Category: Politics

U.S. War With Iran Summed Up By Monkey With A Typewriter

Monkey see, monkey laughs at humans

This comment to an article in The Financial Times nicely sums up things currently in the Middle East, as well as in the muddled brains of those running the show here in the U.S.

An eye-level screenshot of a note on a light-brown background with dark-grey text and an outline of a bookmark and share icon at the top right. The text says, 'Monkey with typewriter. 11 hours ago. Saw this from a UN diplomat... amusing and yet hard to argue with. What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in.' Following this is a block with a pink background and dark-grey text. It says, 'The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn't a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war. The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can't build the nuclear bomb that they weren't building for the not war that the United States started. Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous. If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.'

Frankly, as darkly humorous as it is, it’s only dark and humorous because it’s spot on. Hat tip to fellow Mastodon user Julian Schwarzenbach.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links. 

 

Sunday Morning Reading

“Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.” – Paulo Coelho

It figures. You plan a weekend of yard work and Mother Nature reminds you she controls more than you do. In these parts that makes this a perfect chilly Sunday for a little Sunday Morning Reading. I’m not sure how, but a theme emerges in the collection of links I’m sharing this weekend, somehow suggesting that regardless of our feelings, the forces that seem to be conspiring against us just keep rolling. At some point, just like with the shifts in the weather, you just want some unshifting force to make it all stop.

A dark bronze sculpture of a young boy with shaggy hair, wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, sitting and reading a book on a light stone bench in a park setting. He is focused on an open book he holds in both hands, on which a small bronze bird is perched on the upper edge. A stack of four bronze books is tucked behind his right arm. His left leg is crossed over his right, revealing a highly detailed molded bronze sneaker. In the background, a curved stone path is lined with two white, pebble-shaped benches and a dormant lawn leading to a paved road, a church building, and a blue sign with text. The sky is overcast, and a dark sedan is visible on the street.

Here in Chicago we’re seeing a number of theatre spaces closing. (We’re also seeing a few open.) On the national stage, we’re  watching with dismay, anger, and sadness as The Kennedy Center is being shut down by cultural barbarians. Josef Palermo had an inside seat to that dismantling and tells the story in My Front-Row Seat To The Kennedy Center Implosion. 

And while Madison Square Garden is more a venue for pure entertainment than the arts, the story about how its owner is using surveillance on its patrons and employees that upset the powers that be is a harbinger of things to come in all arenas of our lives. Check out The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine by Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman.

Having experimented a bit with Artificial Intelligence in seeking information about a statue this weekend, my ongoing suspicions that this “way of the future” isn’t ready for today, much less tomorrow. The technology might be not ready for prime time, but the hype has never been. Kyle Chayka says A.I. Has A Message Problem Of It’s Own Making. I like this quote in the subhead, “If you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you.” True enough. And if those things are as incompetent as humans, what’s the damn point?

It’s all math. That’s one way to sum up any computing activity. Unless it comes to emotion. And yet, some think feelings are somewhere in the numbers. Mike Elgan writes, No, Math Doesn’t Have Feelings in response to those who must not have any feelings of their own, but are trying to add that into the AI equation.

Gaby Del Valle, says The Only Way To Fight Deepfakes Is By Making Deepfakes. Sounds like an arms race to me. We should be up in arms about it.

Speaking of arms races, Gideon Lewis-Kraus looks at AI in the war that isn’t a war, that’s over every week, but begins again every weekend once the markets close in How Project Maven Put AI Into The Kill Chain.

Apologies for so much AI linkage this week, but it’s been on my mind lately, especially since the news of Mythos broke. It’s the latest demon to fly out of Pandora’s box, and I’m afraid it’s not the last. Margie Murphy, Jake Bleiberg, and Patrick Howell O’Neill examine How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous For The Wild.

CNN has a report by Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, Eleanor Stubbs, and Marco Chacon called Exposing A Global Rape Academy. It’s a hard, but I think necessary read considering the topic is just how horrible humans can be to one another. Maybe we should hope the robots develop feelings. Too many humans seem to have stopped developing theirs.

Gail Beckerman says If You Want A Better World, Act Like You Live In It. I concur.

And to close out this week, Scars is a short story by Sigrid Nunez. Some scars can’t be seen. The ones we’re watching form daily, can be.

(Photo by the author.)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Sunday Morning Reading

Optimism comes every Spring, but Winter always nips at the edges

Temperatures are warming. Every day brings more daylight, more blooms in the gardens and trees Yet on the edges of two of my interests, politics and tech, things continue to darken a bit. The common denominator between the two? Humans. But then again, humans are the ones who read this Sunday Morning Reading column. As well as the bots that scrape it of course.

