The trees in the picture are in the circle at the end of the short cul-de-sac on Cape Cod where our house sits. The first resident of the street planted the trees when there was nothing there but dirt. He planted four different small trees, evenly spaced within the circle. At the time, the trees looked fine. However, the man did not consider that the trees are living things that will grow. Now, forty years later, they are crowding each other out, and they need to be trimmed, or two or three of them should be removed, which would be difficult and expensive. One tree, in the middle, would look more elegant.

How often does someone who plants a tree plan for forty years ahead? A lot of people do, especially if it’s in front of a new house, or if the tree has a ceremonial meaning, such as a birth, or a death. But, a lot of people don’t. More often they are thinking about how it looks now, and expecting that it will look that way for a while.

Politicians are notorious for focusing on the short-term changes. They know that if they are wrong about what happens in the immediate future, they won’t be relevant years later. That is a major reason that the world is such a mess, and getting worse. America’s national debt is now over $4 trillion. People have known for years that this could be coming and that it will have a negative impact on several areas of life in this country, but making plans to avoid this happening involved making necessary but unpleasant choices. So they all skipped it.

One of the biggest problems of our current government is that they do not plan anything. They seem to base so many of their actions on how they feel at the moment. The decision could be based on who made Trump angry or who flattered him. It often changes six hours later. Our president puts on tariffs, goes to war, paints the reflecting pool, sends troops into the streets, shuts down the infectious disease department, denies that the climate is deteriorating, and demands lower interest rates. He is confident that he knows more about all of those things than anyone.

Often, as they say, he “TACOs,”. Which makes things more unstable and disruptive. But he doesn’t always TACO. Sometimes he does the same thing several times, as he does with tariffs. They cause inflation. But Trump doesn’t want to hear about that, so he lies and keeps saying how fantastic they are.

Some people do plan for their future, especially financially. Many people begin planning for retirement forty years before they expect to retire. That can be very helpful. Other people don’t plan; they just hope. Many people can’t make any plans; they don’t have any money left after they pay the rent.

I am writing this after reading two recent articles about destructive things that millions of people know are happening, yet doing what is necessary to prevent worse things from happening will require cooperative efforts that will be difficult, costly, and require careful planning.

The first is about how the machines of our industrial age have raised the temperature of the Earth, and that is already causing major changes, by Bill McKibben. There were several examples of weather disasters this weekend.

The Crucial Years

The growing rumble

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3 days ago · 354 likes · 59 comments · Bill McKibben

The second is about how Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin’s wars now involve North Korea, China, Iran, and all of Europe, and all of the Middle East. Unless a real plan to reverse course is implemented soon, we can expect much more violence all over the world, kind of like a WW III.

by Brett Stevens.

https://www.pressreader.com/oman/oman-daily-observer/20260827/281797110849395

I am a vice president of an independent lifelong learning group where I lead courses and do other tasks. Our membership has been dropping since the pandemic, when we stopped meeting in person for two years. It is not a surprise that in a group of old people, some of them drop out due to illness, frailty, or death. While this is happening, we are gaining fewer new members to replace them. Six years ago, we had over 300 members; now we have less than 230.

In response, we have invited a group of retired business consultants to help us develop a plan to attract new, younger, vibrant members, so our group will continue to be an organization we all want to be part of. All of us old trees have grown together and are getting in each other’s way.

We are an eclectic group of over-educated, over-intellectuals who want to do things the right way. We will see if our plans are more effective than the corrupt, impulsive, irrational, often violent, sometimes fatal decisions of the current United States federal government.

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At least we won’t be killing people, and we actually have two Canadian members who Zoom in.

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If you have been reading these posts for a while, you may remember that my sister died in January of 2025. After she died, her husband moved to Boston to be near his daughter, my niece. He lived here for about a year and a half and died two weeks ago. We are doing what we can to help my niece.

My wife and I were sitting on the beach recently with a woman whose husband died three years ago. A friend came by because she knew we would be on the beach. She has come to the Cape to help arrange hospice care for her mother-in-law. The woman we were sitting with began to cry.

I will be leading a discussion course about the election in October. I’m sure it will be less predictable than any fantasy series on TV. I chose to run the course over Zoom this term because two of the people who enjoy my courses now have mobility issues. One of them died three days ago.

There was a memorial service on Tuesday for a woman in our neighborhood in Concord. We didn’t drive back for it because we knew there would be an overflow crowd without us. She was 90, and in great health and spirit until four months ago when she had a recurrence of cancer

I read a Substack called Oldster Magazine once in a while. I read it a few days ago because the man they interviewed was talking about what it’s like to be 81, and I’m 81. The man was a well-known journalist, and he did a pretty good job of describing what life can be like at this age. I disagreed with him on one point. He said that he doesn’t think about death at all. I asked him how he can do that. Maybe he only has young friends.

I went to A.I. and looked it up. Gemini told me that about 53% of the people born in America in 1945 are still living. My sister and her husband were born in 1942, so I looked that up. It said that 35-40% of people born then are still alive. That’s quite a culling of the herd in three years.

I decided to scare myself a little more, so I asked Gemini what percent of men who were born in America in 1945 are alive now. The answer was 45-48%, while women are 60 to 62%. Not a surprise, although I think that balance will become more equal over the years as gender roles become more equal, despite the current backlash against that.

So yes, I think about dying.

I don’t worry about dying because one of my more spiritual friends gave me a tai chi routine to refresh my mind, body, and spirit. Also, twice a week, I try to form some of the thoughts that run through my mind into a somewhat comprehensible blog post. I find that more beneficial to my cognitive abilities than solving NYT puzzles. I am physically active for at least 150 minutes a week, usually more. I avoid unregulated peptides — as well as regulated ones. I don’t microdose.

I would like to take some hallucinogenic mushrooms, but I am waiting until I’m ninety-four.

I have cut down on my alcohol because I am afraid that it will raise my hormone levels and reactivate my hormonal cancer. I am much more sensitive to the effects of alcohol, which is nice because it saves me the money I used to spend on a second drink. I still enjoy a good drink, and I can’t figure out if the buzz I get is taking hours, weeks, or months off my life, or if the relaxation I get is helping me avoid stress and live longer. So I drink half as much as I used to, which was never that much anyway.

I have seen how a fall at this age can be life-changing, so I walk much more cautiously. I pay special attention when going downstairs because my mother died from falling down the stairs to the basement of the house where I grew up — on Mother’s Day. She was 89.

I have learned not to get upset at every despicable word, deed, or action of our government, no matter how dangerous or how many fatalities it may cause. I realize that we are witnessing the post-modern, live-action version of the theater of the absurd. It is full of directionless plots, meaningless twists and turns, and cartoonish characters. It has dwarfed all dramatists, satirists, and science fiction writers with its creativity. The only flaw is that it is real, has caused a million needless deaths, and is much too dystopian.

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Today, as a complete antidote, I went down the river on my kayak. The cormorants waved at me. It was a beautiful late summer day.

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As we head into the last week of August, the traffic leaving the Cape can back up for miles, but few people are coming over the bridge in this direction. Many of the waitstaff and lifeguards are already back at college, and the kids in high school sports are heading home to practice. Two of my four grandchildren are reluctantly doing drills (no football-bad for the brain).

The beaches and the restaurants are accessible. The few families that remain have toddlers. A small wave of retirees are here because the rates drop, and the weather in September is the best, and the water is warm. We are staying until a week after Labor Day, which is late this year.

My daughter left with her family and doesn’t know when she will be back. For the last few years she has skipped Labor Day because it makes her too sad. If she leaves earlier, she feels like she will come back for a September weekend, even if it is unlikely.

However, this year, instead of going directly home, she went with a couple of friends to Martha’s Vineyard. They stayed two days at a friend’s house, but the main reason they went was to see Michelle Obama give a talk about her book. My daughter reported that Michelle was so genuine and so uplifting that Michelle and everyone in the audience began to cry.

Michelle talked about how much pressure she constantly felt not to be too aggressive, look too Black, or do anything that would become controversial. She was always aware of the possible repercussions of her words or actions. The Republicans, especially when they had control of Congress, and Fox News were turning over every pebble looking for anything they could use to paint them as angry Black-folk.

Michell Obama was part of a short speaker series. The speaker before her was Maggie Haberman from the NYT, who also has a book out. My daughter’s friend had also gone to see her. Ms. Haberman described how the current president has no awareness, discipline, or concern about his actions or the effects they have on the country or the world. She said Trump is scattered, impulsive, and seems mostly concerned about getting his ballroom/bunker built. She felt he had almost no thoughts or strategies about the war, the economy, or anything Americans might be upset about.

Michelle Obama reminded everyone that her husband was elected twice, and that the people who voted for him are realizing that they need to come back to reality. People believed what Trump promised them, which was that he could tame the confusing world. He will be remembered as the world’s greatest conman, as well as the most inept and corrupt.

We’ll see.

Unfortunately for me, I left the empty beach late this afternoon, came home, opened a beer, and watched the news: Two Supreme Court permission slips, many more illegal arrests and disappearances, two wars with no solutions, Canada, and some really crazy shit about Trump and this Natalie Harp person. What more should we expect from a pedophile?

