I've just finished an excellent book by Theo Baker called How to Rule the World. Baker begins his book in the Fall of 2022, when he was a newly-admitted freshman at Stanford University. He opens with an on-campus meeting with a Silicon Valley CEO teaching an
In addition to today's longish piece on incompetence over at the Department of Justice, I want to flag another piece of news that surprised and disappointed me today. Tulsi Gabbard was the least-qualified US Director of National Intelligence in the history of the country. She's
On May 19, the US Department of Justice announced that it had settled a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump, two of his sons and his real estate company against the US Treasury and the IRS. The settlement included the creation of a fund of $1,776,000,000 to be
For the past decade or so, I've donated money and time to political efforts that I support. I've done that locally, but also nationally, giving time to and canvassing for issues and candidates here in California and in other states. That's landed me on
Thousands are dead after more than five weeks of Donald Trump's war on Iran. Most of those are Iranians, including heavy civilian casualties due to attacks on infrastructure and at least one school. But the death toll includes members of the US military, and civilians and military personnel
I wrote recently about plans for Trump Social to merge with a fusion energy company. It's a weird deal – the two businesses are in different markets building different products for very different customers! – but after thinking about it for a while, I understood the motivation. The Trump Media
News broke this past week or so on two fronts that I want to cover here. Immigration On the American television series Law and Order, each episode begins with a narrator intoning, "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the
Mixing my media here, but my brother-in-law Rick Galusha has been doing a radio show in Omaha, Nebraska for forty years on Americana and roots music. He and I just recorded a show on Bruce Springsteen's new song, Streets of Minneapolis. You can give the show
Regime violence in Minnesota is moving fast. DHS' deployment of ICE to the Twin Cities was aimed, it claimed, at capturing and removing Somali criminals. There's no evidence of widespread criminality, no apparent success in arresting and imprisoning and deporting genuine bad guys. You can be sure
Here's some of what's happened so far this year: A masked agent of the Federal government shot an unarmed mother, a citizen, in the head in Minneapolis. She and her family are being investigated, but the shooter isn't. The US invaded, then expropriated lots
An unusual story broke this week: Donald Trump's social media company is merging with a 27-year-old business that is working on technology to generate energy using nuclear fusion. The investor presentation is – interesting? On its face, the combination makes no sense. The two businesses work on
It's been a month and a day since the US federal government crossed from its 2025 into its 2026 fiscal year. Because there was no statutory authority to keep spending money on October 1, the government shut down. I wrote about the legislative and budgetary details back then.