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Some of the big news in tech this week was about a new AI product from Anthropic called Mythos. So fraught with potential peril that Anthropic gathered together the major tech heads to form a consortium to keep lid on it. Monica Verma has a good run down with her piece Did Claude Mythos Break The Cybersecurity Industry.

M.G. Siegler’s The Causal Catastrophe of AI takes a look at maneuvering around Mythos as well. Call me crazy, but I don’t think there’s anything casual about this development.

The reason I’m a pessimist on this is that I agree with a comment from JA Westenberg,  “Being wrong about doom costs you nothing.” Check out Optimism Is Not A Personality Flaw. The piece walks a line. You should read it and walk it too.

Mike Elgan takes a look at Black Traffic: The Corporate Sabotage Technique You’ve Never Heard Of. Now you have.

Ng Chong examines The Echo Chamber In Your Pocket. Follow that up with this from Julie Jargon: Over 4,732 Messages, He Fell In Love With An AI Chatbot. Now He’s Dead.(That’s an Apple News lnk. This is an archived link.)

David Todd McCarty thinks one path to reclaiming power over information might be in The Return Of The Local Newspaper.You don’t know what you had until it’s gone.

This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling For Good. The “this,” according to Lief Weatherby, is something called silicon sampling. Yes, you guessed it. AI.

Coming back around to my comment at the top about not having faith in humans, OpenAI’s Sam Altman got his turn in the barrel (again) this week. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent quite a bit of time putting this piece together. Check out Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted? FWIW, I don’t need much more time than it takes to put this column together every week to answer their question in the negative. And not just about Altman.

Mean while Altman responded on his blog, after someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at his house. He says “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” For someone who has scraped all the words he can off of the Internet and tried to turn them into something smarter than humans, you’d think his machines could have at least figured out that words have power.

Natasha MH sums up a lot of my lack of faith in humans in her piece, Stop Blaming The Chatbot. As she puts it, “AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.”

Sorry to be so negative this week, but that’s where I’m living., But to change the tone, Neil Steinberg turns around the Latin term, memto mori, (remember to die) around to memento vivere, or remember to live. A nice little bit of humanity to close out this week with Little LIfe.

(Photo from the author)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

 

Taking Flight On A Glasswing

With the fragility of egos as a pilot

Every time I hear the warnings about the current or next big thing in Artificial Intelligence, I’m reminded of the Surgeon General’s warnings that are printed on packs of cigarettes. I’m also reminded of every new fad I’ve seen in my lifetime, that might have inched over into a trend, but eventually ended up waiting for its turn on the nostalgia wheel of time.

Claude mythos.

As the world was holding its breath from the civilization destroying threats that sprung forth from the mind of the U.S. President, and then exhaling as they turned into the latest episode of “Bluff, Bluster, and Bullshit,” we were learning about a new AI leap and threat from Anthropic, potentially as dire, called Claude Mythos Preview. To get ahead of any damage this coming attraction might visit upon us Anthropic created Project Glasswing. Given that the raving lunatic in the White House came to power a second time with a civilization destroying manual in hand called Project 2025, I’m more than a bit leery of anything with a title that leads with the word “Project.”

From what I’ve read, Mythos is the latest innovation in Anthropic’s flavor of Artificial Intelligence. It is so powerful that it has sought out and found vulnerabilities in so much of the software the world runs on, that Anthropic is only releasing it to a hand full of companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Broadcom, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, NVIDIA, and more.) That’s Project Glasswing. Tech overlords uniting to protect us from their sloppy software. (The lawyers will have a field day.)

Anthropic, having been declared by the U.S. as an unacceptable national security threat and supply chain risk, nevertheless is also working with the same U.S. Government looking ahead to the threats. Somehow security and existential threats always seem to become negotiating partners with their foes when money is at stake. Also occasionally when global annihilation is knocking on the door.

The way I interpret the idea behind Project Glasswing is that these companies, and presumably governments, might use Mythos to seek out all of the vulnerabilities, and perhaps obliterate them (I use that term in the Trumpian and Hegsethian sense) before they can filter down into things like power grids, banking systems, and consumer use. It can supposedly do this at a scale humans can’t. Note that Mythos discovered problems in every operating system and, on a level both big and small, the constantly updating browsers we use on our computers.

During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect.

I think of it this way. Announcing the existence of Mythos is akin to living the moments of terror those responsible for our safety have in House of Dynamite, once they realize the gig is up, misses are inbound, and the interceptors have failed. I’d call it an “Oh, shit” moment.