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As we used to say, in our case conferences, “How fucked-up are these people?” But at least those people knew enough to come for therapy.

We’ll see. Chaos is already guaranteed. We have to do everything we can from September 8 to January 5.

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My head was filled with ideas of revolution from reading about so much government corruption and destruction when my children and their children descended upon the Cape. My wife was away visiting a very sick friend, which sadly has become a regular part of our lives, so I prepared a lavish Cape Cod dinner for the kids. Dinner consisted of steamers, G-Pop’s special fish recipe, corn, zucchini, and bread. It was a hit with everyone.

After dinner, somewhat to my surprise, the kids and their spouses sat around and talked about money, who has it and who doesn’t. These four people have good jobs. They will not be part of the oligarchy; in fact, they are all somewhat active in opposition, but they are all benefiting from the current wave of ultra-capitalism. Unlike me, they have all mastered the expectations of American corporate culture. They have all worked hard and smart, and have risen to high management positions, so over the last two years, they all had the difficult experience of having to lay people off, instead of the demoralizing experience of being laid off.

To be fair, while I am very proud of how well each of these people has done in their careers and financially, we are all aware that timing had a lot to do with it. They all came out of college close to the turn of the century, when fewer people were graduating, and despite the dot-com bust, many jobs were available. It is a credit to them that they all made smart decisions through the years, and have benefited from being able to develop and maintain networks of friends and colleagues who also came out of college at that time, many of whom, like them, came from what is considered “elite” colleges.

What is happening now is that not only are they getting paid very well for the work they do, they are all now vested in their companies, and their companies are all doing well. The stock prices of three of them have risen to new heights this summer, and no one is part of, or dependent upon, the uncertainty of the A.I. Due to the rules of our current form of capitalism, the shareholders win. So, even though my children are being very well paid for their work, their income has suddenly exponentially, magically increased. What was a comfortable upper-middle-class income has been bumped up to whatever the next level is, and perhaps beyond.

The conversation rambled on to the few people they know who are doing even better financially than they are. It was interesting to listen to how those people, who are collecting even more absurd amounts of money, are not admired, but are mostly regarded as assholes who are ruining our society.

Then the conversation turned in the other direction and was filled with examples of people they know who are now in their late forties and early fifties, who have taken other paths, some of them not by choice, and are now feeling oppressed by the recent rise in prices.

They also described other friends who are artists, doctors, professors, and journalists who are doing well enough and are enjoying their lives and families, but who do not benefit from the workings of ultra-capitalism. And then there are the teachers, social workers, and others who are doing God’s work with people who need help: the chronically ill, the poor, the homeless, the impoverished, rejected, and shunned. Those people are highly valued and very poorly paid.

After everyone helped clean up after dinner and moved on to the ice cream, I was left with very mixed feelings. My wife and I had raised our kids to have good values, have as much fun as possible, while hopefully finding satisfaction in their work. The satisfaction part came late to a couple of them, but they are all now working for companies that are doing good things. Two are in biotech, discovering ways to keep me alive. They now find themselves benefiting greatly from what we all recognize is a very unbalanced system.

I am very pleased and grateful that I don’t have to worry about my kids, as so many of my friends do. I am also pleased that one of the couples has already found ways to use their money to benefit people who are struggling and to give other people opportunities they wouldn’t have.

Yet, I am left feeling a little uneasy. This is not what I expected. I don’t think it was what my kids expected or planned for, but now that it’s here, why not?

The “why not” has something to do with the knowledge that the extreme and growing gap between the rich and the not-rich is not good for our society, our country, and the world. My kids are living good lives. The couple that has had a large pile of money for a while has begun doing expensive things. Nothing ostentatious, but they take the family on nice trips and buy clothes that my wife tells me are very nicely made. Their kids have grown accustomed to this lifestyle, although the older one worked this summer scooping ice cream and is very proud of the money she made.

My solution has been to just back away and let them figure it out. It’s a situation I never expected, and I am not prepared to deal with it. My kids seem to be handling it well. I have some concern about how my grandchildren view the world, but I have very little understanding of the world they live in now, and no idea what they will have to contend with in ten years.

I will watch and wait. I feel my contribution will be to do what I can to undo the mess that my generation has allowed to spread over the world. In many ways, the world has always operated like this; there have always been a few very wealthy and powerful who bestowed their blessing on a small set of people they favored, and everyone else did the best they could in the fields or factories.

However, now, more than ever, we have the knowledge and technology that could easily make the lives of 80% of the world much safer, healthier, more stable, and prosperous. Sadly, during the last decade, we have reversed the progress we were making and substituted individual greed.

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My hope is that since the greed and corruption are so obvious and painful, rapid and drastic changes are coming soon. I will try to help bring about those changes, while avoiding violence. I have no interest in learning how to make drones.

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And they are eating almost all of my sage. They don’t touch the basil, rosemary, or oregano. Is it sweeter or blander? Perhaps it’s an evolutionary trait, because wolves, foxes, and coyotes don’t like the smell or taste of sage, but they love basil? Probably not.

The traffic on the Cape is terrible. It should be getting lighter by now, but it’s not. It can take two or three minutes to get onto the main road. The traffic getting on and off the Cape is worse. It took us an extra hour to get here from Boston on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s been like that all summer.

The new bridge might help, but it’s not going to be finished until 2033; eight years. I’m going to be 89 in eight years. I might have to take a Waymo. Or, the Cape might be underwater.

Part of the reason I was upset during that long drive was that we were coming back from the short service they had after they cremated my brother-in-law. He lasted in hospice for ten days without any food, with just a few sponges to keep his mouth moist. Those services are always sad, and there were a lot of old people there because my niece had the service at the CCRC where he lived for the last year and a half. Many of them were on walkers or with aids. They were very nice, and they genuinely seemed to like my brother-in-law. But it seems as if I am quietly building a prejudice against old people.

It’s not them, of course. It’s that I am not good at getting old gracefully. My wife expects me to stop swearing so loudly when I drop something, can’t find my phone, can’t remember a name that I read ten minutes ago, or drive past an exit when I am having a conversation. There are dozens of such things. It’s not that I feel I am really losing it more rapidly than others; it’s just that I never had these difficulties before, and I hate it. Or, maybe I am losing it. I might be the last to know.

These things bother me more because during the few days we went off Cape, one of our neighbors, who we heard went into the hospital in July, died the day we got home. Another neighbor clearly is slipping faster than most of us. She can’t put a sentence together anymore and has trouble keeping track of time. Also, right now my wife has traveled to visit a friend who has stage 4+ cancer. Some of the new drugs might give her a few more months.

And the healthcare system doesn’t make getting the things that are supposed to keep us alive easy. They change formularies. The doctors are too busy to make regular appointments. The insurance companies don’t cover things easily; they don’t want to pay. In many areas, the hospitals have closed.

I realize that if I were going through all this fifty years ago, I wouldn’t have any expectation that there might be things to keep me healthy if I became seriously ill. But this is ME I’m talking about, and it’s the only one I have.

I am also upset because my niece is married to a Black man, and, no surprise, they have children who are considered “Black” in America, even though they have skin a shade of mocha. They talked about being a bit apprehensive because their kids are growing up under ten years of MAGA; a time when too many people are “proud” of their white skin.

And A.I. keeps popping up telling me that my writing doesn’t make any sense. Substack now has a button you can push to determine how much of what I’ve written was assisted by A.I.— I don’t think anyone will feel the need to push that button on this post.

The more I read about A.I., the more I worry that its purpose is to help the very rich continue to gain more money and power. The people who are building this technology are taking control of a large percentage of America’s resources: its power, water, land, and money. These companies are all intertwined with each other, and if (when) China comes out with a better, cheaper product, our markets will collapse, and these people will expect to be bailed out by the government they are in the process of buying.

Sadly, this has led me to be suspicious of too many of the men on the Cape whom I don’t know. When we go to any of the too expensive but very good fancy restaurants, I look around and wonder about the men in their forties and fifties who are all buffed up and impressed with themselves. Did they get rich in crypto by some other exploitative means? Do they care about the Haitian woman who is taking care of their parents? Then I found out that two of them are holding big fundraisers for Democratic Senators; so what do I know.

Money? The Lakers were just sold for $12.5 billion to two billionaires who seem to need a new bauble to show off. My favorite team, the Celtics, which was sold last year for only $6.5 billion to a billionaire and a private investment fund, gave away one of its best players because they didn’t want to pay him his big salary. Of course, Jalen Brown is making about $60 million a year. The most Bill Russell made as a player was $100,000, in 1965. Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $1 million. In 1965, I paid $6 for a good seat to see Russell play Wilt Chamberlain. I don’t know how much that seat will cost this season. It doesn’t feel as if the real game is being played on the court anymore. It’s played by billionaires in the market.

