to three steps: maximize America's share of the world's energy supply, especially its fossil fuels; leverage the hell out of 'em; and then make rivals both foreign and domestic bend the knee.”

“American-controlled fossil fuels can now be used to try to push other countries into compliance with our petrostate.”

“But that dominance is not total, and the Trumpists see China as the biggest threat to it. Beijing's solar, wind, and battery tech has become so efficient and cheap that it's undercutting the appeal of US-controlled fossil fuels.”

“(The) Trumpists insist (that) energy dominance is more than simply an instrument of geopolitical leverage. It's a blueprint for rewiring the American economy for the age of AI before China can do the same. AI data centers require massive amounts of power, and the only way to reliably supply it at the scale required, the administration has claimed, is with fossil fuels. Wind and solar power are too susceptible to the elements.”

There are other factors at play here for sure, but the Business Insider analysis is one deserving of serious thought.

HEADLINES:

  • Drilled: How Trump's "energy dominance" plan helped fuel the new war in Iran (Business Insider)

  • Iran targets U.S. allies, hits American Embassy in Riyadh (Axios)

  • U.S. shuts embassies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait after drone attacks; Israeli troops stage incursion into Lebanon (NBC)

  • US nationals urged to leave Middle East as conflict spreads (BBC)

  • Cuba Is Next (Atlantic)

  • Secret talks, a firefight off Cuba and 72 hours of near silence from Trump (Miami Herald)

  • Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination will likely backfire. Here is why (Al Jazeera)

  • Hegseth: ‘We didn’t start this war but under President Trump we’re finishing it’ (NPR)

  • Trump says Iran operations likely to last 4 to 5 weeks, but he’s prepared ‘to go far longer’ (AP)

  • Trump pursues Iranian decapitation without a plan for what comes next (WP)

  • Israel strikes Lebanon after Hezbollah rocket fire as Iran conflict widens (BBC)

  • Iran and allied armed groups fired missiles at Israel, Arab states and U.S. military targets around the region on Monday, while Israel and the United States pounded Iran as the war expanded to several fronts. Kuwait mistakenly shot down three American warplanes over its skies, but the U.S. military said all six pilots ejected safely and are in stable condition. However, the U.S. casualties of the war have risen as U.S. Central Command confirmed a fourth U.S. member succumbed to their injuries. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered zero guidance on to how long the war would last at his press conference. [AP]

  • War isn’t what it once was (Silver Bulletin)

  • How a pacemaker for the brain could help Parkinson’s patients (CNN)

  • When Does the AI Bubble Burst? (Counter Punch)

  • AI Will Never Be Conscious (Wired)

  • AI doing 75 per cent of office tasks, but employees have to work 5x more: Founder explains how automation increases workload (Economic Times)

  • AI saves me hours every week — here are the 9 ways I use it (Tom’s Guide)

  • China’s Parents Are Outsourcing the Homework Grind to A.I. (NYT)

  • Nation Forced To Eat 35 Million Canadians To Survive Harsh Winter (Onion)

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)