If you ask me Mythos is also exposing more than a few myths as well as vulnerabilities. The sound you hear is PR slide decks about security enhancements in the latest releases of current software being furiously redone.

As M.G. Siegler puts it,

Historically, many vulnerabilities have been fixed only after someone exploited them in some way. Again, that’s because the incentives are in favor of the attacker versus the defender. If and when Mythos-caliber tools are put in the hands of hackers… yeah.

That’s obviously exactly why Anthropic isn’t releasing Mythos to the public and also why they’ve set up Glasswing. While the company may be first to such capabilities, they won’t be the last. They probably don’t even have long to try to get ahead of the situation. While I generally dislike the nuclear weapons analogy for AI, I must admit, this all does feel a bit Manhattan Project-y. The good guys are racing against the clock to implement a new technology before the bad guys catch up. But they will. They always do.

Yeah, that sounds problematic.

Paul Krugman took a break from agonizing and writing about the situation in the Middle East and weighed in with this,

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

So, there’s plenty of doom floating around, along with the now clichéd approach to all things AI, that there’s good tech behind all of the bad things that the tech can do. Note that the profits from tobacco helped found the U.S. and twisted science and politics into knots trying not to end up on the ash heap.

I’ve largely stayed away from playing with any of these AI tools and toys, but I follow the news of the advances on all fronts, and those who do play around with it. Like it or not, those who run the world have decided this is our future.

I’ll be honest. Hallucinations aside, I don’t know enough rather or not to trust the software. I have my doubts and I do have fears about the tech. Project Glasswing might be a noble effort. Yet, with a clear mind, I do know enough not to trust any of the humans running the show. Frankly, it feels like they don’t know enough to trust the software either, much less to protect their and our systems from being destroyed by some kid in a basement.

As Natasha MH puts it, not writing about Mythos specifically, but about Artificial Intelligence in general, AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

 

Sunday Morning Reading

A basket of good writing to share

For those who celebrate Easter and Passover, and all who do not celebrate either, may you find some bit of peace on this Sunday morning, however you see yourself and the world. I’d like to say this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is filled with Easter eggs, but instead it’s just the usual basket stuffed with links to interesting topics and stories that I like to share. Enjoy.

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It’s good to be seen, certainly the way you see yourself. When seen by someone who doesn’t know you, that’s eye-opening. Check out Natasha MH’s The Taxi Driver Knew.

The war that isn’t a war in Iran continues. Whatever that story is, it is still being written. Given that this might be heading to the culmination of a conflict that has simmered, and occasionally boiled over, for decades if not longer, there are a few stories out there that offer preface. He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb by David D. Kirkpatrick is one worth reading.

JA Westenberg’s The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation of Entrepreneurs is also one heckuva a read. There’s nothing passive about this take.

Seva Gunitsky takes on The Incel Global Order. Somebody needs to.

As the technology we use advances, in some spheres some are stepping back. Joshua Cohen takes a look in Sweden Goes Back To Basics, Swapping Screens For Books In The Classroom.

Social Media is under the microscope again after two recent court verdicts against Meta. Chris Castle takes a look with The Social Media Verdicts Are In. Now Ask The Hard Question: Where Was The Board? Counting the money, I imagine. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

In the category of no easy answers, Mathew Ingram also examines what’s going on in social media with Social Media May Be Bad For You But The Remedy Could Be Worse.

On the Artificial Intelligence front there are always interesting topics cooking as the AI purveyors cook the planet. I wrote about two fascinating pieces yesterday, and today I’m highlighting Angela Fu’s An AI Company Set Out To Fix News Deserts. Instead, It Copied Local Journalists Work. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing more of this going forward.

Apple is, I assume, winding up its week celebrating its 50th Anniversary. So much has been written on that topic because there is indeed much to celebrate and much history to contemplate while looking ahead. Here are four pieces that caught my eye, the first three primarily because they are more personal than historical, the fourth is a look ahead.

John Moltz gives us Missed Connections: Me and Apple.

James Thomson is one of my favorite Apple developers. His Apple At 50: Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden is indeed a personal journey.

Adam and Tonya Engst have been writing Tidbits since 1990. I started reading it shortly thereafter. What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses is certainly different than most, but one that mirrors the thoughts of many on this anniversary.

And Marco Arment, looking ahead, has penned A Letter To John Ternus, the guy everyone assumes will don the CEO mantle in the future.

Baseball is back. And every team and their fans are dreaming of a championship. David Todd McCarty spins a bit of fiction that’s baseball adjacent, but rooted deep in dreams in The Taste Of A Dream.