———-

As I wallowed in my crankiness, my kids showed up with some of their kids. The rest will be coming home from camp in two days. My eleven year-old grandson brought three friends with him, so we took them to the bumper boats and bumped and squirted each other. We all took turns in the batting cages, and I showed them I could still hit hot line drives down the third base line. Then we went to the beach. I got to swim with everyone and float on the waves as the boys played a game of throwing, catching, and tackling each other in the water, which is exactly what eleven-year-old boys have been doing for a couple of millennia.

I suddenly felt reassured that there are enough good people around, and there is hope for the world. My family, and many of the families and people I know, IRL and virtually, will not stand for this amount of corruption, greed, and exploitation. I will continue to swim, talk, write, send money, and do my tai chi, so that I can be around to experience the changes.

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ALSO :

Please tell every candidate for Congress that they must support recreating the Department of Justice as an INDEPENDENT agency. It was to be removed from the Executive Branch.

Trump is already trying to convince people to believe that if the Democrats take control, they will use the DOJ to go after him only for political reasons. Congress needs to establish an agency that is protected from politics. It needs to be run by carefully selected people whom the country can trust to follow the law without bias. Otherwise, America’s sense of justice will be ruined.

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Thanks.

It’s the middle of August, and I’m beginning to get sad. The summer that I had changed my body to prepare for, rehabilitated myself, and tried to wait patiently through a cold spring is slipping away.

For me, and the world, it is a summer like no other. While my new knee is working and I can go up and down the 38 steps to get to the beach, there was never a time that felt completely calm. For most of the four decades that we have owned the house, our activities have been centered around our children and then the grandchildren. Now, our children have jobs that often require them to stay home and manage whatever the hell they need to manage, as their jobs rarely slow down for the summer. This isn’t Europe where people just drop everything and enjoy themselves.

The grandchildren are no longer children. The oldest has a job; the others go to camps or go away with friends. Arranging their schedules with their parents’ schedules is difficult. They often aren’t sure they are coming until they actually get over the bridge. It also depends upon the weather, everyone’s health, and the unexpected things that are happening in our lives, such as our friends or relatives getting sick or actually dying. Everyone our age seems to have to leave the Cape once or twice to see a doctor.

Of course, hanging over all of this is that when I come out of the beautiful, warm, slightly choppy water of Cape Cod Bay, I go home and spend half an hour reading or watching the news. It seems that every day our government has found a new and original way to make the lives of some of the citizens miserable. Whether it is demonizing trans people, abandoning the thousands of people serving our country on an aircraft carrier, the DOJ again protecting pedophiles and murderers, while trying to indict anyone who insults or contradicts Trump. We are now involved in two endless wars that should never have been started. I am amazed at the many forms evil can take.

For decades, as a therapist, I was able to explain people’s behavior, no matter how bizarre, self-defeating, or even cruel. I have heard and seen hundreds of horrible things parents did to their children, but once I met the parents, I could tell that their lives had been worse than their kids’. Cruelty and perversion became fascinating rather than frightening. I was always able to find determining factors, rather than blame.

However, after a year and a half of Trump 2.0. it no longer matters what these people endured to become who they are. The way they are misusing the power they have illegally taken is evil. The way they seem to relish the power of a rogue ICE agent, the plane that can blow up a fishing boat, to advocate for harmful medicines, to use the DOJ to silence people, and then to gloat over how no one can stop them, is evil.

In my search to find support and direction, I was surprised to find comfort in who, for me, was the most unlikely source: the Pope.

It is the Pope who is advocating for the poor, the immigrants, refugees, minorities, and even transgender people. It is the Pope who is taking a stand against greed, corruption, war, and even warning against the misuse of artificial intelligence.

I was able to feel hope and find direction from the Pope talking about resilience, resistance, reformation, revelation, and even resurrection.

I was never religious. I was an atheist by the time I was fourteen and never really considered religion a factor in my life. If I am anything, I am a humanist who feels that humans have caused 90% of all human problems, and it’s only humans who can solve them. That belief also includes that we are all equal, mortal, and basically insignificant, except to ourselves and our families, then perhaps to our communities, and if we act together, to the wider world.

Given that perspective, I am sure that I define that list of “r” words differently from the Pope. I am not looking to a god to help us. I am hoping that a large enough number of American people will be resilient and resist the attempts of the Trump administration to take our rights away. I want to be a part of reforming our government so it can create a society where we all want to live. We need to demonstrate (reveal?) that it is possible to create a more equal, just, safe, happy, and healthy society, and that we can resurrect America, perhaps by resurrecting the Democratic Party, before it falls into the dung heap of history.

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We can overcome evil with good thoughts and good deeds. Hopefully, that’s why we still have elections.

I wonder how the Catholics will vote in the midterms. We’ll find out in 82 days.

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For at least the last twenty years, we have invited these three other couples to get together for a weekend on the Cape. We have known these people since our kids grew up together, and now the kids are fifty. We have all moved out of the town where we raised our children, but we still see each other regularly. Two of the couples, especially the men, are avid golfers, so we must have first invited them when I was about sixty, and just beginning to try to play golf. The women played nine holes together and the men, being men, played eighteen. We did that again this year in 90-degree heat. It will be the last time anyone plays eighteen in mid-summer.

Except for the few hours of golf, we spend the rest of our waking hours talking. We talk on our deck, during the meals, at the beach, deep into the evening, and then do it again the next day. We talk about our kids, who everyone knows. We talk about our health, as everyone has a diagnosis. We talk about the people we know in common, and their diagnoses, as well as who has died, and who is dying. As I mentioned in my last post, my brother-in-law was in hospice care. He died two hours before everyone left. His death made us realize how meaningful these long-term relations are in our lives.

We have always spent much of the time talking about politics. No one supported the Iraq War. Everyone was excited and very hopeful while Obama was president. No one has completely gotten over the shock that Trump was elected the first time, and was horrified when he won again.

Everyone is interested in politics, especially now, but no one is as involved or as active as I am. They all watch some form of TV news, and skim either the Boston Globe or the New York Times online. To me, they are much more typical of how an educated American follows the news and politics. They form their opinions based upon who they talk to and what they see around them. Two of the women are in groups writing postcards, but now that everyone is retired, they devote their time to their families and more recreational activities such as games, freinds, and extended families.

This time, more than usual, it was fascinating to hear how differences have emerged from what had always been very unified views, and how they are similar to what some political polls are showing. Two people, my wife and I, are supporting the most progressive candidates and are hoping that the pendulum of political activity swings strongly away from MAGA and in a new, much more inclusive direction. Four feel that pushing progressive ideas too aggressively would be too disruptive, and it makes them feel uncomfortable. The last two, who strongly identify as Jews, unexpectedly erupted in a tirade against Mondani, even though they no longer live in New York. They feel that although he says the right things, his stances and what he proposes are encouraging anti-semitism, and that his unrealistic promises will ruin the city.

In contrast, what was striking was that everyone avoided talking about Israel. That included me; even though I almost always enjoy dealing with different opinions, it was clear that this unsolvable problem has become too emotional for people to discuss rationally. The topic seemed to disappear magically into a discussion of the different ways people would like to see Trump die. Everyone is still dumbfounded by how quickly he has been able to destroy almost all of the good things our government was doing, and has no concern about putting it back together.

Of the eight people, two will vote for Seth Molton, and the rest for Ed Markee in the Democratic primary for Senator. Everyone agreed that Markee should not have run again, but Molton was not their first choice.

Of the eight people, four feel that the time between now and the election will be full of chaos and destruction, but that the election will be the beginning of a meaningful change. I am one of those people. The others feel that too many things have been too badly damaged and corrupted, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the environment, the endless wars, the AI economy, a fragmented Democratic Party, and that MAGA has so much money behind it that it will keep it in power after Trump is gone.

These discussions are not representative of the American voter. We are a bunch of old people in Massachusetts. It makes me feel that there is a lot of work to do.

To begin, I got a message yesterday from States Win to join a phonebank tonight, Monday, to make calls for Anna Rink, who is running for the Michigan state legislature. I’m not sure I can do it, as we are trying to help my niece get organized after the death of her father.

If any of you feel motivated, you can join in:

Register here: https://www.mobilize.us/stateswinmari/event/926383/

Learn more about Anna Aho Rink here:

Can’t join us? Please consider sponsoring our phonebank--all donations go directly to the campaign.

ALSO:

Everyone is focusing on the wars, inflation, the destruction of our climate, our justice system, our medical system, immigrant communities, and the threats to our elections. If that wasn’t enough, I think this column from the NYT warns about a force that is keeping Trump in power and hopes to take over after he is gone: The A.I. money:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/opinion/artificial-intelligence-data-politics.html

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I’m going back into the warm water for a while.

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Driving home, I had about a dozen scattered thoughts on my mind when an old Van Morrison song came on. Van Morrison is another great star who turned out to be a fascist asshole, but his music is still great. The song, And It Stoned Me, a nostalgic song about the fun of wasted youth, got me all choked up. I realized how many changes, big and small, good and bad, seem to be going on in my life at the same time.

My family is healthy and doing well, except my brother-in-law is in hospice, mostly in a coma, waiting to die. That makes me the oldest of our extended family, which is somewhat unsettling.

