September 18, 2026: 1965, a poem

 

            1965 

I came across an ancient text

From when I was fifteen

Buried in a paper box

Forgotten and unseen.

I marvelled at the language there

And in my simple faith

In the rightness of my land

On its expanding path.

It must have been the things they taught

That shaped my point of view.

My pride was pure but incomplete

With things I never knew.

America, I still love you whole

For all that you could be.

At fifteen there was so, so much

That I was not allowed to see,

But I see it now, warts and all

With utter clarity.

September 17, 2026: Fighting Against the Down

 

I don’t write my blog as often as I used to, mainly because it has become hard to see the point. That is my failing. I am an optimistic fellow, who believes that people generally want to be good, and that kindness will bring that good out in them. But watching the news every day is depressing and infuriating. Seeing my country abandon its principles, its allies, and its own people is disheartening. Knowing that my blog will be read by a small handful of people who agree with me feels meaningless.

I apologize. I should do better, but most days my energy is spent on more benign pursuits.

That being said, I still pay attention. And I recognize my duty to continue to speak out. Today, my outrage over the strange attitude of our President has grown exponentially. It comes on many fronts. As interest rates climb to combat growing inflation, and gas prices soar because Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz and now the Houthis are tying up the entrance to the Red Sea, Trump promises that prices are going to drop far and fast when peace is made, ignoring that peace is nowhere close to being made. Again, Trump chose this war and therefore is the one responsible for kicking the hornet’s nest. He also promised that Venezuelan crude oil reserves would lower oil prices, ignoring that Venezuela crude is much harder and costlier to refine, and no one seems to want to try.

It always fascinated and annoyed me that Trump blames our allies for not helping out against Iran, when he chose to follow Netanyahu’s lead and create chaos in the Middle East without first consulting those allies or his own people. It’s his mess. It’s our mess. Trump was stupid enough to think that the Iranian government would collapse on Day One, and we all are paying for that arrogant mistake.

Trump also has engaged in a trade war—again, of choice—against Canada. This has forced Canada to seek better relations with other trading partners, which should be no surprise. When the European Union invited Canada to become its first associate member, Trump’s response was more tariffs against the EU. He refuses to back down on his fixation on tariffs, despite his own Supreme Court putting the brakes on him, and despite most economists warning that high tariffs cause inflation and ultimately are paid for by the consumer.

I am proud to be an American. I am ashamed of our current government. The list of grievances against the Trump Administration continues to grow, but our government is not listening. They don’t care. They are making money on a level exponential to my outrage. In the bargain, they have jeopardized America’s position in the world for decades to come. Who can trust us? Who can trust us not to elect Don Junior twenty years from now?

To the world I say, Forgive us our stupidity, as we forgive those who are stupid among us. And to ,my fellow citizens, no matter what you think or how you feel, I say, VOTE! Tell the world who we really are, and then learn to live with the consequences.

August 25, 2026: Pluto Is More Than Just A Planet

Twenty years ago today, our solar system lost a planet when Pluto was demoted to the status of dwarf planet. In 1906, amateur astronomer Percival Lowell began searching for a possible ninth planet in our solar system, which he called Planet X. Pluto was discovered in 1930, fourteen years after Lowell’s death by then 23 year old astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. But Pluto’s size was much less than scientists expected for a ninth planet, and continually downsized over the years until, on August 24, 2006, its status as a planet shifted. Many of us were and remain saddened by this reclassification. I don’t think Pluto itself cares. It just does its thing out there, deep in space.

The name “Pluto” comes from the Roman name for the God of the underworld. The Greeks called him Hades. For me, however, “pluto” has a different meaning as well, as short for “plutocracy.”

The definition of “plutocracy” is simple. It means a system of government or society controlled directly or indirectly by its wealthiest individuals. Government by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich. The word comes from the Greek “ploutos,” wealth, and “kratos.” power or rule. Why is this important to me now? I have been thinking for a long time that the United States is being run by the very, very rich people, families and corporations who control the economy. I have mentioned before C, Wright Mills’ 1956 book, The Power Elite, that expresses the same theory. If you just follow the money, the conclusion seems inescapable. If there is profit to be made, the super-rich will do whatever it takes to get more.

What’s happening in Gaza? The West Bank? Ukraine? Syria? Venezuela? Our attention has been fully co-opted by Donald Trump’s war of choice. While we bluster and push against Iran and Israel pushes itself deeper into Lebanon, other key issues disappear from our thoughts. But they still go on. Children face starvation. Refugees seek shelter. People are being killed.