To conclude this week, this story by Audrey Pachuta very much sums up the contradictions we’re living through at the moment. Check out A Student Set A Goal To Run Every Street In Chicago And Inspired A City. Now He Must Leave The Country. 

May you find peace however you can.

(Photo from the author.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

 

Birthright Citizenship and April Fools’ Day

The joke’s on us. All of us.

There’s something entirely appropriate and also ironic about the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments about birthright citizenship on April Fools’ Day. Don’t get me wrong, they shouldn’t be hearing the case in the first place. But they are and here we are.

The first section of the 14th Amendment, guarantees that any person born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the United States. Given how language can get tortured and twisted around by lawyers and scholars, the text of Section 1 is pretty clear on its face and doesn’t require a legal degree to understand.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But, as I said, there’s a case (Trump v. Barbara) being heard tomorrow on April Fools’ Day. Traditionally a day for jokesters and pranksters to have some fun, this unfunny joke, in my opinion, is on us. All of us.

Bottom line, it’s yet another blatant attempt at remaking America, continuing the white supremacist myth that one race is superior to any other. The fools perpetuating this lampoon of law don’t really have the courage to spell it out so succinctly. But you have to grant SCOTUS some sort of sickly ironic gift for timing of the hearing. It comes a day after announcing a block of a Colorado law that banned “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids on the Transgender Day of Visibility.

The bad joke that this U.S. Supreme Court has become, along with most the rest of our government is anything but funny. In the wake of a fear so deeply held by this confederacy of dunces that their somehow supreme race is heading into some sort of imagined abyss so deep  that too many are constructing doomsday bunkers, I have a dim view of the possible outcome. I cant predict how it will end up. With this sad excuse of a president planning to attend the hearing tomorrow, making even more of a mockery of the episode, you just know we’re heading into another of those moments that are no laughing matter, but makes us all all victims of this dangerous prank.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

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Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars  the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.)  Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

 

No Kings Rallies: Build On It

So much wrong, so little cardboard

Today was No Kings Day in the U.S. and around the world with large crowds in large cities and smaller ones in small cities, towns and hamlets. Regardless of the numbers, (estimates are running as high as 9 million at the moment) what’s important is people showed up, stood up, and showed they still stand for decency and the rule of law.

Due to being completely under the weather I had to cancel plans to attend the rally in Chicago, but I did tune into the national live stream. I’m not sure if that will stay up after the day is done, but I sure hope it does. 

What will be more important than the protest rallies will be what happens next. We all know weekend protests, as good as they are for building solidarity, are not enough and there’s still a big fight ahead. As the sign above says, so much wrong, so little cardboard. As wrong and dark as things have been, things are going to get more wrong and darker before whatever the end of this will be. 

I’ve linked to Bruce Springsteen’s song, Streets of Minneapolis here before, and you can catch it there or just about anywhere. Below is the short speech he gave before singing that song at the Minneapolis No Kings Rally. 

Sing and march on.

(Image from Bill Strait on Mastodon

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Bette Midler Updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’

Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Add Bette Midler to the growing ranks of musical artists offering up protest songs for our current crisis. 

Midler has updated Woody Guthrie’s classic, All You Fascists Bound To Lose, with new lyrics hitting many of headlines and moments we’re all living through under the current administration. Here’s a sample:

We’ll battle ICE together until they cut and run
Just like in Minneapolis and when the midterms come
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

All you fascists bound to lose
All you fascists bound to lose
I said all you fascists bound to lose
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

To hell with all the cowards who hide behind their masks
We’re gonna win the midterms, we’re coming for his ass!
He knows it too, that bastard’s bound to lose

Trying to distract us from the Epstein files
You gas and beat and murder us, protectin’ pedophiles
Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Give it a listen. Share it around. The fascists may be bound to lose, but everyone has something to gain when they do

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Paying The Pump

Up, up, and away

We’re back home after spending five days and nights with the grandkids. We drive a well worn path out and back, always stopping at the same places for whatever fuel we need for the car or our bodies.

Thanks to the war that isn’t a war that’s almost over, unless it’s just beginning, it was not really a surprise what we were seeing for gas prices. These before (on the left) and after shots are from our stop on the way out of town and our way back in.

CleanShot 2026-03-25 at 17.48.31@2x.

That’s quite an increase in five days. We typically stop at truck stops for refueling, and listening to truck drivers complain in the restrooms this trip was a lesson in invective. Although that didn’t seem to have an effect on what felt like typical truck traffic.

For the record, on our last trip before this one prior to whatever we’re calling what’s happening in Iran, we paid $2.69 a gallon at this stop.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.