Also, I bought the fish to cook for a very old friend who is staying with us. She has recently sold her house and is moving into a very nice Senior Living, Continuous Care Community. She will get her knee replaced in a couple of weeks and is very happy to have all of her care right there. The residents of these Senior Living places are usually about 60 to 70% women, most often widows, as the husbands are often dead. Another not very comforting thought.

Our friend also reported that of the 400 people in the place, one-third are over ninety, again almost all women. But it’s clear that if you are upper-middle class, white, and have good healthcare, your odds of living a long time are much better than if you are not those three things. These places increase your odds. I would consider going — when I can’t drive, can’t see, can’t walk, and can’t remember to turn off the stove.

As we sat and ate the fish, we exchanged the names of many people we know who have died recently or who probably won’t get to celebrate the New Year.

The next day the clouds and rain kept coming and going, driven by a strong wind. The frequency of winds like this has greatly increased over the last three years. Few hot or cold fronts come or go peacefully. In the mood I’m in, they felt like an ill wind that will bring more turmoil and change.

Then, of course, as expected, the “rebellious” Republicans caved, and the committee will now approve of Todd Blanche becoming the new destroyer of law, order, and justice in America. His job will be to prosecute the innocent and protect those who are guilty of unending corruption, murder, and pedophilia. It’s clear that the people who favor corruption and greed, with a side order of racism, are still running America.

And so it goes, and it will only get worse until the midterm elections, when it might get really crazy.

But I don’t feel bad. I’m not depressed or hopeless. I just feel melancholy. I know that when I feel something, as long as it isn’t suicidal, the best thing is to go with it and let it play out. So, I put on an hour of Irish ballads of loss and mourning. I think the Irish are experts at melancholy.

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I am looking forward to the backlash to everything MAGA. I expect it will be an exciting time. The wind will change, and we will experience a new and better America. Stay focused.

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This year, I went back again. Once again, it was one of the highlights of my summer. The only other people on the marsh were on a guided kayak tour, and after getting their safety instructions on land, they set off in the other direction.

The day was sunny and warm, but not hot. The marsh was quiet, except for the birds. I read that there are over 300 species of birds eating, nesting, and preparing for the next migration in this marsh. I saw at least twenty of them.

My favorite sight is when the anhingas take off from their perch as I approach. They flap their wings, and take off, dragging their feet in the water for a few yards before they fly low across the water,

I was on the water for a couple of hours. Half the time I was paddling, and half the time I was just drifting, directed by the tide or the wind, being quiet, and enjoying being alive and healthy enough to do this. As I floated, I watched a black-headed gull land on a mud flat and struggle for a few moments with a crab that was attempting to flee. The gull quickly won the struggle and flew off with the crab still in its mouth. I felt fortunate to be the dominant predator in the area. Two young boys were trying to take advantage of that as they were fishing from their kayaks.

If you bothered to read what I posted last year, I wrote about how stunned I was by the constant stream of destructive activities coming out of the government. It was only six months into the second Trump administration, and everyone was still in shock. We all still expected that either the courts or the Republican Party would find a way to shut Trump down. Last year, we were still hoping Trump would help Ukraine. He promised to end that war on day one.

By now, we know that Trump is not going to be stopped easily. Despite my very low expectations, it continues to amaze me how cruel, racist, inept, dangerous, and destructive the Trump administration can be. Everything Trump does causes more people to suffer and die. He can even destroy the treasures of Washington, DC, including the White House, the Kennedy Center, and the Reflecting Pool. Now, he is about to destroy the world’s energy supply, economy, and the entire Middle East. Since Trump has no idea how to correct an obvious mistake, he can only keep hammering away at the wrong solution, making everything worse.

It seems that Ambassador Huckabee may get his wish, as Trump seems intent on bringing about the rapture.

While I was on the water, I was able to keep my mind free of all that. I tried not to think of my brother-in-law, who is now in hospice care, when a week ago he was still his indefatigable self.

Two days ago, I went swimming at a different beach where the water is warmer. I plunged my bumpy and scared old body into the small waves and seaweed of Nantucket Sound. I swam out and drifted in with the waves. I swam to the right, and then back to the left, and then went out and in again. I was in the water for about half an hour. I’ve had that routine since we first came to the Cape over forty years ago.

I got out of the water and sat in my beach chair for about ten minutes drying off. Then I picked up my stuff and headed home.

As I walked back on the sand, a man of about fifty approached me and asked if I was okay. I smiled and said I was fine; that I had just had a good swim. Then he said he saw that, and he told me that I was doing great. He said he hoped he would be able to do what I did when he reached my age. I smiled, shrugged, and said, “You know, you’ve got to keep moving.” He agreed.

I didn’t know how to take it. Was that a compliment? I asked one of my friends who was a DEI consultant, which is now a banned profession. She said it was a micro-aggression about ageism. I’m not sure.

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I think he was just comparing me to all the old people who only go in the water to pee.

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The cloud in the picture is passing over the Putuxst River, which flows into Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island. I was standing on a public dock when I took the picture. It was raining slightly, but the rain moved north, where those clouds produced a frightening storm in southern Massachusetts. As I have mentioned before, we don’t get rainy days anymore; we get deluges.

Before I talk about the dark clouds, I want to recommend Rhode Island. It is called the Ocean State for a good reason; everywhere in the state, you are on a river that flows into the bay, which flows into the ocean. Every view is spectacular. The ocean is warm and as good for surfing as you get on the East Coast. Most of the calamari comes from Rhode Island. The people are welcoming, warm, and talkative. The accent is unique and charming.

I was in Rhode Island for two very different occasions last week. The first was a “celebration of life” for a very good friend who died early last spring. Her daughters didn’t want to have a gathering while it was cold and dreary, so they invited all of her friends and relatives to come to her house in Rhode Island, which was small but situated thirty feet from a large bay, where she spent the last ten years of her life.

It was a warm and friendly gathering. Most of the people who came knew the woman for decades, and so they knew many of the family members too. It felt more like a reunion than a time for a eulogy; so much so that the daughters decided it would ruin the spirit of the day to make people sad by talking about the departed, so they skipped having any service or remembrances and just let everyone have a good time. Still, we left feeling a bit unfulfilled.

The second trip was to Putuxit Village in RI for my wife to meet some of the students from her old high school who were receiving the scholarships. My wife had spent twelve years raising money, which is now invested by a foundation that gives about $40K to ten kids. It’s a very rewarding experience.

The dark cloud is that some kids didn’t come to the ceremony because even though they are allowed to attend college in RI, they may still feel vulnerable. ICE is picking up kids who aren’t citizens, no matter what their actual status is. DACA means nothing anymore. Some of the kids might be Haitian. Cruelty is the message. Shoot first, no questions later.

Earlier in the week, my wife had lunch with a very good friend of ours. The woman told my wife that her husband, who is one of my best friends, is beginning to have more bad days than good. He can’t keep track of his activities, and often just goes back to bed.

Then, on the day we were headed to RI, we got a call from my niece, who said that her father, my brother-in-law, was in the ER in Boston with what appeared to be a stroke. So we left RI and drove to Boston to see them. He was in the ICU and not doing well. He cannot move one side of his body. He can hardly speak. He can’t swallow.

If you look back at my posts, a year and a half ago I wrote about my sister, his wife, dying. Understandably, he had gone through a rough few months, but he seemed to be doing better, until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

I am not blaming his stroke on the Trump administration, but I was very aware that the hospital, which is a major Boston teaching hospital, was not as clean, organized, or well-staffed as it was when one of my grandchildren was born there. Because the Trump administration no longer believes in science, the hospital has lost a lot of the research funding that helped support all of their services. Superstition and lies determine the current policies.

We are back on the Cape now, waiting for my kids to come with their kids for a couple of days. The sun is shining. The large, dark thunder clouds have cleared and won’t be back until Tuesday. We will go to the beach.

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I hope you all are enjoying the summer and are not totally distracted by the dark clouds.

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It’s mid-July. Many people are coming to the Cape for their summer vacation. The beaches on Cape Cod Bay are great for younger children. The tide comes in slowly, the water is warm, and the kids can run in and out easily. The sand is great for digging, and the sun was out … kind of.

The only downside is that housing and food prices are probably 20% higher than last year, but many jobs in Massachusetts pay very well. There is clearly another generation enjoying the water.

But, as I mentioned last time, the hoax of global warming giveth, and it taketh away. The water is warmer and better to swim in because the temperature of the Earth keeps rising. The Cape is not as hot as Paris, so people can enjoy the warm water.

However, the warm air has dried out some of the forests in Minnesota and Canada, and there are now huge wildfires burning millions of acres, sending millions of tons of tiny particles of smoke and ash high into the atmosphere. It has drifted this way, and for three days, it covered the sky in Cape Cod.

The air quality index for a summer day on the Cape usually ranges from 20, which is good, to 75, which is moderate. One day last week, our phones pinged an alert. The air quality slipped from dangerous to hazardous. Check out the map:

This level is dangerous to everyone, but especially to young lungs, and even more so if you have asthma.