Trump loves it. In his tiny but expanding bubble, he loves to bully and threaten. He loves us to be confused and terrified of what he will do next. Meanwhile, he is lining his pockets and pushing his ultimate one-word agenda, oil. Forget Jeffrey Epstein. Forget the 2026 midterms. Look at me—Donald Trump, King of the World, owner of Venezuela and the Strait of Hormuz and a percentage of every gas pump in America and the world.

And yet, for all his increased wealth while President over the last year and a half, Trump still ranks only 201 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. There are 200 entities who have more than him. For them, Trump is the distraction, the clown show the rest of us are watching while they steal us blind. Between oil and Artificial Intelligence and the Crypto Ponzi scam, they all are getting richer at the same exponential rate he is. If democracy collapses in the bargain, they stand to profit from the collapse. And, like the dwarf planet Pluto, these plutocrats don’t care. 

August 20, 2026: Wrong Thinking

 

War has changed. Massive, expensive, what former Defense official Dr. Jerry McGinn called ‘exquisite’ military hardware can be taken out by relatively cheap drones. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating this new reality, because despite Russia’s military might Ukraine is not buckling under, and instead is taking the war to the Russians with their superior knowledge and use of drone technology. All the hardware the United States has been throwing against Iran has not crushed Iran’s will to survive. Instead, the Iranians have learned that the Strait of Hormuz is a weapon of blackmail, and they have learned how to use it. Now they are using their allies to expand the threat to other key commercial bottlenecks.

It makes me wonder, looking at the world situation, just how much Trump is actually enjoying the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. If you follow the money, Trump and Iran could be thought of as intentionally manipulating the oil market by controlling the Strait. If the price of oil per barrel goes up worldwide but American oil refiners don’t actually face increased costs, then they make more profit themselves. And so does Donald Trump. Just saying.

In fact, American oil companies reported their greatest profits ever during the second quarter of 2026, just after Trump’s war of choice began. According to The Guardian, the biggest companies in the world made about $700,000 profit per minute. But oil is a dirty and finite commodity. Human beings are moving away from fossil fuel dependence. Trump knows the inevitable. So do the oil tycoons. Trump has pushed back against alternative sources of energy against all logic. Why? Because there is a great opportunity to cash in big before the industry collapses. There’s money to be made, and Trump and those who control him don’t care about the consequences as long as they get theirs first. And if one of those consequences is bankrupting America by fighting a war nobody asked for with a dwindling supply of obsolete weapons, it will encourage the military-industrial complex to go into high gear. As is his wont, Trump is doubling down on wrong thinking.

It comes down to this. Trump wants a military budget of one and a half trillion dollars for the next fiscal year. He wants more high-end missiles and the delivery system to deploy them. He needs to replace all the ones his military has shot off over the past few months and will have to keep on shooting off for the foreseeable future. In today’s changing world, it’s a colossal waste of money. On 9-11, 2001, nineteen zealots and about $500,000 crippled the world for a time. The new reality is filled with people who know how to fly under the radar and strike hard, and no stockpile of Tomahawk or Patriot missiles can stop them. It’s wrong thinking to believe that money and munitions can solve our problems. We need intelligence, which today seems to be seriously lacking anywhere in our government.

Here Be Pirates!

 

July 13, 2026: Here Be Pirates!

No, I am not talking about the Pittsburgh Pirate baseball team. Once upon a time I was a huge fan, when I spent a great deal of time with John and Robert Pira, who were rabid Pirate fanatics. It was easy to like the Pirates because of Willie Stargell, arguably the nicest guy in baseball at the time, and the immortal Roberto Clemente, whom I thought was the most exciting player in the game, beyond even Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

No, I am not talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean, who were my all-time favorite real-life characters when I was growing up. I collected every one of the 66 cards in the Fleer Pirate Bold set and read their tiny biographies, the size of an old tweet, every day. I am still fascinated. My favorite trio is Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. The original Skull and Crossbones motif on a pirate flag is said to have emerged from Calico Jack’s even better design, a skull, representing him, and crossed swords, representing his two female companions and soldiers-in-arms.

