Month: January 2026

I have spent a day or two away from the news, and it has done wonders for my blood pressure. It’s kind of like taking a vacation.

On the other hand, you know things are really bad when we need to take a vacation from the news.

Doug Englebart’s having a birthday today.
He just turned 101, by the way.
He invented some pretty cool things, like the mouse,
That helped bring the modern age into your house.
If that age were base two he would be only five
And then I am sure he would still be alive.
Or even base six – then he’d be thirty seven,
And most likely he’d still be here, not in heaven.

Having experienced both, I have come to this sad conclusion that bad theater is worse than a bad movie.

Theater is an opportunity for people to connect with performers right here and now on this planet. That is far more precious than anything else.

The opportunity to make theater is sacred, When you get that opportunity, you shouldn’t blow it by just going through the motions.

I just saw Hamnet, which I highly recommend. Seeing Emily Watson on screen, in a film produced by Steven Spielberg, gave me flashbacks to Minority Report.

In particular, I started thinking about one of my favorite scenes in any movie. It’s the scene where the character played by Emily Watson, who has precognition, is leading the character played by Tom Cruise to safety as they are being chased by the bad guys.

He looks bewildered, but she, being a Precog, knows exactly where to go next to evade capture. At one point she tells him to grab a large umbrella. He just looks at her, with a confused look on his face. Why would they need an umbrella?

But then she starts to panic, thinking maybe he won’t do what she says, and he senses her urgency. So at the last moment he grabs the umbrella and opens it – just in time. At that moment, the bad guys are passing overhead. Because of the open umbrella, they are unable to see our heroes, who manage to get away.

What I love about this scene is that it feels like Spielberg telling us what it’s like to make a movie. The director knows exactly what is going to happen, yet his job is to make us feel the suspense and uncertainty of an unknown outcome.

In a sense, this scene is Spielberg giving us a glimpse into what it is like to be Spielberg.

If you put five people in a room and get them working together, they can usually outperform a team of 40.

I find that to be completely wonderful and amazing.

Democrats have not yet completely recovered from the moment when they lost faith in their standard bearer. That was on June 27, 2024, when Joe Biden couldn’t get out a coherent sentence during the presidential debate.

The bizarre and fact-challenged ramblings of his opponent seemed almost normal in comparison. We all know what happened next.

I wonder whether the murder of Alex Pretti will have a similar effect, if not on Republicans, then on the independent swing voters who will determine the results of the 2026 midterms. The Republican standard bearer has always lied, but this was a different kind of lie.

We all saw an American citizen who we could plainly see was holding only a cellphone shot 10 times in the back. Our president asserted that the victim was a crazed gun-waving assassin, responsible for his own brutal murder.

That lie was an insult of a different order to the intelligence of American voters. Will this be the moment when the political right finally loses faith in its standard bearer?

I certainly hope so, for all of our sakes.

Alex Pretti, an American citizen, was murdered in cold blood in Minneapolis while he was trying to shield a defenseless woman who was being pepper sprayed. He was surrounded by vicious thugs who first threw him to the ground and then shot him 10 times in the back.

The many videos on the scene all plainly show that he was holding a cellphone. Yet “officials” keep trying to convince everybody that the phone in his hand was a gun, despite the clear evidence of our own eyes.

The idiots who are sending masked and armed thugs to terrorize our nation’s cities seem to really believe that they can get away with gaslighting 345 million Americans.

But Americans are not that stupid, and enough is enough. As Chico Marx once said: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

I find that one of the greatest impediments to getting things done is overconfidence. After a string of successes, at some point I start to think that everything will turn out great, no matter what, and that’s when I start to get careless.

At which point, inevitably, something goes wrong. And then I am reminded that the ability to maintain a little humility is one of the most useful tools in your toolbox.

Yes, I know it sounds ironic, but it’s true. There’s nothing like a good setback to help you make good progress.

I read a beautiful and sensible quote today. It said “Freedom is the absence of fear.”

That idea goes a long way toward explaining what is happening right now in Minneapolis. Our president and vice president have been trying to convince the public that they should fear the very small percentage of immigrants who are criminals.

But the fear that ICE is creating is vastly greater than any other threat. Pregnant women are being dragged through the streets. Five year old children are being rounded up and sent away to detention centers in Texas. People who are guilty only of “looking Asian” are being dragged out into the freezing cold in their underwear.

A mother of three was shot to death by an ICE agent, in plain sight, on the streets of Minneapolis. The main response of the administration was to gaslight everyone into pretending that the victim was guilty of something (despite clear and copious video evidence to the contrary) and to squash any investigation of the shooter.

I am proud of my fellow citizens in the Twin Cities who stood up today to this sadistic madness by calling a general strike. Courage in the face of raw brutality is never easy.

I enjoyed watching the testimony by Jack Smith about the attempt by you-know-who to subvert our democratic process in 2024. Smith was consistently clear, articulate and measured, and utterly unfazed by the clown show being put on by the Republicans on the committee.

It is clear that Smith is a patriot, fearlessly standing up to charlatans in his defense of our democratic process. But what the heck was going on with those Republicans?

They didn’t dare question the veracity of Smith’s account, since they knew it was all verifiably true. Instead they resorted to hurling third grade insults at him, and defending 47 by clinging to the farfetched theory that the poor boy didn’t actually know that he had lost.

In service of truth and honest representation, shouldn’t Jim Jordan (representative from Ohio) have been wearing clown make-up? That would have been consistent with his agenda during that hearing: Trying desperately to distract from the clear evidence of crimes against our nation by putting on a clown show.