The next day was windy and blew some of the smoke away, and the day after that, heavy rains washed out an entire vacation day, which must have been frustrating for those who were only here for a week.

President Trump promptly blamed Canada for not managing their forests well and allowing these terrible fires to send smoke over the border. He threatened to place more tariffs on Canadian goods.

Canada reminded the president that last year, when fires were raging in the American Northwest, Canada sent men and equipment to help, because that’s what good neighbors do.

But that was hardly the worst thing the president did or said last week. Two things he did that were worse were to resume daily bombing raids on Iran. Iran managed to get a missile into an American base in Jordon, killing at least three American soldiers. The “ceasefire” and the Memorandum of Understanding are no longer in effect. The fighting and killing in the Middle East are back in high gear with no plan and no end in sight,

President Trump also gave a speech last week, in which he promised to bring shocking news to Americans. The speech was neither shocking nor news, but Trump made it clear that he was not going to sit by and lose an election to voters who vote against Republicans. He was going to do his best to find ways for him to decide who wins more seats in Congress because he doesn’t like to lose. That’s not good for our country.

I didn’t watch the speech. I knew it would upset me. But I did see many highlights. I was surprised by my reaction. I suddenly felt that if Trump were not one of the most despicable people on the planet, I would feel sorry for him. I have seen that look and heard that tone of angry, desperate pleading many times.

The way Trump spoke instantly reminded me of several very paranoid people I had as patients. Like Trump, they had also experienced a major loss or suffered a major setback in their lives that they could not tolerate, as it was too devastating to cope with. Usually, the patients felt shame and/or guilt for something that happened that they had no control over, yet they felt that the world blamed them for it. They felt people knew they had sinned, were watching them, and were judging them harshly. They wanted me, as a therapist, to help get these people to leave them alone and to stop spreading rumors and lies about them. Stop watching them. Stop them from rearranging their clothes or the food in their refrigerator. Stop the TV from talking about them.

These were very difficult and sad cases. They were living tortured lives. No one would listen to them except me. Just listening often proved to be a successful start to treatment.

That was what Trump’s speech felt like. He is pleading with his followers to believe him. He is being exposed as a greedy, lying, racist fraud. He can’t stop the bleeding. He is angry that people are questioning his reality and his power. He is desperate to pull the curtain back up around him. You must believe him!

No one does. Not even Fox News.

But sadly, there are still many ultra-wealthy people who want to keep him in power so that they can keep doing things that they want, legal or illegal, without any governmental interference.

Two of them came before the Senate this week to be confirmed as new members of Trump’s cabinet: Todd Blanche for the Department of Justice, and Jay Clayton for Intelligence. They told the Senators, in very condescending and dismissive terms, that they would certainly continue their lying and corrupt ways, and as long as Trump is president, as pathetic as he is, and as long as the Republicans in Congress remain just as pathetic, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them.

Also, in a move that will legalize insider trading, for a considerable fee, Trump will give you an early warning when he posts a “truth” that will move the market. Playing fair is an anathema to Trump; it can be in the World Cup, stock trading, or how he treats young women.

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It’s now only two and a half months until the election. Enjoy your summer. The doors to the fun house will swing wide open in September.

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In my last post, I realized that I had difficulty predicting what the lives of my grandchildren might be like in twenty or fifty years. My own life felt very predictable for decades. I had some general idea of the way I wanted to live, and I knew how to maneuver through whatever was necessary to get there. The things my children wanted were not drastically different than the things I had wanted, and they have been able to achieve most of what they expected, in some cases more.

However, how the world works began to change at the turn of the 21st century, and the changes have increased more rapidly in the last decade. I don’t think my grandchildren are as aware of that as I am, because it has been that way for their entire lives. They seem to know how to go with the flow, although one of them is already complaining because she would like to plan for the next thirty years, and she is finding that some of the things she might want to do in the future might not exist anymore.

Once the boys left, I was free to go back to my reading, the necessary stretching to keep my body upright and mobile, and to enjoy the approaching heat wave at the beach. The more frequent summer heat waves are my favorite part of global warming. As I wrote earlier, this year was the first time I could swim in the bay in June.

However, none of those things went as planned. They each brought some level of concern about what the hell is happening and how fast everything seems to be falling apart. Perhaps I am just an old “Chicken Little.”

The forecast was for 87 degrees and sun, which meant it would be 95 on the beach and the water would be perfect for swimming. Didn’t happen that way. The picture above looks as if it was taken at eight o’clock in the evening on a cloudy. It was taken at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun that was supposed to be warming the waters was hidden by a thick band of smoke that floated in from the fires north of Toronto.

Thanks, Canada. You’ve ruined the best feature of global warming with a worse feature of global warming. What will the summers be like when my grandchildren come to this beach after I’m gone?

Reading? Over five days, I have read articles in magazines, newspapers, and online that discussed many different views of how Artificial Intelligence has penetrated almost every aspect of our lives. I read about ten different pieces out of the about fifty that were available to me.

The quest to build, train, market, and profit from these relatively new large language models has dominated the stock market and finance. Building them takes tens of billions of dollars, so it absorbs a huge amount of the available credit. The promised revenues are just beginning to come to these companies, but so far, the only profits are going to the builders — the chip makers, the disk makers, the data center builders, the power sources, the builders of the power sources, and the people who finance all of these. Their continued growth makes them all interdependent with each other, so the risk is magnified.

The energy and water to build all the new servers that will be required are becoming a problem. Communities are now organizing to keep the new data centers out of their counties, even if they build their own power plants.

AI will make everyone smarter and our lives easier.

AI will take jobs away, especially entry-level jobs.

AI will make people lazier and less able to think critically.

AI will help cure every disease.

Ai will make mistakes that will wipe out hundreds.

I read an article in the NYT about a company owned and run by 23. Year-olds, who are paying Ph.Ds. and lawyers who are having trouble getting jobs $60 an hour to input their special knowledge into an AI model, so it will be able to answer questions with expertise, without the expert.

There are several articles about how AI is helping people create new music, or write new fiction, or nonfiction by helping to clarify and refine ideas. There are other stories that talk about how AI is stifling creativity because all of its “new ideas” are based on old ideas that have been fed into it.

Google is realizing that AI is cannibalizing its search business, so they are finding ways to make AI more profitable.

Then, while I was stretching, I listened to the Hard Fork podcast. They discussed when and how we should begin to treat an AI machine as if it were a conscious entity and should be given protection and a list of rights so that it doesn’t suffer.

Just listening to people talk about that made me worried. Not because I think that a sophisticated pile of silicone will ever be able to care about anything, but because it already can sound and act as if it does. I have read that millions of women all around the world already prefer a relationship with a bot than with a living, breathing, macho man.

What actually happens with AI, and how much it will be the driving force of civilization in ten years, is impossible to know. I hope it will help me stay alive to find out. My kids and their kids are not that concerned. They have the sense that they can figure it out as it happens. They have the resources and connections to ride the wave, wherever it goes.

Of course, it seems as if the wave is still following the tide of the last three centuries, filled with endless, repetitive wars, headed toward an overheated planet with the divide between the haves and the rest of the world being greatly unfair.

Maybe AI will save us. Electricity didn’t. Washing machines didn’t. The internal combustion engine didn’t. Television didn’t. The Internet didn’t. The current Dofuss in the White House isn’t helping.

People were not designed for this, but there is a chance that the generation that is growing up surrounded by technology since birth will know how to make it do something besides making a few people very rich.

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I want to be around long enough to see it happen.

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My eleven and twelve-year-old grandsons came to stay with us for five days. The boys are cousins. They are both younger brothers with older sisters. We expect to have their sisters for a few days later in the summer. Until a couple of years ago, their parents would come to the Cape often during the summer and turn them over to us so they could relax on vacation. We have years of pictures of them at the beach together, splashing, digging, and later swimming and playing different sports on the flat sand.

The boys were very excited to be together because, even though they live in neighboring towns, they both have complex schedules that involve sports, camps, friends, and trips. They also know that we are grandparents and not parents, and all of the privileges and benefits that entails.

I feared that it would be difficult and tiring, and that I would not be familiar or comfortable with the things that filled up their lives, especially the electronics. We had seen them have occasional battles with their parents over limits on the different screens, and when and how they could use them..

However, it wasn’t like that at all. The boys were excited to be together, free from the watchful eyes of their parents. Since we gave them more freedom, they respond easily to the few things we asked of them. They are getting older, more aware of the world, and have moved from fart jokes to penis jokes.

They would start and end their days on their screens, but after breakfast, they were eager to take advantage of being on the Cape. We were at the beach often, played mini-golf a couple of times, took them to the ropes and zip-line course, and fed them fish and chips often. They rode their bikes and scooters to buy donuts and go to the beach. Even on the day when there was torrential rain for thirty hours, they eagerly played Monopoly and chased each other around the house, playing some kind of made-up game. It wasn’t that much different from when their parents were at the house forty years ago, when we didn’t even have a TV.