I am talking about real pirates on the High Seas today. Specifically, I am talking about the Strait of Hormuz and the United States Navy. More specifically, I am talking about the Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Donald John Trump. Today Trump announced that our navy will be keeping the Strait open and that he expects passing ships to pay America a 20% surcharge to offset the cost of doing so. This means Trump plans to charge our allies to control, not fix, a problem he created when he declared war on Iran. It sounds like piracy to me. It sounds like extortion.

Maybe I am being unfair. To pirates. What Trump wants to do sounds like a protection racket. Old school: let me smash up your business, and if you don’t want it to happen again, pay me 20% of everything you make so I can protect you against myself. He’s not a pirate, he’s a gangster. He’s not Blackbeard, he’s Al Capone.

July 3, 2026: The Rule Golden

 

I have spent a great deal of time lately thinking about how humans should behave, and about how most human beings, I want to believe, strive to do good or at the very least, do no harm. We acknowledge that we are flawed. After all, perfection would be boring! Throughout history good souls have tried to lay down moral principles by which the rest of us should live. Our own country at its founding endeavored to codify, that is, human rights with a clear understanding that as We The People progressed, we would make the necessary modifications to expand those rights.

Yet it all can be boiled down to this: the Golden Rule distills what human beings ought to be, ought to strive for, in 11 words. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It seems brilliantly simple and probably naive. Georgia Senator and Baptist minister Raphael Warnock says there are versions of this rule in every faith, and that it is key to the small c christian moral code. It means, help others as you would want them to help you in similar circumstances. Do not enslave unless you want to be enslaved. Do not kill unless you want to be killed. Do not impoverish unless you want to be poor. Be kind. It should be self evident. But if it were, we wouldn’t need reminding.

And yet, I know atheists with a better moral code than Mike Johnson and other so-called christians.

Decades ago, Science Fiction writer Damon Knight wrote a novella called The Rule Golden. In it, if you kicked someone, you felt the pain. If you shot someone you died. I don’t know how to remind christians of their own moral code, but reading this book might be a good start, if you can find a copy.

MEDICARE FOR ALL: A HILL TO DIE ON

 A HILL TO DIE ON

Do not be surprised if the Republican leadership throws Donald Trump under the bus and enacts the 25^th Amendment, then blames Trump alone for the failure of the Iran War, subsequent rise in inflation, and the collapse of health care—all in the hope of salvaging their control of power. Trump is an easy target because he is guilty as charged. But We The People know the Republican leaders are complicit. This makes the midterm elections look very good for the Democrats. But Democrats are excellent at losing elections. They could use a positive campaign issue instead of always yelling about what the other side is doing wrong.

They need a hill to die on.

Health care is a major issue in this country. We have arguably the best health care in the world, if you can afford it. Even after the Affordable Care Act became law, insurance premiums with high co-pays and deductibles were the norm. If you are wealthy, cost doesn’t matter. But most Americans struggle to make their premiums and to pay their medical bills. The solution of taking out a loan to cover medical costs is no solution at all. By all global measurements, factoring in per person cost and healthcare outcomes, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among industrialized nations. I have seen an overall rank as low as 69^th in the world. Most surveys I have seen place us nearer to 37, which is still shameful for the richest country in the history of the world.

What’s different about all the other countries? They have universal healthcare. Everyone has access to equal treatment. There are problems, certainly, country by country, but the point is that healthcare is much more readily available, and democratic, elsewhere. We need Medicare for All.

But how? It should be simple. Consider. The average annual income for a family of four in the US is $106,000. I personally don’t know anyone in that bracket, but it takes a huge number of people making a whole lot less just to bring the average down from the billionaires and trillionaires. The average cost of insurance premiums for a family of four is between $18 and $27 grand. Even at the lower number, that’s 16% of that average income. Remember, there are a great many people making less than $106K who still have to pay that much in insurance premiums. I am not a math genius, but even I can see that killing private insurance and increasing the Medicare payroll tax from 3%, where it is now, to 8 or 9, or even 10% across the board, would save everybody money in the long run while at the same time providing better care for anyone who needs it.

It’s not like there are no models out there. Yes, the health insurance companies will balk, but how good are they at helping Americans? Maybe it’s time for them to go.

Remember, to whom much is given, much is expected. It also might be worth remembering that it takes a mighty work/consumer force to keep the wealthy afloat. But getting Congress to do anything close to this will take a long, long time and a great many down ballot changes. Still, for anyone who believes in helping our fellow citizens realize a better life, this is a hill worth dying on.