However, the lives they live, and the world they are living in, are totally different than the way things were forty years ago. Their parents have been very successful at shielding them from the current craziness and instability of the country. But they each know someone who knows someone who has been deported. They are aware that not everyone has a place to stay at the beach, and also go skiing ten weekends a year, even though this is true of many of their friends. They realize that many aspects of life in America are unfair, but they don’t go into the specifics.

The pace of what they are taught at school is twice as fast as how their parents were taught, and four times as fast as when I was in school. There is so much more to learn, and so many other skills to master. However, there are some very basic skills, such as sitting and reading a novel, that they don’t need. One of the boys said that when he is assigned a book for class, he downloads it from the library app and has the app read it to him at 3X normal speed. He can get through it in twenty minutes.

Their knowledge about wars, crime, and sex all comes to them in a constant stream of funny short videos on YouTube or TikTok. They can tell you what’s going on in the world, but they don’t feel it relates to them, which is the way it should be at their age.

What they do feel is that their future already depends upon what they are doing in the present. They have already been fluent with computers for years. Now they are using AI to tell them about anything they want to know. The knowledge is so easily available that they can be curious about history, nature, and people, and it’s there in twenty seconds. Often, they can learn the details of their own interests, which at this time consist of sports, ski mountains, airplane flight patterns, video game cheat codes, very dangerous mountain bike videos, and subway maps.

They don’t need to be geniuses or academic superstars, but they do need to know how to operate in the world. They need to have a sense of whom they can trust. They want good friends whom they can depend upon, and they have already become very sensitive to scammers, who are everywhere online.

Both of these boys have stable families with two parents who each have well-paying jobs. The boys seem aware that if they want to live similar lifestyles, they will have to find a way to put things together for themselves in a world that is already pretty competitive.

However, it’s summer, which is not the time to take anything seriously. So, let’s go for ice cream.

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I am exhausted.

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What a mess. Conflicting emotions, hot weather, crowds, cops, the consistently crazy president, and Jaylen Brown made everything feel out of balance.

It began on Wednesday night as hot weather began to settle in. We were eating dinner with a friend, and the air conditioning in the restaurant broke, so they gave us a small dish of half-melted ice cream. I got a text from a friend that read “I can’t believe it. Jalen Brown is no longer a Celtic.”

Even though the team had continued to hint that they were going to trade him, we thought that when they didn’t get another star, he was too good a player and too much a part of Boston to be traded. We, 95% of Celtics fans, felt betrayed.

It has been the excellent, team-oriented play of the Celtics that has offered me a very welcome escape from the terrible Trump years. Many people depended upon them to support the resistance, if just by offering a very positive distraction.

I could write another 10,000 words about this, but I’ll just briefly describe why this matters so much on July 4th. Jaylen Brown has been on the team for ten years. He is an excellent player, but not without some obvious faults, and there is another player on the team who is usually, but not always, better. However, three seasons ago, the Celtics won the championship. And Brown was the MVP for the playoffs.

The team has not yet clearly explained why they traded Brown, but three things about this are really upsetting. First, they got very little in return: an old guy who was once very good but isn’t anymore, and some much later draft picks. Second, Brown is a very powerful speaker for the Black community, and has done a great job of supporting the much beleaguered Black community in Boston. He is also the VP of the NBA players union, and very outspoken about some of the NBA’s actions and activities. He is being paid an enormous amount of money, but unlike others, he is using a lot of it to promote new Black businesses in Boston. He shows up at many events to help the city. A lot of people expected him to run for mayor someday.

But most upsetting, last year, the Celtics were bought for over $6 million by William F. Chisholm Jr, who made huge money in private equity. He was a prep school soccer player who went to Dartmouth and then into finance. He has silent partners who are from other private equity firms. He is now one of many similar types who now own NBA teams. They have become the glamorous toys of the extremely rich. We have come a long way from the first owner, Walter Brown, who owned the team for over twenty years and cared about basketball. We are very afraid this guy cares more about power and money. Like many owners, he might like to take charge and make savvy moves, but he doesn’t have the knowledge or care about the extremely dedicated fans.

The fear is that he comes out of the Trump culture, which is the antithesis of the Bill Russell and Jayen Brown mentality.

Everyone is pissed. It immediately put a cloud over the already Trumpian 4th of July.

Next came the heat and the traffic. 100 degrees for three days. An extra hour or two to get over the bridges to the Cape. The beaches were mobbed. The parking lots over crowded. You couldn’t make a left turn without stopping traffic for a mile.

The good news was that the water in the bay was warm, perhaps close to 80 degrees. Global warming at its best! I was in the water for hours, something that had never been possible on July 4th.

Every year, for at least the last thirty years, people set off fireworks on the beach on July 3 and 4. This year, there were cops all over the place all day, mostly because the traffic was so heavy that they had to keep more people away from the overcrowded beaches. Then, at 8:45, only one group showed up on the sand to shoot fireworks. People were discussing how they had heard that the town had installed a zero- tolerance policy for private fireworks.

As soon as someone said that, a large police SUV showed up in the parking lot. A very friendly police woman got out, walked over the sand, and told the people to stop shooting fireworks. The people complied, although when they went to put them back in the barrel, one went off. The policewomen felt they made her point for her.

What’s this? A police state on the 4th of July. No fireworks for the 250th birthday. Is this what will happen when we try to vote? The end of American freedom?

The evening of July 4th, we were at a cookout with several friends, lamenting how everything seems to be going haywire. Everyone was tired from the heat and various grandchildren, so we left soon after sunset.

Driving home, we came near the beach, and suddenly, POW! Up in the sky, a flash of red, green, and yellow opening into a star. Then POW, another one. I quickly got out of the car and stood on top of a dune overlooking the beach. For 45 minutes, there were fireworks to my right, left, and further to my left. Big ones, swirling ones, noisy ones, often at the same time. A few hundred people were already there who obvious had not heard about the zero-tolerance policy. Walking home at almost ten o’clock, another group shot some off for ten minutes on the ball field.

It rained on Trump’s anti-communist, pro-corruption, pro-pedophile rally.

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Freedom restored. Hope for the future.

Enjoy being an American. Better days are coming if we continue to do good work.

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For 26 years, SCOTUS has slowly but surely become the most powerful influence on American society. In 2000, when they decided, based on no constitutional law, who could become president, they realized they had the power to rule however they wanted. They discovered the power they had because no one could overrule them, and they had their jobs for life, no matter what they did, including taking money from people who had cases before the court. So what the hell, let’s go!

Since then, they have set America on a path to be ruled by a corrupt oligarchy of rich, white, straight, Christian men. The Slaughter ruling not only gives much more power to the Executive, it also opens the door for unlimited corruption. The Trump administration is already there, but this gives him the power to continue with his insider trading, choosing which companies succeed or fail, and allows him to spend money on his vanity wars and projects without needing authorization from anyone. The president is the government. If anyone in the government decides to enforce too many regulations or follow certain laws, the president can fire that person. If anyone attempts to stop the president from taking bribes to avoid a tariff or to pollute, or to get a friend pardoned, that person can also be fired.

From now on, anyone who gets to be president will have the option to instantly become a billionaire.

The decisions of the court this year have made it clear that the “judicial philosophy” of the six Republican appointed justices is that money runs America, and those who have the most money should ipso facto have the most power. This has become more true as some of those very rich people have been sharing their money with members of the court. Today’s decision in the Campaign Finance (NRSC v. FEC) case took that a step further. It allows huge donations to a political party to be spent anywhere, for or against any candidate. AIPAC and some crypto millionaires will be pleased.

People without money, especially Black people, women, and other minorities, are not protected by this court. The court recognizes that there once was racial discrimination in America, but it is no longer a factor in its decisions. They have repeatedly shown that race should no longer be a factor in voting rights. Black people can register and vote in every district. They don’t need a special law to protect their votes. White people don’t have their own districts, do they? Oh…

The reason Black people don’t get special treatment is that they don’t have enough money. Some Black people have enough money, and they get all the amenities and privileges as white rich people if they behave like white people and don’t fuss. The same expectations apply to women.

Due to the extreme nature of so many decisions by the current Supreme Court, many lawyers, Congresspeople, former judges, law professors, historians, legal scholars, politicians, and millions of American citizens are trying to determine how to reform the court so that its decisions will reflect the ideals and values of 89% of Americans, the ones most people thought were written in the Constitution, or settled by laws and traditions that were fifty or a hundred years old. Most people think that expanding the court would be the easiest way to effect the change.

IF the opposition to Trump and his corrupt administration is successful in gaining control of Congress, there is one change that has to come first, and the Slaughter decision made that clearer. Ironically, two parts of that decision added to the clarity

As I have said before in many places, and will repeat until it happens:

In order for the US Department of Justice to regain the trust of the American people, it must be removed from the Executive Branch. The president should not have the power to decide who gets investigated and who lives above the law. The DOJ and the FBI must become a carved-out, independent agency, walled off from the influences of politics, special interests, and money.

Chief Justice Roberts stated in his decison that the Officers of the Federal Reserve Bank board of directors cannot be fired on the whim of a president; there must be some clear malfeasance. The Congress must design a new kind of even greater independence for the DOJ. The president should not be allowed to appoint a new Attorney General. The new AG should be nominated by a special nonpartisan committee of judges, law professors, and respected legal scholars who represent a wide range of views about the law and the Constitution, but agree that hoensty, integrity, and experience are the basic qualifications. The new AG and FBI director should be given ten-year terms that expire in different years. They can only be fired by Congress for serious malfeasance. No president will have any control of this independent agency.

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Right now, there is no justice in America. There is blatant corruption in almost every level of our government, and the DOJ protects it instead of prosecuting it. If we had an independent, respected, trusted DOJ, it could prosecute corruption, fraud, and crimes in the government, in corporations, in the streets, and even in the Supreme Court.

Please write to your Congress people and tell them to make this happen.

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The light comes into the bedroom at five o’clock. I can usually sleep for another two hours. The mornings are cool. If the sun is out, the temperature rises rapidly. By the afternoon it’s a good day to go to the beach. If the weather is changing, it can be very windy, especially at the beach. The winds have been noticeably stronger and come more often now. Rainy days are fewer, but when it rains, it is wilder and heavier. But I guess we are not supposed to notice.

What we notice is that while the price of gas has dropped 50 cents, the price of eating at any restaurant has gone up and stays up. A fine dining place is now one for the price of two. Still, it’s difficult to get a reservation. People with money have money. The difference used to be expressed in multiples; now it’s exponential.

The sun has been out most days, so we have been going to the beach. There is no cell service on the flat sand when the tide is out, so I read. One thing I read this week was about how the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, came to power and how he stayed in power. It was impossible not to compare him to Trump, and to see why Trump will fail while Erdoğan continues to hold power.

The main reason Erdoğan succeeded in co-opting the Turkish government is that he began as a good politician who solved problems. He did that when he was mayor of Istanbul, later as prime minister, and then as president. He threw out a corrupt government and was a real reformer for a while. He literally cleaned up the city and got the garbage picked up. He established a national healthcare system. He integrated the Syrian refugees into the population, and he is now, a decade later, working to integrate the Kurds.

But, he thought that his work to stabilize the economy and make Turkey an independent power was not finished. So he began to take more power for himself, change the laws, get rid of the old judges, stifle, and then oppress the opposition. Finally, he decided that he should stay in power for as long as he wished, and he still wishes. He made some mistakes with the economy, doesn’t tolerate criticism, so now, things are not going well, but the people are surviving, and a strong, organized opposition has not been able to peacefully push him out of power, although they are getting closer, as the last election was close.

By contrast, Trump is the world’s best con man. He began by demonizing the opposition, splitting the population along racial and economic lines, and was excellent at making people feel that they were being cheated and neglected, and that he would be their savior.

Trump has two talents. First, he figured out what to promise people, that he understood their needs, and then he convinced them that he, and he alone, could make their lives better.

Trump is not a politician; he is a performer. Like any performer, when the show ends for that day, you come back tomorrow and run the same show again. Trump was good at that. But he can’t run a government like that, and now, his act is stale, and no one thinks it’s working. He didn’t deliver on any of his promises, and he can’t lie or blame his way out of that.

Trump has another problem. He is old, deteriorating, rigid, and unable to create a new act. So now, he lies about everything, tries to blame anyone and anything for his failures, and gets angry. Unlike Erdoğan, Trump has no past accomplishments to point to, only lies about what he said he would accomplish.

Unfortunately, Trump’s problems are our problems. Almost everything the entire Trump administration does now is dangerous and harmful. If their actions don’t directly kill people, they at least make a lot of people suffer. Some courts have been able to slow him down, but no one has been able to stop him. The Supreme Court seems to agree with most of what he’s doing. That isn’t helpful.

The opposition is growing and becoming more effective, but not much can change until after the midterm elections. It’s going to be major chaos until then.

Here on the Cape, it’s summer and the living is easy. There are many people here who are, or at least act like they are, part of the 1% of Americans who now possess 31% of America’s wealth. The highest percentage ever recorded. This isn’t an accident. This is what the MAGA movement is designed to produce. Many of those people are paying to support Trump rather than to support the government.

My wife and I are enjoying the Cape and trying to take advantage of being healthy, as too many of our friends are crumbling and facing physical and mental challenges. Instead of supporting Trump, we are supporting people like Jo Mendoza in Arizona and Cait Conley in New York. We are also giving money to Alexander Vindman in Florida. He is very impressive, and although he might be a long shot, I’ve read that even the former Florida followers of Charlie Kirk are no longer supporting Trump, so who knows?

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a phone bank, but I don’t have the patience for disrupting people in June or July when most people are trying to avoid politics. The prices will still be high in September, and a few pictures of Trump with naked 14-year-old girls might be in circulation by then.

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Two of my four grandchildren are going to basketball camps this summer. I’m jealous.

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The summer on the Cape has begun. We had a string of good beach days. I was even able to swim when the tide came in over the warm sand, making the shallow water warm enough. It was the first time I had ever gone into the water in June. Made me happy. Hoping for a lot more to come, but ya never know.

I was also very pleased to see that my granddaughter, now fifteen, officially loves the beach. She had a couple of years when she was bored because she would get wet and get cold and didn’t want to play in the water with her brother and cousins. Now, she has solved that problem by bringing six of her closest friends with her.

Seven fifteen-year-old slightly privileged girls running in and out of the water, lying on blankets, soaking up the sun. Almost all the same body type, just a few different heights, three different skin tones, the same outfits of barely anything in seven different shades of pink or yellow. They all had long, flowing hair in blonde, brown, or black. And they talked, laughed, and talked some more. They talked as fast as the people listing side effects on drug commercials. I tried not to listen, but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t understand it. They were hardly on their phones the entire day.

Of course, it reminded me of thirty years ago when my daughter was on the beach with her friends, talking and laughing. It makes me happy that many of those friends still come to the beach now, and bring their kids. Life goes on. The tide comes in and makes me happy. The tide goes out and makes me sad.

One big difference is that when my daughter was this age, I had some idea of what her life would be like. There was a wide range of options, and nothing was guaranteed, but I was pretty certain she would go to college and then pursue some variation of a career from the thousands of choices available, and all of those choices would be something I could understand. It still seemed as if they would probably get married and have a family, similar to how we did, although I would not have been surprised if there were variations in what kinds of relationships they had or how quickly they emerged.

I don’t feel that with my grandchildren, although it may be just because I am old and it takes me a while to adjust to the way the world works so quickly and electronically now. Hell, my car just got a new software update, and the only way I can turn on the radio is to ask Google to do it for me. And it wants to know where I’m going, and it offers to tell my friends when I’ll get there, and asks if it should order for me, since it already knows what I like. Why is this a good thing?

This kind of electronic intervention, along with the changing climate and the very unstable political situation, makes the future feel much less stable and more uncertain. I don’t feel frightened; it’s just that there are so many known unknowns, and even more unknown unknowns.

However, moments later I think that all of these changes that seem so disruptive are really superficial, and life will always be about forming good relationships, finding ways to eat and stay warm, and then taking time to go to the beach with your friends. That’s the way 90% of humans want to live.

While I was keeping a respectful distance and observing the girls enjoy the beach, I had a momentary thought that made me shiver with disgust: Donald Trump and his friend Jeffry Epstein felt that it was their right to ruin the lives of girls of this age for their momentary perverse pleasure. At that moment, despite my age, I could feel the surge of a testosterone rage that could cause me to do damage to those men so that they could never indulge themselves in those pleasures again. I could see why Mr. Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, carefully chose young women who were vulnerable and had lost the families who would protect them.

It is so important that these criminals must not be allowed to be protected by the corrupt and perverted injustices of the Trump administration. That again makes the case that the DOJ must be removed from the Executive Branch and reorganized as a completely independent agency, free from all political or special interest influences.

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Of all the crimes and corruption of this administration, the protection of pedophiles is the most illustrative of who they are and how little they care about anyone or anything else. There must be consequences.

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A thank-you to Michelle Obama:

The speech she gave at the opening ceremony for the Obama Library described the country we all want to live in and contrasted it with the country as it is governed now.

We crazy, old-fart, hippie, liberals went wild as she spoke. Hearing the way it was, made us determined that it will be again. We are working to create it, and make it better than ever.

Last fall, I led a course at my old-age school about the past, present, and future. We spent half the time talking about AI. Most of the class members were uncomfortable with a future dominated by AI. One person continued to send me doom links about how it would destroy civilization. My reaction to those predictions has always been, “so, what’s different?”

Every day, in almost every publication I read, including the NYT, The Atlantic, and people on Substack, especially Paul Kugan, publish strongly ambivalent views about AI. It seems that many older people, those over 70, and younger people, under 25, are most resistant and upset about how AI has invaded their world. Many of those in mid-life are using it.It has invaded our world in so many ways, and so quickly.

As I type this, AI keeps suggesting improvements. It doesn’t like how I use a passive voice. Really, I can’t say it doesn’t “like” anything. What is happening is that the algorithm has learned that its creators mark the passive voice as less effective in persuasive communication. As anyone who has read some of my posts must realize by now, I am not an effective communicator; I am usually ambivalent and uncertain. I write to help make sense of what I’m thinking. AI cannot do that. I only want AI to correct my spelling. I am not good at that.

As AI improves, it is being marketed not just as another tool, like a word processor, or even the internet. Now, it can easily be designed to be an assistant, a combination of a secretary, an intern, a butler, and a research assistant. It can help you keep a routine, guide you through your schedule, remind you about what you are going to discuss at a meeting, with notes, questions, and answers. It can learn to write emails in your style while improving them, especially the difficult ones, such as when you need to apologize, say something negative, or talk about death.

A well “trained” assistant can keep track of your finances, cancel your unused subscriptions, and warn you when you buy too many speculative stocks. It can act like a worried spouse.

Here is how you can create your own agent in an hour:

Method 1: The No-Code Route (Fastest & Easiest)

If you want an agent running within an hour that connects to your apps (like Google Sheets, Spotify, Notion, or Gmail), use a visual workflow tool.

The Tool: n8n or Make.com

How it works: You use a visual interface to drag and drop a “Brain” (like a Gemini or OpenAI API node), link it to a “Memory” node (to remember past chats), and attach “Tools” (like Google Calendar API).

Perfect for: Automating personal workflows, like an agent that reads incoming emails, extracts action items, and adds them to your to-do list.

— from Gemini

Out of curiosity, I asked AI for ideas of what I could write about for this public journal. I typed that I write about the interactions of aging, technology, family, and politics. After several additional prompts, the suggestions it gave me sounded like the trite homilies of the new-age, self-help, self-motivation industry of the last sixty years.

Why be surprised? That’s what much of AI is: a summary of what has come before. It can arrange things in new ways, but, like Spotify, it gives you similar, not new.

However, I strongly believe that AI can be used for amazing discoveries in science, medicine, and other kinds of research that could never have been done before. It can compile numbers and find patterns in seconds that would have taken 100 years without it. It can answer questions about philosophy, literature, and math in six seconds, and give sources, with reasonable accuracy.

Yet, for now, I am going to continue to use my writing to explore the slowly deteriorating brain and body that I have. From that, I constantly receive “prompts” of things for me to think about. Some come from internal sources, such as my knees, my back, and the heartburn I get from eating Italian food. Others come from external sources such as my wife, kids, friends, the flowers, the pollen, and the news. To put everything together, I will use my own intelligence, even if it is superficial; at least it’s real and not artificial.

Of course, when I am trying to find a book, a name, a historical fact, a drug interaction, a new musician, the directions to a place I’ve never been, what to do when I get there, or when I need a recipe because people are coming for dinner, I will ask Siri, Google, Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.

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I don’t remember how I functioned without it.

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We have a different community of friends here. It has grown over the years as more people retire and spend more time down here. Then it grows organically as we meet their friends. Most of the rest of our family is coming next weekend, but all the grandkids are older and in their early and mid-teens. Their lives are full of other things, although they all love the beach. Now, they bring friends. They give us a hug in passing.

People on the Cape come from all over, mostly Massachusetts, with a big group from New York, and then the rest of New England. During Trump’s first term, there was a small but very vocal group of supporters who drove up and down the Cape with big flags and signs extolling his glory. There is hardly any evidence of Trump support now. There are a lot of people who spend seven months in Florida and five months up here. But they don’t come with signs and stickers anymore. I think, after January 6, 2021, there were doubts, and now for many, those doubts have been confirmed.

But maybe I’m just not seeing what I don’t want to see.

The tides still come in on time, and the beaches are as beautiful as any beaches in the world, but they, like everything else, are affected by the changes going on in the world. Several big storms hit the Cape since last summer, and the devastation is clear. The dunes have been carved out; several houses even collapsed or had to be moved. Away from the beaches, there was extensive damage to trees and houses, and the power went out a few times. Many old trees that survived many large storms were ripped apart. It was shocking to see the power of the winds.

The oceans are warmer. The lobsters left the bay a few years ago; now they are leaving Maine and heading to Canada. The price of a lobster roll has doubled in two years.

But I’m back, and I’m alive, and I can walk a mile on the beach with no pain in my knees, which is better than last year. Few things get better at 81, so I’m happy.

Many of us will survive the drastic changes in the weather. Many of us will survive the drastic changes in our government. Unlike the weather, we can, and will, change our government and make it better, perhaps better than it ever was.

Unfortunately, not all of us will survive. Too many are suffering and dying all over the world as a result of America’s biggest mistake.

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The tide of politics is turning. And like the basketball finals, the one who had the lead is panicking, while the older, more experienced people are focused and finding ways to win. We have good lawyers, good candidates, and we are making the right plays.

Don’t let up.

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I don’t know where many of you are, but today, in Southern New England, it’s summer. It wasn’t supposed to be. The forecast said cloudy, rain, with a high of 71. It rained from 8 AM to 8:20. The clouds were mostly gone by 10. The rest of the day was sunny and reached 91 degrees. It was hot and humid, like summer. The forecast was probably wrong because DOGE fired half of the staff, and they no longer make reports for the Blue States.

There is more. It wasn’t just hot and humid; someone on the radio was saying that if you’re old ( am I old? ), there is a hole in the ozone, and that makes being out in the hot sun more dangerous for older people. Since I am not that old, and I need to keep my knee moving, I went out and took a walk.

If I stayed home, I would probably have been pinged with “Breaking News” every four minutes. I would have been updated about the war that isn’t a war and the ceasefire that includes bombings and drone attacks. I would have known if we are having a bombing day or a ceasefire day. Things changed twice yesterday. Today, the ending seems possible. Trump is ready to give Iran 80% of what it wants, and then he will declare victory.

Instead of waiting for more news, I had lunch with a friend, and we talked about the Spurs’ monumental, record-setting collapse. I guess I am old because then we talked about who is going into Senior Living residences. We talked about the pros and cons of Graham Platner, and our fears about the election. We agreed to skip the last twenty outrageous acts of our pedophile president, so we talked about our plans for the summer, and how we never have spring anymore.

Since Trump backed away from making Pulte, the next major political event is when Todd Blanche will come to Congress to defend his appointment as the next Attorney General. If he gets confirmed by the Senate, it will mean that Republicans are forever committed to destroying the concept of justice in America, and that everyone involved with Blanche and Trump should be prosecuted for the biggest coverup of trafficking underage girls for sex in American history.

It is time to begin laying the foundation for a long-term strategy to rebuild the necessary trust in the federal government. Trump and every one of his cabinet members has made it clear that their goal is to rape and plunder the federal government and as much of the American economy as they can. He has been able to do that because the Republicans have corrupted two of the major forces that were put into the Constitution to stop him: the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice.

Therefore, the Todd Blanche confirmation hearing is the perfect time to introduce the idea that the Department of Justice needs to be removed from the Executive Branch and redesigned as an independent agency.

Merrick Garland was too hesitant because he didn’t want to appear to be political. Trump has co-opted the DOJ into doing his dirty work and disregarding many of the kinds of crimes they usually pursue. That means no civil rights cases, no insider trading crimes, no fraud, no corruption, no bribery, and no terrorism will be prosecuted. They are going after immigrants and anyone who offends Trump.

In order to rescue the rule of law in America, the Department of Justice needs to be removed from the Executive Branch and become completely independent. The AG should be appointed from a list of qualified people selected by retired judges and deans of law schools, then confirmed by Congress. The new agency should report only to Congress. The new AG should get a 6 to 10-year term and can’t be fired by the president. All Inspectors General should report to the DOJ and not be subjected to any outside influence. The FBI should be included in the independent DOJ. The head of the FBI has to have a record of being a skilled, unbiased investigator. There should be NO political appointments to this department.

The lawyers in the new department should be free to pursue crimes wherever they occur, and not be influenced by any politician or major political donor. They should be able to look at every branch of government, including the Supreme Court, to investigate corruption. They must be able to do unencumbered investigations of war crimes, and of sex, gun, and drug trafficking. They can break up price fixing, collusion, and other corporate crimes. They can fight all types of domestic terrorists when they have proof. The main feature is that the new DOJ would be walled off from all political influence. There would be no more charges of “weaponizing,” real or imagined.

Unless this happens, when a new president takes office and appoints a new Attorney General, whatever that AG does will be magnified by partisanship. We must get back to a sense of justice based on unbiased investigations, facts, grand juries, and juries.

It would be great if presidential pardons had to be justified to the DOJ. We have seen how Trump has found another revenue stream that should never exist.

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This is what I am advocating for. I realize it will take a long time, but change is always difficult. I have been writing to newspapers, bloggers, and getting ready to spray-paint it on walls. If two people agree, they will wonder about our relationship. If four people agree, they will wonder what we have been smoking. But if 50 people begin to talk up this idea? 100? 1000? Then we have a movement!

Then if we can get Platner and Talarico elected, along with Brown, Cooper, and Petola, and maybe one or two others, then we can make this happen, even if we have to wait until 2029.

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What else do you have to do?

(Well, right now, I’m going to the beach.)